Reflections on poverty

I am spending a few days in an African country. I observe with detachment. From a materialistic point of view, I am surrounded by what we in the West label as “poverty”. If I free myself from cultural prejudices, though, I see people relating to one another, not hunched over a black screen, plenty of spontaneous smiles without a “why”, and I am surrounded by a sense of lightness and simplicity. I ask myself: are they really the poor ones? And yet many people who live here dream of our way of life and set sail in the hope of reaching it. I would like to stop them and explain that ours is certainly a shinier world, but the price of reaching it is the soul itself.

Obviously I am not saying that material poverty leads to happiness, nor that one necessarily excludes the other.

But I find it essential to be able to observe the world and judge it outside materialistic parameters. To strip away what we are in order to understand. Is it still possible to understand that the spirit cannot be measured in possessions? Is it possible for anyone to understand, or at least to consider, that our Western world has never been so materially rich and so culturally poor? It is not a competition, and we cannot go back, but perhaps we can choose carefully the direction to take as we move forward.
Photo: Emanuela Boriotti

m.m.