What is Poverty? By Diana Hammer
September 4, 2003
What I am about to write about poverty is nothing new. In fact, it surprises me that after so much time studying and advocating for ways to minimize or eliminate poverty, how it still surprises me and confuses me here in El Salvador .
My family here washes clothes by hand, cooks over an open fire in a smoke house/kitchen, and shares living space with chickens, dogs, cats, and rabbits until someone shoos them out. The rest of the family has a big house too, but not nearly as finished as Tonio and Juventina´s place. And the other families nearby have much less. There are dirt floors (ours our cement) and no running water (I see one woman coming to the pump near the road several times every morning to fill a big jug which she carries on her head back to her house).
On the other hand, my family also has a TV, stereo, refrigerator, and two phones (one electric and one that runs on battery when the power goes out.) The phone brings many folks to our house during the week that do not have one of their own. Tonio and Juventina may be slightly better off than many of the other families, but they share everything without question. I have not figured out yet how it is that Tonio was able to study so much when all 4 of his brothers are farmers. I have met many children who have already dropped out of school to work with their parents at home. Mori is 14 and stays home every day. Tonio sometimes gives him odd jobs to do like hauling bricks for the porch wall or cutting the weeds in the yard with a machete, but otherwise he spends the day playing with Carlito and the younger boys. This makes me so sad, even though they have a good time. Mori could be doing so many other things…
Another girl, Norma Concepción should be in 7 th grade but she left school after 6 th to stay home and help her parents with her 5 siblings. I met her on the road yesterday at 6 am. She had a pan of corn balanced on her head (which didn’t fall even when she ran to catch up with me!) She told me she was going to the mill (a 20 minute walk from her house), and invited me to come to her house for a longer visit some time.
Reina and I had gone to visit her family the day before because Norma’s little sister, Liset Noemi, had a bad accident on her bike on Sunday afternoon. An ambulance took her to the hospital in the city of Chalatenango , and from there to San Salvador to do surgery, and then back to the hospital in Chalate. Sunday night, Norma, her mom and aunt and cousins came to our house to use the phone. Tonio called the hospitals in Chalate and San Salvador to find out what was happening. Even in this circumstance, Norma had brought a coin purse ready to pay for whatever the calls would cost. Her mom, Ana, stayed outside, probably too anxious to sit and also shy as soon as she saw me there.
The next afternoon (Monday), Reina and I sat on the porch at their house. Norma’s dad, Alfredo, had not gotten home until 4:30 that morning, and he wasn’t getting much chance to rest because people kept dropping by to hear how Liset was. As Reina talked, I only half listened as I tried to figure out what life is like for this family. The view from under the tin roof of the porch was down the hill of thick, waist-high grass, called zacate, that is good food for cows. Immediately below the house was a chicken pen which a pig tried to nose its way into. Alfredo shushed the pig away and a little girl about 6 went to close the fence better. There were little puppies and baby chicks wandering around under our chairs, and one puppy a little bit older slept in the middle. I didn’t even notice this one at first, until Alfredo said he thinks it’s dying from parasites.
My eyes moved from the fly-covered dog to the one-month-old baby boy in Reina´s lap. The one-month-old was wrapped in nothing more than a blanket. I was glad at first that they didn’t give him to me to hold since I still have a cough, (and then even more glad when he wet all over Reina – twice!), but then looking around I realized that a cold is the least of this baby’s worries right now.
Alfredo (who is the president of the Junta Directiva of El Amatillo) and his wife Ana have a pretty nice house if you start from the bottom up and think about what it would be like to live in the mountains with absolutely nothing over your head and no steady source of food, as many people did for 5 years or longer during the war. All eight people in the family have a roof to protect them from the rain and the hot sun, and plenty of animals and land for food.
What I don’t know, and probably Alfredo and Ana don’t either, is how they will pay for Liset´s doctor bills. The health system here has not been privatized yet, but things are still pricey with a co-pay necessary for every visit and expensive prescriptions. I am still learning about how the health system works so I can’t say much about that, except that every time I look at a newspaper there is another article about a recent outbreak of something: pneumonia, dengue fever, conjunctivitis.
If this were any other school paper, I would now start linking this individual situation to a dozen others across the country, and end with an appeal to overhaul the entire health care system. But I can’t think on such a global scale right now. The daily reality of Norma’s family is something that I cannot fix, and even if I could, it would not be my job to do so. If there is anything I have learned so far, it is that the people I live and work with here know exactly what they want and how to best work toward that. Life is hard, but they are not crying from self pity like I want to.
On the bus every day I see women wearing nail polish and makeup who manage to look more sophisticated for a bus trip to Chalatenango than most people do on an average day in St. Louis (and these classy clothes are washed by hand). People work hard during the day on the milpa, or taking care of kids, or organizing communities, or teaching. At night some enjoy TV programs (especially one called “Proudly Salvadoran” that highlights a different tourist destination in the country every week.), and play cards (sometimes by candlelight and flashlight when the power goes out), and some go to the literacy class that Alfredo´s sister teaches every night at her house.
I realize now that thinking systemically is an easy escape. I do not often let myself sit with the reality as it is for families like Norma’s, but that is what I have to do here. The big changes will come with time, but for the moment this is life. Everything inside me screams that this is NOT just, or healthy, or right. It is dirty and crowded and damp, and there are ants and chickens everywhere. But at the end of the week, I have a clean guest house in San Salvador , and all of you to listen as I process this. I’m sorry that I can’t make this shorter or more organized now.
So what is poverty?
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