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Determining the true level of poverty is not to say how little one can exist on. That is relevant to the person/s concerned. Some can live and work around the most basic of incomes, have a roof over their heads to call their own space they can pay for. Still feeling like a king because they are independent enough to be so. That is their choice, and not poverty to them. Hundreds and thousands do that, around the world.

Those of their own indigenous ways of life, so totally different, are happy. A true level of poverty, is not always even summed up in a material or monetary manner, which is the only way some, in most western/European cultures, weigh the word. From the African tribes, in their only known ways, through to the Mongolian, still happy to move on in their carts, erecting their yurts where they must. Both these so different to each other, are content.

They might miss some teeth, or be weather beaten. Their hair might not have been all fancied up at the hair-dresser; or appear to be dressed in rags, right through to their home spun clothes. Cow or sheep skin mats on their floors where there are no carpets. They might have less in the most obvious ways to the European eye, and seen as poverty, but they can still laugh. They offer a hospitality of everything they have.

One can have all the material wealth and be starving of real life qualities, within them-selves. That is one level of poverty. Even 80% of designer homes are not owned, but have debts to pay, if truth be told. Less is more peace of mind, if weighed in the eyes of poverty, with all the debts for their own chosen life style add up. Lose it, and they are on poverty's street. At the end of the day, financially, they are the ones, who are really worse off.

Some, give up the bounty of their own rich home-land wealth of land which is free for them to live on. Views with sunrises and sunsets to die for; and become the poverty stricken, in search of what only looks like on the surface, a richer life. Other peoples ways are but a pretense. These are the victims who had it all in fresh clean Mother Nature, ending up in shanty towns of millions, and streets of rife crime, to become richer: the western European way.

The opposite to this is where beautiful, peaceful Islands, the Pacific and many other oceans, have been discovered for tourist potential. Without any sense of more than a song, the land is bought out from under the Islander's feet, and sold for thousands of dollars in blocks, to the

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