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Poverty is a scourge. It happens of neglect and abandonment. Good fortune leaves people sometimes but mostly it is people who abandon themselves, their families or their communities first before good fortune leaves.

Poverty is a huge issue in the world today with the majority of the world living on $2 a day. It is a huge problem in China where it currently affects at least 800 million farmers who are about to be evicted and move into slums on the outskirts of big cities. In India, farmers' suicides due to utmost poverty have been a huge issue in several provinces.

For children born into poverty situation might not seem all that bleak until the day they discover they are poor. If they have some food, family, friends and things to do they might not get to find out they are poor until quite some time later in life and suffer from it.

I am talking about a deprivation factor when as long as one is poor and everyone around is poor as well, one doesn't feel deprived of some material goods that are not critical. Realizing the contrast between one's situation and one's environment could be painful and I've seen kids who suffered more from perceived deprivation than from poverty.

My mother was an absentminded scientist but as I was leaving for school one day she noticed I was taking an orange with me: "Do you have enough for all the kids there?" I immediately put it down because where I was growing up citrus fruit was rare, there were food shortages and an orange was a luxury item.

There is another form of poverty: it is a culture of poverty which might be influenced by the experience of poverty where one hoards goods or is extremely stingy when it comes to life's necessities. This is also exhibited by a lot of noveau riche who might have the necessities to overflow but most of their furnishings would have come from one store and they are blatantly ungenerous toward others.

Then there is intellectual poverty which pollutes people who have to come in contact with these "poor". Poverty of the mind is extremely difficult to deal with as people with it rarely realize they have it. The mind needs to be fed as much as body including brain does and the neglect and its effects are daunting.

What causes poor people to procreate baffles me the most as bringing a child knowingly into poverty is inhuman. Somehow people with no foreseeable future, sometimes starving themselves reproduce like rabbits perpetuating the cycle of poverty. I studied Sociology,

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