by Duane Gundrum

Created on: August 23, 2007

Defeating poverty takes more than just studying it.

During a recent graduate course I took the subject concerned the concepts of poverty in America. The information read in class was all very scholarly type of information that looked at the problem from the outsider perspective, and the reading list included one book of someone who decided to "live poor" as part of her investigative reporting concerning the process of being poor. What struck me as being most odd about the course was that everyone in the class had a different conception of what poverty meant, and almost always it was from an observer's perspective, not someone who grew up with the very nature of what being poor might mean. There always seemed to be a "let's compare it with Africa" or some other intellectual method of explaining poverty, and then we would analyze the many socialist methods to "fix" the problem. I think I walked away from that course more frustrated about understanding poverty than when I went into it.

You see, I was born dirt poor. I mean really poor. My family had little to no education historically. My dad took off when I was too young to ever remember him because we were a "burden" to him. My mother, with an incomplete middle school education, tried to function as a buffer between starvation and death for her kids, and she was too proud to ever consider taking any type of financial assistance from the government. When we had access to a stable apartment, it was usually overrun with cockroaches, and very rarely did we have enough food to sustain even one of us during difficult periods. Clothing usually came from what the Salvation Army couldn't sell for ridiculously low prices. The apartment building where I lived most of my childhood was heroin-addict central, and strangely enough I remember this fondly because some of the most bizarre conversations I ever had with other people my age were with people who were so far gone that seemed to make a lot more sense than I probably ever will.

What changed for me was that some grammar school teacher discovered I had a strange methodology of writing and felt there was something there that needed further cajoling. I started winning a bunch of awards for young writers, which eventually put me into another demographic of students that teachers watched out for rather than ignored. Because of this, I read more than I ever would have, and I studied a lot more than I ever would have, even if it meant having to do most of my work at a school library

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