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Lisa Selwyn

Poverty: A Description of One’s Situation

”To be poor is to be deprived of those goods and services and pleasures which others around us take for granted.” Mollie Orshansky, developer of the poverty measurements used by the United States government.

What is poverty? Poverty can be a situation in which one is born into, be subject to due to a natural disaster or fall into by means of personal hardship like disease, drug or alcohol use, and other illnesses. Poverty is a situation not a judgment upon one’s character. Poverty is a shortage of common things such as food, clothing, shelter and safe drinking water. Shortages of unclean drinking water results in poor sanitary conditions. Poor women, suffering from isolation often spend many hours a day fetching water for the household, diverting them from income generation and childcare activities. Being physically weak due to illness can prevent the poor from earning an income and push them further into poverty making the cycle of depression and desperation more intense. Many feel powerless and vulnerable because they have little access to justice for help with legal issues for example, a death of the primary wage earner in the family because the family can not afford adequate health care services. Thus putting the units’ assets in jeopardy or exhausted digging the household deeper into poverty.

In the United States extreme poverty is called destitution or absolute poverty. Extreme poverty is traditionally defined as having an annual income that’s less than half of the official poverty line, an income level determined by the Bureau of the Census, 2008 http://www.census.org.

Extreme poverty in developing nations, as defined by international organizations, means having a household income of less than one U.S. dollar per day. It doesn’t take into account the cost of living differentials within countries. A dollar will buy different amounts of goods in urban and rural areas. A bushel of corn (eight ears) costs more in the cities than it would in a small farming community that grows corn as a source of income. Many poor countries people grow and rear food and animals for their own consumption. This isn’t captured by measures of income and consumption based on the measurements of the purchase of goods sold as commodities. This definition also does not show who lives in permanent and who lives in temporary poverty. More information on this will be discussed later on. Next is relative poverty. Relative poverty is the condition of having fewer resources or less income than others within a society or country, or compared to worldwide averages. Relative poverty is measured as having a family income less than one half of the median income for that developed country such as the United States. According to the United States Department of Agriculture 34.5 million American people are living below the poverty level. Of this number, the country’s 2.1 million American Indians are the poorest in the United States. 400,000 of those live on reservations where the highest rates of poverty, unemployment and disease are of any other ethnic group in American.

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Pine Ridge of Shannon County, South Dakota, is the poorest county in the United States. Unemployment hovers around 80%. Per Capita income is $3,419 a year, the lowest in the nation and two out of three people live below the Federal poverty level. The average poverty threshold for a family of four is $16,660 in annual income to that of a family of three which is $13,003 yearly income The poverty rate-in the metropolitan areas and central cities is twice as high compared to that in the suburbs. Sadly, children make up the highest poverty rate compared to any other age group 13.5 million children. These poor children make up 39% of all the poor population and they make up 26% of the total population in the U.S. ￼

Facts about the ”poor” in the United States by the Census Bureau of the United States in 2007 it is reported that 43% of all poor households actually own their homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three bedroom house with one and half baths, garage, and a porch or patio. This may come as a surprise, but you can also see that such a home would not be found in the middle of a New York City neighborhood. It is reported that eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. Six percent are over crowded, of that two thirds have more than two people in one room. The average poor American has more living space that the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe, those are just the average Joe’s not compared to the poor of foreign countries.

It is reported by the Census Bureau that that three quarters of poor households own a car, with 31% owning two or more cars. Ninety seven percent of the poor have color televisions, some more than one. Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player with sixty-two percent having cable or satellite television reception. And 88% of the poor according to the Census Bureau own microwave ovens and more than half have a stereo and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher. As a group, American’s poor are far from being chronically undernourished. The average consumption of protein, vitamins, and minerals is virtually the same for the poor and middle class children and, in most cases, is well above the recommended norms. Poor children consume more meat than do higher-income children and average protein intakes one hundred percent above recommended levels. Most poor children, today, grow up on average to be one inch taller and ten pounds heavier than the GI s who stormed the shores of Normandy in World War II. Contrary to this census, the effects of poverty in the United States vary. Many low income families purchase a cheaper variety of foods high in starch, sugar and sodium. Those who are considered low income tend to frequent fast food franchises hitting up the value menu items and dining at all you can eat buffets resulting in the poor nutrition. The effects of poverty in the wealthier countries – such as the United States, Canada, Japan and those in western Europe include poor nutrition, mental illness, drug dependence, crime, and high rates of disease.

