than a dollar a day. That $2 a day level represents about
40% of the world's population. So often the measures
that are used are physical measures, such as health, in-
fant mortality or life span. But when you ask a people
characterized by these statistics "What is it like to be
poor?" they respond from their perspective as whole peo-
ple. While they often describe their physical plight, they
often talk in psychological, social and spiritual terms
about their conditions. They feel ashamed, less than hu-
man, no hope, without any voice, unable to affect change
or society. They feel disconnected or even condemned by
the gods. They describe poverty in more holistic terms
than those of us in the West. We come from a very mate-
rialist framework. We focus on material issues when the
issues are actually far more holistic and multifaceted.
tors. The materially poor here in the United States
are always rich in a purely economic sense com-
pared to the rest of the world. They talk about a
sense of a loss of purpose, of meaning, of hope, a
feeling that they are not truly part of society.
proaches to helping the poor have focused on symp-
toms rather than underlying causes. A person who is
dressed poorly or who appears to be hungry or sick,
lacking shelter--those are symptoms of something far
deeper. Trying to figure out what that is pushes us into