AoNikki

Since no new entry has been written for a long time, I decided that I should at least write something for the global Blogger Action Day. So here it is, an entry on Poverty.

Poverty for me is an abstract word. It's one of those concepts that seem to never become real, although people keep assuring you of their existences while reminding you of how lucky you are to not having to understand them. People, at the same time, blame you for this lack of understanding and the ignorant inconsideration resulted from that.

I was one of these people grown up inside the palm of poverty without being touched by it. Many years ago, when my sister and I was still living in my father's clinic, I learned to classify people. I could almost always tell whether a strange visitor was my parents' acquaintance or a patient; my rule of thumb was simple: friends looked alike. Friends rode motorbikes, put on modern clothes, made themselves home, and smiled to me. Patients were dark skin people with somewhat filthy long dresses, had a funny accent and spoke in a strange language to each other. Of course sometimes came patients that looked like friends, and I must admit I didn't really like them. There was something in their attitude that irritated me greatly.

Every child, and adults too sometimes, dreams of differences. Before I was old enough to comprehend what these differences actually mean, the other reality of those patients made an experience that I yearned for. A shelter in the middle of a vast rice field, a life in the vineyard or on a river, a small tattered house made of straw and mud, a living earned by selling home-grown apples in which my sister and I woke up early every morning and shared a small portion of rice before going to work... were things that I used to wish for. I still remember with details how I painted a one story, collapsing house of mud when told to portray my "dream house" - which my teacher looked at and exclaimed: "What kind of a dream house is this?"

When thinking back, I usually contemplated a lot about how the two worlds, namely mine and others, were juxtaposed. Poverty was something that, at the same time, so close and so distant.

Now, sitting in my desk in my dorm room on Massachusetts Avenue, looking out at the illuminating dirigible floating above, I don't really know why I'm writing about poverty. I don't know anything about it. I can't tell you what it is like or what it feels like; I can tell you what it's not like, though, but high chances are you already know that. I can be lame, and pretentious, and political, and tell you that poverty is the restrain of freedom of both individuals and society; but I won't do that. Actually, I can tell you what it feels like to watch poverty directly and with bare eyes. It aches. Sometimes it's scary. The scariness takes place when I observe the kind of people poverty produces, and it's something that you yourself have to witness in order to understand. Or of course, like many people where I grew up, you can choose to go past it blindly and without sufferings.

Poverty is something I'm working hard to understand. One of the factors that motivated me to apply to MIT was an article I found online on The Tech about a D-lab (development lab) course in which students practice poverty. Other than some inevitable freebies such as water and electricity (and shelter and many things else), they practiced living at the absolute poverty level of $2 per day, or less, for one week. The main problem with this was mostly food, since MIT students buy food themselves. Yet that only problem made them miserable - while they still having to handle the heavy workload. This model may not provide a thorough understanding of what poverty is like, but it does give an idea. As a graduate from the course, you know that poverty is something which is even more terrible than that.

Understanding is important. When you decide that you want to care about something, such as when you're inspired by a presentation, you have to make the next step to understanding in order to really care about it. That's the difference between theoretical speeches and concrete actions, and the only way through which you'll achieve something meaningful and significant. So, I don't know how much poverty means to you, but as a blog for the action day, my only message is : try harder to really understand it.