Mental illness among the poor is high. Diagnostic criteria for many mental disorders require symptoms to cause significant impairment on the individual’s ability to function in social or work environments. It can be reasoned that those with a severe mental health disorder may have difficulties functioning at work which then would lead them to unemployment and possibly poverty. There are some organizations that aid the mentally handicapped with employment and living skills but those are few and expensive making it difficult to attain services. Poverty is painful. Poverty fills one with shame and anxiety. Drug dependency takes the lives of many who are living in poverty. Many fall victim to drug and alcohol abuse due to much of the depression and hopelessness that prevail with poverty conditions. Some turn to crime out of desperation. Resorting to selling drugs, prostitution, racketeering, theft and larceny in order to take care of themselves or families. It is a fact that there is a high rate of disease among the poor. Inadequate health care is the main reason for this. Most of the illnesses associated with poverty in developing countries are infectious diseases such as diarrheal illness, malaria and tuberculosis. Diseases among the poor in the United States consist of gum disease, heart disease, diabetes and sexually diseases to name a few. The world’s poorest people live in developing areas of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. They struggle daily for food, shelter, and other necessities. They often suffer from malnutrition, a dietary condition caused by deficiency or excess of one or more essential nutrients in the diet. Malnutrition is characterized by a wide array of health problems, including extreme weight loss, stunted growth, weakened resistance to infection, and impairment of intellect. Severe cases of malnutrition can lead to death. These poor countries suffer from epidemic disease outbreaks which are contagious diseases affecting an unusually large number of people or involving an extensive geographical area. Epidemics, which may be short-lived or last for years, are brought on by the widening reach of disease-causing organisms. These organisms can spread by contaminated food or water, directly from one person to another through physical contact, or by the exchange of bodily secretions such as saliva, semen, or blood. Insects, rodents, and other disease-carrying animals, known as vectors, are agents that may infect human populations with epidemic diseases. Diseases that have an epidemic history are the Bubonic plague, influenza, smallpox, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, cholera, bacterial meningitis, and diphtheria. Occasionally, childhood diseases such as mumps and German measles become epidemics. One of the largest epidemics ever recorded was the outbreak of the bubonic plague or the Black Death. This plague killed one-third of the people in Europe alone. It also raged through Africa and Asia from 1347 to 1350. Famine, a severe shortage of food, generally affecting a widespread areas and large numbers of people impact the people of developing countries. These shortages occur for many reasons such as natural causes for example droughts, floods, earthquakes, insect plagues, and plant disease. Other causes are human caused like that of war, civil disturbances, sieges, and deliberate crop destruction. The population increases disproportionate to the food-producing or procuring capacity of people in a region. The number one killer of young women in the developing world is not disease whose cure eludes us; the cure for A.I.D.S. is not in grasp, or a condition which the world lacks resources to treat. It is pregnancy and childbirth. Every year, 500,000 women die while trying to give life. That’s one every single minute, according to End Poverty 2015 campaign.

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To end poverty is a huge task. One way of trying to fight the fight would be try to end hunger. One way this could be done would take a look at the wasted food in America alone. America’s Second Harvest, a non-profit food bank organization, states that over 41 billion pounds of food have been wasted every year. A 2004 study from the University of Arizona in Tucson, on average, American households waste 14 percent of their food purchases. 15 percent of that includes products still within their expiration date but never opened. Timothy Jones, an anthropologist at the UA Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology, who led the study, estimates an average family of four currently tosses out $590 per year, just in meat, fruits, and vegetables. 16 billion pounds of milk and 14 billion pounds of grain products have been included in this loss. When you think of this waste in numbers and try to imagine that people go hungry everyday and think of the nations guidelines of poverty, it makes you think hard at yourself and what you are doing. Poverty hasn’t any respect to one’s race, color, or religion. It has extraordinary wide variations in terms of breadth and depth. It can be relatively minor, requiring nothing more than some degree of personal adjustment, or it can be deadly; freezing to death in the dead of winter because you can’t pay for your heating bill. For some it is fleeting, temporary condition. Such as those who fell victim to natural disasters such as drought, hurricanes, floods or tornadoes. For others it is a generational norm, revealed only at a sufficient age of awareness. To illustrate, when a child realizes and experiences shame for the first time when he notices he or she is being judgeds by the brand of shoes they are wearing or singled out because they are unkempt or unclean due to lack of clean running water. It can be a reflection of a tragic mindset or harsh images of seemingly inescapable realities, as that of the products of war. It is a description of one’s situation, not by definition an assessment of one’s character. Therefore, poverty is a situation in which one is lacking one or more necessities of life. It is not a judgment on ones character. The fact that someone is poor does not mean they are a bad person. In Lakota culture the ”poorest” of the tribe was the chief, because he all he had back to the well-being of the people. The poor do not have to be nameless or faceless. There have been many people in American history who have risen above the lines of poverty to become a successful positive contribution to society. Among these individuals who have become well-known is comedian Jim Carrey; he was homeless and lived out of his VW van for two years. Cary Grant, the Oscar-winning actor slept on the streets of South Hampton England during a summer in his youth at the time of World War I. The actress Halle Barry stayed at homeless shelters while struggling to find work when she was too young to obtain employment legally. Billy Mills, a 1964 Olympic gold medalist, was born into poverty on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The author and inspirational speaker Cedric Jennings came from the inner city of Washington D.C. He was born of his surroundings but with hard work earned his way to an Ivy League college. Today he is still successful helping other troubled teens growing up in the inner city.