Friday, April 12, 2019

What do poor people lack {fmf}



It has been a long hot humid day here in Cambodia. Feeling so tired and slow, but wanting to try the 5 min free write today anyway.... hope it makes sense. Linking up with FMF. This week the word is LACK.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" A common question children get asked in some places. But it makes no sense to others.

According to When Helping Hurts, rich people describe poverty as lack of food, money, water, medical, housing etc. A focus on the material. Where as poor people emphasize things like shame, inferiority, powerlessness, fear, voicelessness etc. More social and psychological than material.

I know the bad that can come from a medical misdiagnosis. You end up not getting better, sometimes getting worse. The authors say this is what happens in poverty alleviation. The rich people don't know what the actual problem is (but they think they do) so they might go about solving it the wrong way.

I skim read this article today, about how we equate having a life with having choice. It reminded me of a weekend away I went on in my first year of uni. At that stage of life it is all so exciting to be choosing a career and working towards it but stressing about it too. We were reminded for most people in the world that stress is actually not an issue as there is no choice, its about survival.

 Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash

2 comments:

Susan Shipe said...

I would really like to read a conclusion to this post!

Katherine said...

Thanks for your comment Susan. Sorry I don't have a conclusion for you right now, but there are more thoughts in the book I linked too.