Poverty's Differential Diagnosis

Six years ago, I stood amongst real, as-seen-on-tv poverty for the first time. I was on a two-week study trip to Managua, Nicaragua. I remember clearly standing in our single-storey hotel, or perhaps it was a compound. The man guarding the door advertised his power with a larger gun than I had seen short of Rambo movies my entire life.

I remember brushing my teeth and, out of habit, wetting my toothbrush using the strictly forbidden tap water. And I remember the terror of not knowing what was going to happen to me for having committed a breach of this magnitude. Perhaps there's a room in the basement of the hotel packed tightly with the remains of those who had committed the same grievous sin. Or perhaps the ill effects on my health would be a slow and painful reminder for the duration of my life.

This is a different world, I thought. An uncomfortable world.

While in Nicaragua, I learned things about this world, and our world -- the two are, after all, inseparably knit together; arguably, a single world -- that were so shocking that they would take several years to soak into my being.

What I remember most about the trip was a conversation with our facilitator, Pastor Jon, about what appropriate responses to poverty ought to be. We were talking about all sorts of things that we had witnessed over the previous dozen days: about the benefits and risks of wealthy countries like Canada practicing "tied aid", about the harmfulness of improving people's housing by forced relocations, about self-empowerment through fair trade and cooperatives. Our interpretations of the previous days didn't always agree. He seemed to be casting thunderclouds over the best efforts of the Western world to reduce global poverty. In our arguments, I took the pragmatic road and he the idealistic. Me the rational, and he the fanciful. And I distinctly remember the apex of the conversation, when the wisdom of all of my 22 years focused down to a sharp, irrefutable point.

I had him right in my sights, and I pounced with what I was sure would be the decisive, knock-out blow in our debate: "You're telling me that you don't want to help these poor people realize economic improvement?"

How can you stand in the midst of all of this poverty -- all of these starving children with threads of clothing hanging off their stick-thin bodies -- and reject economic development as a solution?

"That's exactly what I'm saying," he calmly replied. And with that, he wriggled out of my trap.

* * * * *

Fast-forward six years into the future (I've wisened up enough to know that I don't have all the answers anymore), and I'm again standing amongst a similar degree of poverty, albeit in a different tucked-away, nearly-forgotten corner of the world. Only now am I beginning to understand what Pastor Jon was trying to say.

He was, perhaps, trying to be a little provocative. No, he didn't want those children to waste further into the gutters of history. Instead, he was opening my eyes to an interpretation of poverty that goes beyond a lack of stuff.

With his comments percolating in my mind over these past six years, I am finally prepared to agree with his wisdom. Poverty is not always about a lack of stuff; Pastor Jon would argue that it's never about a lack of stuff.

The solution that we find to poverty will necessarily be determined by our own interpretations of its causes. Bryant Myers proposes some cause-response pairs as examples:

If the poor lack things, the response is relief and social welfare.

If the poor lack knowledge, the response is education.

If the culture of the poor is flawed, then they must become like us.

If the social system makes them poor, then the system ought to be changed.

If the poor are sinners, then they need to be evangelized.

If the poor are sinned against, then we need to work for justice.

But even our worldview interprets for us our reading of these cause-response pairs. There is something more fundamental underlying each of these pairings: does the locus of control for reshaping this world lay with us, or with them? Does it flow necessarily from my desire to empower the poor that I'm suggesting that I have power that they lack, and can pass it on to them? Perhaps so; perhaps that's the truth. Or perhaps not.

The responses that we so often bring to the developing world reflect our god-complexes: that we hold the key -- the power -- to progress, and once we deliver this key to the developing world, they'll become more like us. More forward-looking. They'll improve.

These god-complexes suggests that we have all of the answers, and the developing world need only sit and listen attentively, take good notes, and all will be fine.

Even the labels that we choose to apply connote this interpretation: the developing world is behind us, but they're developing. Soon they'll catch up and be just like us. The First World is, after all, Number One.

What is required is a differential diagnosis. That's a label that doctors use in complex medical situations (as popularized by the maverick television doctor, Gregory House), and which Jeffrey Sachs has borrowed for international development. The complex label makes this simple statement: there is no single cure for poverty.

People experience poverty in different ways.

People are poor for different reasons.

A one-dimensional understanding of poverty will, by necessity, be an incomplete understanding.