The Face of Poverty

Historically the world has been trying to “relief” poverty for many centuries. The three concepts used to define poverty since the 1880’s include subsistence, basic needs and relative deprivation. In a collective where I worked for four years we debated the difference between wants and needs every time we processed our pay. The debate became heated every time. How do you define wants and needs and how would you measure substance, basic needs and relative deprivation which in some form have been and still is at the center of defining and measuring poverty. Do your own experiment when you are out with friends start a discussion on what each person believes are their needs as opposed to their wants.

Today alternative perspectives have refocused the concept of poverty as a human condition that reflects failures in many dimensions of human life – hunger, unemployment, homelessness, illness and health care, powerlessness and victimization, and social injustice; they all add up to an assault on human dignity. Working against any aspect that assaults human dignity is why so many development organizations focus programs on gender and development as it relates to poverty. Measuring only subsistence, basic needs, and relative deprivation without looking at social needs is inadequate particularly when measuring gender inequality. As Peace Corps volunteers I believe one of our biggest impacts is on the social needs of our communities both where we work and back home. Poor people are not just the victims of a misdistribution of resources but, more exactly, they lack, or are denied, the resources to fulfill social demands Looking around in my community of Koutiala I am aware that most of the women in affluent families have more freedom to have a career, choose their husband, and are able to meet more social needs then their less advantaged counterparts. In doing gender and development work our main goal is to relief poverty by giving women the ability to meet social needs for a full and happy life with opportunities. Thus the means of giving women access to meet social needs leads to the end of poverty for the whole community. Working to end poverty needs a multiplicity approach to the solution.

In asking the question what is poverty we need to ask the question, “What is Income?” In my home town of Seattle many people do bartering for a lot of their needs and have little income. There was a time that I helped start a food coop, a women’s health clinic, and day care center to improve the lives of people in my community. As an active member of these organizations I did not pay for healthcare which I could not afford, I got a discount on the food I ate, and even though I didn’t have children at the time a woman in my household was included in my family and got a discount on her child care. My income was way below the poverty level for 1974 America. Yet I had access to health care, was well fed and since I lived in a collective house hold I had very good housing. Thus poverty can not be determined by income alone but by some other means.

Let’s look at International Development and how it addresses the issue of poverty. In the new millennium development theory has gotten so complex and some call sophisticated that the United Nations has developed a program called the Millennium Campaign with eight goals to end poverty to be accomplished by 2015. These goals are measured by 48 indicators. They never mention the views of poor people and what poor people consider poor or talk to them about what they have, what they need or what they want. The agencies defining poverty include the United Nations and the World Bank. My questions to the development businesses are; How will development end poverty; Who sets the standard for what is developed; If the developed world keeps raising the bar how is the rest of the world going to catch up; When are you going to empower the people.

When a good friend of mine died several years ago because she lacked access to health care I wondered what poverty looked like in America. In the US there are people who can hardly read, live on minimal wages and don’t have access to health care. Today in America we are all faced with the question of who has access to health care. Access to health care is one component in measuring and defining poverty the world over. We throw the rhetoric around but what is poverty and what does it look like, is it different in the US than in other parts of the world. Since coming to Africa this question of poverty is on my mind everyday.

Some Peace Corps volunteers made comments during training that started me thinking about what influences us as Americans when we define poverty. One volunteer who lived in a good size house with a single mother of four, all girls, made the comment that the family would be on welfare if they lived in America. Another volunteer said that his family just didn’t have much money. The first volunteer’s family had the best food of all our families, the oldest daughter was in higher education and hoped to get a job in a bank, all the girls were well dressed, the family had a TV, and nice living room. The second volunteer’s host parents were school teachers; one son was in nursing school. They were building a house for retirement. This started me thinking, as Americans by what standards do we see and define poverty.

Another incident that got me thinking about what is poverty came one evening in Abidjan as I was sitting around the court yard with four Africans most of them Malians. We talked until the wee hours of the night. One person was a teacher of physics, one a law student, one a bogolan artist and one was unemployed. We sat around on wooden benches in a courtyard cluttered with kitchen utensils and crowded with people. These people were not at the bottom of the scale of have’s and have not’s in Africa. As we talked the rats ran in the urinal, through the kitchen and where else I don’t know. Thirty people lived in this court yard habitat all of them related in some way. I was visiting here for several days with Koro, the bogolan artist, we are good friends.

