Poverty and The Good Life

I have felt wealthy recently, doing what people with time and money do; eating at nice restaurants, listening to live music, enjoying the company of friends.....I live in a beautiful environment. I am healthy at the moment and if I do get sick I know I can afford to go to the doctor. I trust my doctors here. I have a sense of well being that I have never experienced before in my life.

I grew up poor. My parents both worked at physically strenuous and low paying jobs. There was never enough time or money. They worked too hard to have the energy to worry about anything other than survival. When you are poor you are always the outsider. You watch others enjoy the world. Sometimes I look at the gardeners and housekeepers here and I remember my years of cleaning houses for a living after I became an adult. Poverty goes from one generation to another. Either because that is all you know or because you don't have opportunities that are easily offered to people with money. Or if the opportunities are offered, you don't believe that life could be any different than what you have always known so you don't know how to take advantage of them.

So much of poverty is a state of mind. That is why it isn't always a good idea to try to help the poor by just giving them money. It is quickly spent. Fear breeds more fear and day to day survival isn't conducive to long term planning. I am now thinking of a friend who was given a car so she could find a job. She didn't find a job and the car soon died and then sat in her driveway for years.

Poverty and poverty consciousness are huge problems and I have no answers. I am just talking about it in relationship to my own life. Poverty causes such hopelessness and it becomes a downward spiral. I hate it when the poor are blamed for their circumstances, as if it were a moral issue. Once, as a young woman, I lived for a few months in a ghetto in San Francisco. I was overwhelmed with how hard life was and mostly I remember my feeling of hopelessness. How can you get beyond just survival when survival takes all you've got? Now for me in the States I have no health insurance. It is too expensive. So whenever I am there I have this same sense of overwhelming fear. What if I were to get sick and have to go to the hospital? I would be ruined financially for the rest of my life with just one major hospital bill. A few doctor bills could wipe me out for a couple of years. I no longer want to live with that kind of fear. My quality of life in the States is so far below my quality of life here that it is laughable. It would be laughable except that it is so sad, not only for me but for millions of others in similar situations up there.

I am always the outsider up there, not being able to afford things that my family takes for granted. Let's go out to dinner, my son says. And I tremble inside thinking that one meal in a nice restaurant could easily cost fifty dollars...... It isn't a good feeling to always have to be so careful. People see me as a cheapskate when I am only trying to survive. (I have to say here that most of the time my son and daughter-in-law generously pay for my meals too but that makes me feel like a drain on them.) I remember going out to dinner with a woman friend a couple of years ago up there and the food was so expensive I just ate a salad. I'm not very hungry, I said to her after looking at the prices...My friend ordered a steak and took most of it home to feed to her dog. I could smell it all the way back home in her car. She had me hold the bag while she drove. I was so hungry! She didn't offer any of it to me and I certainly wouldn't ask. And I felt that awful hollow feeling inside (the hollowness which is far worse than the hunger) that I had all my growing up years as I watched people around me enjoying the fruits of this world and I was the onlooker..... Poverty. It isn't fun......You can see from my last few photos that I no longer live in poverty. I thank God that finally, IT IS MY TURN. For me, This is The Good Life.