I don't think I have ever appreciated the mercy of God and the blessings of my life as much as I do today. I don't think I have ever realized how blessed I am for not experiencing hunger or being forced to make decisions that impacted my life or that of my loved ones because of poverty, until today.
I work with poverty you see. I founded and run a group called Women for Women International that works with women survivors of wars and help them rebuild their lives. I have encountered many horrible stories; stories of rape, torture, mutilation, killings, displacement, and of loosing everything one has, among many others. In all the years, and it has been about 17 years, I have focused so much on the physical and physiological element of violence and the deprivation it brings with it. I understood rape, death, torture, displacements and the vulnerabilities they bring because I personally encountered all of these things in various ways throughout my life. It wasn't until last year did I start paying attention to the cruelty, the real cruelty, of poverty.
I was in a refugee camp in Congo, a horrible camp in Goma, Eastern DRC. As my colleagues and I were visiting different women in their shelters that are made literary of branches and twigs with only a plastic sheet on top to supposedly protect them from rain, we noticed a child screaming. It took us a while to notice that the child was screaming non-stop and that he was laying down on the dirt and literally eating dirt. I couldn't' believe what I was seeing: a child eating dirt. I have heard of that before. I was actually told by Wyclef Jean that when he was a child, he ate dirt out of poverty. Truth be told, I didn't fully believe him until that moment when I saw the Congolese child eating dirt. He finally stopped crying when two bananas were given to him, and he started eating them.
Yes, believe it! After 17 years of working in a humanitarian and development organization, I emotionally did not get poverty in its extreme meaning and extreme impact on the lives of people until that moment. In that same trip, I met a beautiful young Rwandese woman in neighboring Rwanda. She was introduced to me as the leader of her women's group in her small village. She was the only one who had a cell phone, the only one who knew how to read and write, and the only one who organized a group of about 50 women farmers in a small farm cooperative. When I got the chance to visit her at her very humble two room mud home, it became very clear why so many women loved and respected her. She was a visionary who had dreams and wanted to fulfill them for herself, her family and the women she is working with. One of her dreams was for her to go back to school. She was passionate about that, excited about it, knew exactly what she wanted to study and what she wanted to be. When I asked her why she left school at 6 grade, she looked me in the eyes, and with a focused, sharp and an equally angry and sad look, she said: "Poverty!"
Her father was sitting in her living room. She was carrying her few months old baby, standing next to her husband, as her 3 year-old child was holding on to her skirt. She was no more than 20 years old. She didn't hide her anger at the injustice of poverty that forced her father to get her out of school because he simply couldn't afford sending her there. She had to work as a farmer instead and get married because her family could no longer afford feeding her. She said all of that in front of her father and her husband. There was no shyness, no hesitation and definitely no ambivalence in her anger. She knew her course of life was changed because of poverty and she was not happy about it and she was determined to change it as an adult. There are moments in life where one can not forget the piercing nature of the emotion. Meeting that young woman and feeling her anger at what poverty did to her is one of them.
And then there was another incident last week in my home country Iraq. It came in the most unexpected circumstances: in a nice restaurant. You see, I consider my Iraqi colleagues heroes. They have worked and stayed working in the most severe and violent circumstances throughout the last years. They refused to leave the country out of dedication, even though they could have left many times. There were years in which they had to drive by the death triangle to deliver our programs' services to some of the women we serve, among many of their other adventures as they call it. Last week, after a long working meeting and a nearby bomb that shook the office foundation, we decided to go out for lunch, change the atmosphere and celebrate our work. They were all so happy to go out to a restaurant, something that used to be the norm before the last war and now became a rarity because of the violence.
During lunch, I sat, by coincidence, next to the office cleaner, who joined us for lunch. She turned to me shortly after I sat down and said "I can't thank you enough for taking us out. I have never in my life been out to a restaurant. I am so happy just to be here. I haven't known what going out to a restaurant means until this moment". I was surprised at what she said. "Never been out to a restaurant?" I wondered to myself. "Umm Ahmed (which means mother of Ahmed) is in her 50s, and she has never been out?"
As a middle-income country, I always thought that poverty in Iraq did not mean the same extreme poverty as in Africa. Not until I talked to Umm Ahmed last week, did I learn I was mistaken. In the very country where I grew up going to a good school, not having limits to my dreams, traveling around the world, and not knowing what to do with my weekly allowance that my father gave me simply because I didn't need anything, there was Umm Ahmed. A woman who got married at the age of 13 to a man who was 20 years older than her!
Umm Ahmed's emotions kept on going back and forth between joy at being in a restaurant and sadness at her life. So I tried to ask her about the joy she remembers in her life. "I don't remember any", she said. "Come on", I insisted. "There must be moments of joy in your life", I continued.
After a few seconds, her eyes brightened up like a little girl and said, "Yes! When my father would come home with bread and food the day he got a job. I remember these days. I was very happy when I saw him coming home with food, but those days were not that frequent." Umm Ahmed explained how her father was a day laborer. On days when he got a job, there was food, and on days he didn't, the neighbor passed on some rice to her mother and they did with that. Umm Ahmed finally had to be married off because her family simply could no longer afford to feed her and be responsible for her. And even though the man she married was a nice and a kind man, she never got over the trauma of being with someone so much older than her when she was just a child.
Her marriage did not get her out of poverty though. It just perpetuated the cycle. She married her daughters off when they were a bit older than she was, but still as teenagers. Now, she cares for her elderly and sick husband and is the sole bread-winner for the family and the problem solver for all of her 4 daughters marriage feuds. Her 5th daughter is a widow and she is only 35. When I asked her why her daughters have so many problems with their husbands, she took a breath and said, "Poverty. It is all about the money at the end of the day. Not having enough money to eat. Not having enough money to send the children to school. Not having enough money to pay the bills. It is always about the money."
I left Iraq thinking that most people really do not understand the full meaning of poverty. I know I don't and despite my work that puts me at the heart of it constantly, I am still learning about it and how it leads people to so many decisions. So many in the West blame culture, religion, traditions among many other things, for child marriages, girls being out of school, and other practices that lead so many girls to be mothers at the age of 15 and often widows or single heads-of-households. And while culture and traditions and all of that have of course a role to play, the real elephant in the room is POVERTY and that is ALL of our responsibility! And by focusing more on culture and less on poverty, it creates a veneer that is a step removed from each of our individual responsibility for creating and living in such a world and really, really forgetting the meaning of poverty and understanding it on an emotional level and not just the factual level.
"Money is part of your blessing" the Quran says. I have known that quote for a long time but I don't think I have ever emotionally comprehended it until this moment.
I wonder how many of those who talk about poverty really understand it. I wonder how many are willing to make the sacrifices to build a system that really eliminates poverty and provides the opportunities for all to make the choices they want, to live their lives fully as I was able and, as you, most likely, were.
My mother used to tell me that the best prayer you can give is to smile and say "Thank you, God." Smile with me and say thank you for your blessings.