Post 3: Poverty
Sorry for the delay: I've been busy getting a teaching job, helping out at camp and babysitting my nephews.
In the year 1999 the poverty line in the USA for a family of 9+ was $34,417/year of income before tax. In 2012 it was $43,650/year for the same sized family.
The international poverty line/threshold is between $1 and $2 USD/day/person. For a family of ten that is between $10/day = $3650/year and $20/day = $7300/year.
Spending time in rural Kenya opened my eyes to poverty. I grew up far below the poverty line in the United States. My parents did well to put food on the table everyday for the ten of us. But nothing I experienced growing up remotely came close to the poverty that I saw in Bungoma.
Often in college I would hear students say or myself would say that I was a "poor college student". In some cases this was true - considering that many people take on large amounts of debt to pay for college. But I think more often than not our conception of "broke" or "poor" is limited.
Poverty has to do with more than simply the amount of income a person has. One of my Kenyan friends explained this to me - that it is very different to live below the poverty line in the US than in Kenya. Even living below the poverty line in the US, there are social systems in place to support people. Welfare, unemployment, homeless shelters, medicare, etc... Few to none of these social systems exist in Kenya (or in other developing nations).
Even growing up poor (by American standards), I could be relatively sure that I would never die of starvation or treatable disease, simply because I lived in the United States.
The biggest question I have had in all of my intellectual realizations this summer is: "what now?"
What do I do with what I now know? What do I do with what I have learned? How can I work to fight against white privilege? How do I put to use this new understanding of poverty?
Any ideas?
-Kristen