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Are These The Poor?

A missionary writes to say that what Americans call poverty is just daily life
PaloCommunityMarch2014

My friend Father Silouan Thompson, an Orthodox missionary in the Philippines, sent the following e-mail last night. I post it with his permission:

I’m catching up on your column and just saw “We were poor once.” You wrote

[My grandfather] was out on the road getting work wherever he could, and sending money back. Their oven was powered by wood that my dad, as a child, and his brother chopped. If they wanted meat, they pretty much had to kill, gut, and pluck one of their chickens. Many nights, if the family was going to eat meat, Daddy or his brother had to shoot enough squirrels to fill the stewpot. Many more nights, supper was stale cornbread jammed into an iced-tea glass, filled with buttermilk and eaten with a teaspoon.It’s funny, this is exactly how we live here here in the rural Philippines.

When I share pictures of life here, it looks very Gilligan’s Island. All the furniture is either made out of sticks (actual sticks found on the ground or cut from trees) or if you can afford it there’s the very crappiest Chinese plastic, the stuff Americans disdain even at the Dollar Store.

Dinner is rice (the word for rice is kan-on, almost identical to the word for food, ka-on. But if you’re too poor even for that, there’s ma-is, which is coarse corn meal. Steam it the same way you do rice, and you get the poor man’s poor man’s meal. Boil a little dried fish if you’ve got it, and pick some leaves, and you have soup which you pour over the rice or ma-is. On special occasions you kill a chicken or buy some nice meaty fish at the market. Buying a pig is crazy expensive; I paid almost $100 for a whole pig which we roasted for a feast recently – that’s the same as the cost of a hundred kilos of rice.

Every morning before sunrise you’ll hear the sound of women chopping kindling to cook rice for breakfast. When you need something made or fixed, any of the men over 30 will gladly take a machete, grab some wood, and do it for you with little drama, no blueprints, and casual competence. Anybody here can build a bench, sew a garment, cook a meal or build you an open-fire cooking grill, plant and harvest food, or macgyver a fix when your tricycle axle breaks or you get a leak in the motorcycle’s gas tank. That’s the kind of omni-competence that enabled folks like your parents and grandparents to survive the Depression; and it’s the lack of it that will cause societal havoc if America’s power grid or just-in-time logistics chain ever break down. (Who knows how to cook with fire? And where would you get wood to heat or cook with if you live in suburbia? Chances are your house hasn’t got a fireplace and your wee gas stove can’t convert to use wood anyhow. Different rant.)

School isn’t free, but most families can afford to send their kids to school for at least a few years, so everybody can read at least a little. But college isn’t even on the radar. Nobody here is going to be an engineer or doctor. You’re going to fish, farm, drive a tricycle for pesos, run a little store, maybe get into building or furniture-making. There’s not much employment out here, so if you’re any good at a craft, you’ll probably move to the city where you can find work and send home support for your family.

My parishioners think I’m paying way too much in rent ($50/month, plus another $15 in water and electricity) but I am really attached to my indoor plumbing. I don’t mind using an outhouse, but sponge-bathing over at the well pump, as well as doing my dishes and laundry there, doesn’t appeal to me. Nobody in the parish has an air conditioner, so I don’t either – but when I come home hot or when I want to sleep, I can wash with a bucket of cool water and run the electric fan, and Bob’s your uncle.

Thing is, everybody here knows they live simply and haven’t got anything to spare for luxuries, but they’re not poor. Nobody is starving, no flies-in-the-eyes stickmen, thank God. This is just life in the provinces. Allow for climate and radically different culture, and life here reminds me of descriptions of Appalachian hillbillies.

Here’s a link to the Philippine Mission served by Father Silouan.

And if you like, check out his excellent blog.

UPDATE: Father Silouan responds:

Just to clarify: I wrote to Rod in response to his piece about how his parents during the depression didn’t think of themselves as poor.

Folks out here in the provinces are familiar with wealth – any of us can take a long bus ride into a city with malls, supermarkets, technology and fashion. Everybody knows someone who’s got a good job and lives in an urban home with aircon and appliances and stuff. They’ve also seen what they consider harmful poverty: the marginal people who [barely] live in slums are not hard to find. To many folks here, being poor means being incapable of building a life worth living.

Life here isn’t romantically carefree. But most of my parishioners, while they know they haven’t got a lot, don’t consider themselves poor. It’s in that sense that I responded to Rod, because his description of life in the south during the Depression (when his grandparents were thankful they weren’t poor)is our daily experience too.

I will add just one thought, though: Why do people consider normal the experience of Europe and North America, where they own cars and have indoor plumbing and can decide what’s for dinner? Where hardwood floors, the Internet, ambulance service, and safe building codes are everyday realities? And how does that disproportionately affluent minority of the world have the role of determining that practically every non-city-dweller in Asia and Africa, the Pacific and much of South America is abnormal, i.e. “poor”? (Perhaps “poor” isn’t a very useful word when it means “most people, who don’t live like today’s middle-class Americans.”)

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