A perspective on poverty

Poverty is a daily reality in my workplace.  However, I would like to go further than the American belief that poverty is a lack of material items.  There is another reason why poverty is so prevalent at my practicum site and its root is much deeper than mere things.  One of the most important aspects to understanding poverty is recognizing the fact that poverty is very cultural.  There are overarching commonalities of poverty within the world, but, as a whole, the way someone should approach poverty is by looking at the cultural context of the poor.  While I will not pretend to be an expert of poverty, I am starting to develop a firm grasp on what poverty means in my work community.  A major cause of poverty within the lives of my clients, who are women, is their gender and the gender roles that are widely held and practiced by Ugandans.

The structure of Ugandan culture is tailored to favor men.  Women are often expected to cook, clean, raise children, garden, and tend to animals without the help of her husband.  A woman’s husband is her keeper and his word rules over the household.  Many of my clients are victims of domestic violence, but cannot leave the marriage because she would not have anywhere to go and would likely receive very little help.  A goal of the child survival program is to help mothers learn income-generating activities, yet women whose husbands do not want them to have jobs in fear of them gaining independence will not allow them to practice these outcome-based program activities.  The state of dependency that women are placed in by men keep them, and their families, in positions of poverty.

The poverty the mothers face has a profound impact on their physical, emotional, and spiritual lives.  Mothers often may not have the finances to buy food that is nutritious for themselves and their families.  They are physically worn out from all of their daily tasks that they are not able to tend to their emotional or spiritual lives in a way that is positive for their development. The root of what my colleagues call client “stubbornness” may be the direct result of living in poverty.  How can I make time to play with my baby when I have three other children to tend to and a household to keep in line?  Who has the time to manage hygiene when the goal of the day is to survive? 

It is my sincere belief that Compassion International tries to relieve poverty in Ugandan women’s lives.  The child survival program is meant to empower women and teach them valuable skills in order to improve their overall quality of life.  However, the major downfall of the Compassion International child survival program, and within Ugandan culture, is that it does not spend more time working on the attitudes of men to allow women, and their families, to move out of poverty.

I find it frustrating to invest much time, energy, and love into a mother’s life only to have the fruits of your labor diminished by a man’s decision to keep his wife in her current position of dependence.  There needs to be more investment into the lives of men in order for the poverty that these women face to become reduced.  It does a woman no good to teach her life-changing information only to leave her husband uneducated and with a resolve to keep her in her current position because she will continue to stay under his control regardless of her new-found education.  There needs to be a cultural shift to focus more on women’s rights and men need to be on board with creating an interdependent relationship with their wives.  Without this change, women at my site will continue to remain in poverty because there is nothing that we, or they, can culturally do about their predicaments. 

I feel like a tiny fish swimming against the current of a tsunami small of problems that are much larger than me.  There is nothing that I can do about the structure of Ugandan culture and my heart hurts knowing these beautiful women must continue to live through these difficult situations.  I am learning to find my peace in Jesus at my site and find Him in the midst of this struggle.  Poverty is much more than dependency and I am unsure if there is really one way to describe its meaning.  This is simply the understanding of poverty that I have encountered within my practicum site and a perspective that will continue to be reformed over the course of the semester.  I am challenged to search for the strengths within Ugandan culture that will make it possible for these women to move out of poverty.

xoxo,

Emilia

My trip was made more financially affordable thanks to the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship (http://www.iie.org/en/Programs/Gilman-Scholarship-Program)!