Learning Poverty

Zambia
May 2019

Shining sealed roads, rich curries colored with spice, electric lights, and potable water are all available. Young women hold mismatched pairs of mobile phones in one hand, and men drive secondhand Toyotas that hum with meticulous Japanese maintenance. Buses and cargo trucks ply the asphalt ribbons of commerce while electronic bass booms from neighborhood bars. I did not expect this Africa.

I expected obvious poverty. They said I'm wealthy and this continent is poor, defined not by what abounds but by absence. By what they can't consume but I can. I expected absence: empty buckets, baskets, and tanks. No food, no formal roads, no consumer machines. Aside from being false, it’s also ignorant. Wealthy people are as ignorant for presuming it as the impoverished are for accepting it. We often say it's the simple things that are worth the most; perhaps the black child in a Sub-Saharan village should be atop the Forbes 500 in place of Carlos Slim or Jeff Bezos or whoever else exploits us all.

But still they beckon in the only English phrase many children know: give me money. They motion to their mouths, eating air, while maize and tomatoes and onions sprout behind on the village plot. Those with concrete homes and a personal car hesitate little to state they are poor. I nod silently. My heart sighs. My head spins.

This poverty elevates objects over opportunity. Plastic supplants potential. Faraway lives broadcast on subtitled screens and absorbed by mesmerized eyes suggest that the fix is just a transaction. Money for things. So they ask me for money or things. Because it seems one or the other will remove the poverty. I offer a handful of oats I bought. Disappointment drains the hope from their eyes as the things I have to offer are barely things at all. This poverty is a farce. But when the wealthy fabricate the scale, poverty weighs by our measure. Hence, the farce is ours.

Instead I see a poverty of esteem, a dusty reservoir where efficacious spirit should flow from within to cascade inspired over the dike. Instead lurking misery flows below the surface, a tainted groundwater for the masses who thirst, an essential elixir that poisons all the same. Everyday optimism to sell pineapples and packaged biscuits in a collapsing market stall sours with any further aspiration. Future accomplishment or consequence is irrelevant because the flavor of tomorrow stagnates permanently. It's an absence of esteem to aim beyond, that to broadly improve life for one or a society is a worthy potential desire. It's not a lack of physical or mental fortitude - many are strong and determined, especially the women and the young men under their guidance. But to what end? To the resolution of the day's troubles, maybe tomorrow's, too; beyond is a luxurious worry of those with a bank account. Muscles can't make plans. Yet caricatures of hope are somehow infinite. There's much of it if religiosity is any indication, as people across the continent praise the gods of their intruders that the imported glamorized lifestyle might too be replicated by the perceived benevolence of this foreign spirit.

The Chinese built the shining roads, but the rest are disrepaired or dirt. Spices tantalize those tongues slurping from silver spoons, but the rest massage lumps of rice or maize porridge in one hand. Water is clean and available: only 3 km on foot to the pump. Solar panels illuminate some concrete corners, but the rest stretch the dusk with a crackling fire. At least one phone extends a lifeline of cashless credit when the bank is beyond the reach of tired footsteps. The Japanese vans never achieve complete maintenance again, choking and clanking to climb hillsides while gasping for clean lubricant. Cargo arrives from another place: the sugary snacks and plastic products approved abroad. Poverty reaches so deep that both what they have and what they don't is decided overseas. Another obligatory lesson dictated by implanted ideas of what they don't have, leaving any of their own aspirations to wither.