LAST CRUMB
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 buyer from more foreign shores. Determining the true value of poverty, is a face with many masks.
Try then to explain, why a spare block of land, (once his block, not still built on,) the innocent Islander who once walked freely on this, is prosecuted, if he passes that row of coconuts which divide his own track, still on the other side of, this vacant block? Logic does not count innocence, where money rules and takes away, creating poverty, where once freedom walked.
Poverty levels are naturally when the oppressed find themselves in war-torn countries, displaced with nothing but the clothes on their back, and where to sleep for the night, or how to feed, who's left of t Other heir children. Those who have a real need, because they have nothing, are one measure of poverty. Such as these are left ravaged across the earth.
Those who give up their time or their lives voluntary, to work where real poverty stalks: lack of medical aid, or in any form of known poverty. Those who live to help the true homeless with real reason. Who seek those where rubbish tips are called home: under a black plastic-bag flimsy shelter, with anything called scraps to hold body and soul together, called food in the belly. These are the voices who are able to speak poverty's language.
Determining the true level of poverty is to live it, then be able to speak about it. It is only they who have the real voice. Yet... somewhere in the heart of poverty is something the side of wealth cannot know. It is the bread of their hope, which keeps them going. And if they could, these are they, who would share that last crumb.