Poverty?

I gotta tell ya about my latest CCD experience.

One of the families we have been working with is that family I have written about before with the grandparents taking care of a large number of grandchildren while the parents of these kids work in Nassau. This family has very little and things are tight, and at times I can imagine they get a little desperate. They are happy, but when we visit usually the children have no shoes (shoes are for school and church), the clothes we see them wear at home are worn quite thin (but their school uniforms are always clean and neat), and when they go fishing, its not for sport - but for food (snacks are things they find growing in the bush, like coconuts or sapadillies). Suffice it to say they live a hard life and if we had any extra we'd give it to them, and we have.

Well, we have enrolled these kids in our Religious Ed class and this past week the topic was freedom. The books we use talked about the Exodus and Israel's freedom from slavery. Then the book had an exercise that explained there are a variety of types of slavery. There is slavery from racism, sexism, addiction, poverty, etc. The exercise they had to do was to describe something they would do to battle slavery to each of these types.

So the first one was freedom from addiction and they all struggled with that one. I said to one boy who has an older brother in Nassau. "What if you went to Nassau and found out your brother was addicted to drugs - what would you do?" He replied "I'd try to get him into rehab." Perfect, so with a pretty good understanding of the exercise they all get to work writing ideas on how to overcome these various forms of slavery.

It is then that one of the girls from this family raises her hand and asks, "What's poverty?" Just about knocked me off my chair. She doesn't know she's poor, life is what it is. I explained that poor people have no money, they may be homeless and might have to beg for food - and she understood that, AND that I wasn't talking about her. But I gotta tell ya, at that moment, when this particular girl asked me "What's poverty?" you could have knocked me over with a feather. She doesn't feel poor. She has a house that is just fine with her, she has a family that loves her, she has food that she's happy with.

What a lesson for me!