I don’t know if any of the people I work with here in Mali would fit the UN’s or World Bank’s definition of poor but when I go to Koro’s house just blocks from where I live and she has no electricity, no running water and her and her husband live in two rooms with minimal furniture I am aware that she has none of the conveniences of the Western World.. I eat over at Koro’s several times a week and am well fed. I even went to the hospital with Koro when she had a bad cut on her foot; she recovered but paid for the visit out of her pocket. Most of the children I know don’t have toys; run around in minimal clothing; and are not getting a very good education. But I ask myself on a daily basis are these people poor.

So far I have not come up with the answer of “What is Poverty.” But where would you draw the poverty line? Would you look at family income, at the nutritional intake, the clothes they’re wearing, what furniture is in the house, do they sleep in beds or on the floor, can they read or write, are they healthy. How would you separate out your western conceptions of the “good life” from what is needed and what is wanted?

The Niger River

Its been a hole year that I have waited to take a boat up the Niger River here. Coming from the Northwest I miss the water, the boats and the reflections the sun rises on the water.

The Niger River brings mythical images of ancient times. Whether things have changed much over the last several centuries. Many of the boats have motors. You can see western dress on some of the people although many are dressed in traditional clothing from their regions.

The connection to Timbuktu just fed the imagination. Many people think Timbuktu is a mythical place that does not exist. When you tell someone you’re going to Mali they get a blank look on their face and ask where is that. I respond by saying it’s the country where Timbuktu is.

The culture and language gets more diverse as you head north. Bambara the dominant language of Mali is hardly spoken up there. In Dogon Country alone there are hundreds of dialects with each village having their own. That's just the gateway to the northern regions of Mali.

The boat we took was a little more upscale then I had envisioned but the landscape and the people were amazing. We left in the dark with a bustle of people, animals and goods being loaded for the voyage. Our accommodations did not include anything but a deck on board the ship. We fortunately took a scenic spot where river life unfolded starting every morning with the first light becoming muffled every night.

Every morning I woke with the first light then witnessed the sun rising over the lush green flood plain of the Niger River. Even thought it hadn’t rained in several weeks the water ways this far north flooded out into seasonal lakes stocked with an abundance of animal and plant life. People took a back stage living with the bare minimum of land.

How the captain navigated through the main channel is beyond me. Most of the water ways are shallow yet we only came grounded once. We were heading to the boundary of the Sahara Desert surrounded by water and green as far as the eye could see. This is not the Mali I live in. How refreshing to see another side of a great country.

Photography Malian Style

Mali has a long history of photography. The pinhole camera is an important part of that history. Lani and I found a man on the street in Mopti that had one. The best we could tell he mostly did passport photos for Malians. He displayed one photo of other tourist posted on his camera.

We sat on the bench poised waiting fascinated by every move he made. First he mixed the developing chemicals in little plastic bottle bottoms and placed them in the camera. The whole process would be done in the camera by feel. The camera took pictures and became a dark room for developing the photos.

He set the lens on the focusing mode looked through the black fabric at the back turning the lens just right. He put the lens cap back on turned the lens setting to the right exposure took the lens cap for just the right amount of time. He got busy with both hands in the camera through the black fabric so we could only conclude that he was developing. What he came out with was a negative print of us. He placed the negative on a holder set the lens to the focus mode followed by setting the lens with an exposure mode and again developed some photos. This time the photo came out a positive.

The pictures here are copies this one of the negative and the other a copy of the copy of the negative. We paid our 1,000 Cfa (about two dollars) for each print. We got two prints one for each one of us and he through in the negative for free. As a photographer that was the real treat.

Another photo phenomena is the photo studio, the portraits at weddings, holidays, and baptisms. Koro took me to met Photo John during our meet the artisans of Koutiala marathon. Photo John has a big studio at a major intersection in town. He has an automated printing machine, a computer that he showed me some incredible touching up jobs on old photos. Photo John invited me and Koro next to his portrait studio. He tried several back drops before settling on the one he thought would be the best. Several days later Koro showed up with some prints for both of us. Months later as we waited for the bus to Ghana a man started talking to us he spoke somewhat good english and said he was from Ghana and going to Ghana. He recognized us from our photos on the wall at Photo Johns where he worked. Again this is a copy of a print didn't turn out too well did it.

As a photographer I did not give the art of photography here in Mali the scholarly attention it deserved. In neither an art history context nor as an anthropology cultural phenomenon. Photography here in Mali has been shaped and reshaped in order to fit into the local fabric of imaging and imagining. People are at the center of Malian life so it makes sense that the art of photography centers around people and major events in their lives. I caught myself between the art form, the technology and the culture. We have a saying in Peace Corp "Cross Cultural." Cross cultural studies is a major part of our training. How to apply that in everything we come across depends on our outlook and understanding. And as my outlook and understanding expands so does my ideas of things I run across in my everyday life here in Mali.