For urbanites in First World countries, it is perhaps correct to say that most will find it difficult to empathize with those who experience real poverty. Not that I can empathize any better or had become wiser after my short visit to a rural community in Laguna, Philippines, I think poverty is not just simply earning less than US$ 1 a day, or not having enough to eat as conventional wisdom would have us to believe. To me, poverty entraps families and the future generations of those who were caught by it.
This is a snapshot of a family caught in poverty. Typically, the parents have never been schooled. I was told that it is common for poor couples to have about 5 children (and I heard there was even a couple who had 16 children!). For the children who come from poor households, life can be tough. Because their parents do not have the means, they do not attend school. For them, living from hand-to-mouth becomes real day-to-day. Daily choices in life are dictated by survivability. By the age of seven, most children would have to work to contribute to their household. And for them, work could mean that they would have to go into the forest to look for fruits such as coconuts and bananas, which would be collected as food, or sold to a middleman. Remember, these children do not have the chance to find gainful employment in the city because they are uneducated and unskilled. Most of them will marry as early as fourteen years old, possibly to ease the pressure on their parents to provide for their needs. For these newly-weds, they would have to live from hand-to-mouth and here, the cycle starts again when they have children – that is 5 children on average.
So, this is how poverty looks like from a cyclical perspective. When it afflicts a community, it does look like a vicious cycle with no end in sight.