Poverty

I’ve had one particular pair of khaki pants since high school. I bought them from Target. A couple of years ago, I wore them while painting a banner. Ever since, there’s been a small black paint stain on one side. Other than that, they’re a perfectly decent pair of pants. Before coming to Peru, I went through stages where at times I was self-conscious of wearing clothes that appeared stained or worn-out, while at other times I flaunted the artsy, “I don’t give a damn” look of wearing whatever was comfortable.

While packing to leave the US for Peru, I was in the latter of those two stages, so I packed my stained pants. “I’m going to be living and working amongst the poor,” I thought to myself. “No one is going to care if I have a stained pair of pants. People there will just be happy with wearing whatever they can afford,” an attitude reflected in the first full-length post of my blog.

While among many people living in conditions of extreme poverty, that attitude may indeed be prevalent, I have a feeling that anyone who’s ever spent a considerable amount of time working with the urban poor is probably laughing at my earlier logic. Even though there have been many days when no one seems to notice the pants, quite frequently when I wear them people tend to point out the stain. “What happened?” they ask sympathetically, assuming that I accidentally stained the paints earlier in the day and hadn’t had a chance to change. Or they try to be helpful: “Did you know there’s a stain there?” Many people don’t understand why I would wear a stained pair of pants.

So what’s the point in telling you all this? The point is, as it turns out, appearances matter. A lot. Many of the kids who attend the Compassion program at Kilometer 13 church wear pretty nice clothes. Some don’t. But many wear clothes that appear to be new and de marca (“name brand”). Several of the older kids (13-16) years old) also have relatively fancy cell phones. For birthdays and Christmas, nice clothes are probably the most popular gift. Yet, as I’ve described in my first newsletter, many of these children come from very poor families. They live in small houses where they sometimes share a single bed with one, two, three or more siblings. Their parents make their livings selling vegetables in the street market. Many already have broken, missing or decaying teeth because they can’t afford good dental care.

This reality obviously has many nuances that are unique to Peru, which I’ll hopefully get to describe in detail in a later entry. But in many ways, it’s not too different from what poverty looks like in large US cities. And most people reading this probably are already well aware that “poor people have nice cell phones and wear name brand clothes.”

To us well-meaning, soft-hearted, white, middle-upper class do-gooders and our “never ever blame the victim” mindsets, this is the type of poverty that frustrates us, pains us and baffles us. The painful, baffling frustration is perhaps epitomized by something that pastor Hernando of KM 13 church shared with me last weekend. He recently visited the home of a family with children who are enrolled in the compassion program. During the visit, discovered that they have cable TV. At a parents’ meeting for Compassion a few days later, these particular parents complained that it was hard to pay the 2 soles (about 70 cents) per week requested to help pay the small salaries received by the cooks and tutors that work at Compassion. “Right then I realized,” Hernando said to me “that a lot of the families with children who attend Compassion aren’t really poor. This is a problem.”

Since Hernando always harps to other people about me being a “professional” sociologist, I seized this opportunity to talk about what I think causes this issue. Deciding to ignore the fact that the family could easily be "borrowing" their cable from a neighbor, I explained to him the sociological concept of “symbolic capital.” Cell phones, name-brand clothes and cable TV are examples of symbolic capital. You don’t generally associate these things with poverty. And that is EXACTLY the reason that poor people have them. They’re symbols of wealth. They’re signposts of success. No one, except for me and my fellow “Irresistible Revolution”-ary, (formerly) middle-upper class white liberal Christian friends, is proud of being poor. Being impoverished is shameful. Everyone wants nice things for their families, especially their children. In our world, people left and right are seemingly pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps (or at least talking about how they did earlier in life, or about how their parents did, or how their grandparents did). This creates a culture where blaming the victim is exactly what we do. “Anyone can make it with hard work in America” proclaims the American Dream. The obvious corollary to this rule is “so if you don’t ‘make it,’ you obviously aren’t a hard worker.” Or “if you don’t make it, you’re not as good of a person as the rest of us, who have achieved success.” So to hide this shameful “failure,” people use what money they DO have to buy the appearance of success.

In my opinion, to really be able to “dig yourself out” of poverty, you have to be frugal and scrounge to get by on minimum necessities. That way, you can save whatever might be left over to invest in “real” capital – materials to start your own business or create some other income gaining/saving technique. But the downside to this is that because you’re only spending a minimum amount of money on just buying the basics, from the outside you tend to look rather ummmm, poor. "Low class." So instead, many people in conditions of poverty use their money to buy the "luxuries" they should only be able to afford AFTER becoming successful. Or to put it in fancy “I’m 22 and have a bachelor’s degree” language, they invest in symbolic capital rather than economic capital.