This unit has helped me open my eyes further and understand poverty in our world. Having visited the Philippines a countless number of times, I’ve seen poverty a lot through beggars, homeless people, and much more. Before this unit, I knew about poverty and being poor, but I had no understanding of how to escape and the difficulty of escaping poverty. But now, after learning more about poverty, I understand the difficulty of living in poverty and the difficulty of trying to escape it and I now know how we can make a difference in the world we live in.
One of the activities we did early on in the unit was interviewing people in absolute poverty through a website called the Places We Live. By interviewing people who live in slums, I got a better sense of the situation many people are in now. Many of them don’t have enough money to buy food since they either don’t have a job or have a very low paying job, like trash picking. Their homes don’t have toilets which results in poor hygiene for many. Also, their homes aren’t very safe and they have to be prepared due to the fact that they can easily get kicked out by the police at anytime. This is relevant to me because it gives me a perspective of what it feels like to be in their shoes and the large number of people experiences the difficulties of living life in poverty. It also shows me how fortunate I am to be living my life comfortably and it motivates me to do my part in improving other’s lives. After completing the activity, I had a greater understanding of absolute poverty but I still had some questions. I thought about donations and us doing our part in helping them but I realized and asked myself: Is donating money going to impact them as much as if you were to buy them a home? And if you buy them a home, will they be able to use that to get closer to escaping the poverty cycle or will they just go back to where they were at the start?
Another activity that helped me better understand poverty was Spent. By being put into the shoes of someone in relative poverty, I got to experience life in relative poverty. Living life in relative poverty was surprisingly hard for me as I barely had any money at the end of the month, even when I said no to almost every decision I could make. All my decisions weren’t based on the right thing to do, it was based on if I had any money. For example, my mom was in the hospital and she had no more money to pay for it, I wanted to say yes because it's my mom, but then I didn’t have enough money so I couldn’t do anything about it. This is relevant to me because people who are born into the situation I’m in now don’t have to worry about basic needs and food but people in relative poverty have to. We can live life comfortably, thinking about what I should wear tomorrow instead of do I have food for tomorrow while people in relative poverty can’t. This has helped me understand how fortunate I am to be in the situation I am in now and how I can make a difference in our world. A question I still have about this is: Having almost no money at the end of the month, would I still be able to live in relative poverty, or would I go down to moderate poverty?
In conclusion, I learned a lot more about poverty and I expanded my knowledge on it. I learned that escaping the poverty cycle is very difficult because of the rare chances and opportunities to get a job or education to be able to break out of it. I realized some people get lucky and get scholarships, and some people have better job opportunities. And I now see how these factors can help you break out of the cycle. This unit has helped me to understand more about poverty aside from just being in it and has helped me open my eyes to the world many people live in: poverty.
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