Choosing Poverty
These two words don’t seem to make a lot of sense when put together… why would someone choose poverty? Why when someone has lived their entire life in poverty, married into poverty, birthed their babies into poverty and currently are raising their kids in poverty, why would they choose to continue to live in life debilitating extreme poverty? Why when given an opportunity to enter a women’s training program where they can make money every week for their family while at the same time, have money set aside in a bank so that when they complete the program after 4-6 months, they have a large sum of money to start their own business? Essentially, though small in American standards, why would someone forfeit an opportunity that may only come around once in a lifetime? An opportunity that if embraced, has the potential for transformation in the immediate as well as distant future. These are some of the hard questions we ask ourselves and perhaps there aren’t easy answers. Yesterday, was one of these hard question days for us. Jamie and I looked at each other and asked, “why would they choose poverty?” Nonetheless, it’s the questions we ask because of our desire to work with the poor and the “least of these”… because of our desire to see life-altering sustainable transformation in the lives of the Malagasy people.
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