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 |