Poverty on Poverty

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak at my friend Amanda's school. She teaches high school Spanish at Julian HS on the south side of Chicago. As you may guess from the fact that this is a Chicago Public School and it's on the south side, it is a struggling school. Most of her kids are what we would consider poor, many of them are in gangs, and even the advanced students are far behind average students in other school districts.

The purpose of my visit was to speak about the culture of Guatemala, where I visited in 2008. It was fun to share the similarities and differences of the Guatemalan culture and these student's culture. Overall, the students were engaged, respectful, and a lot of fun to spend my day with. What really stood out to me was our discussion on the poverty in Guatemala. I shared about the problems with air pollution, lack of drinkable water, and high crime. I'm not sure what I expected the students' reactions to be, but I was surprised that so many of them said, "If it's so bad there, why don't people just move?"

I think this is an easy question to ask about people living in poverty. I guess the reason I was surprised to hear it from these students is because when I host groups, we work in neighborhoods just like the one that all these kids live in. When we tell groups about the issues facing these neighborhoods, so many of them ask the same question- "If it's so bad, why don't they just move?"

Maybe poverty is more relative than we think. Maybe poverty needs to be measured by more than tax brackets and one's zip code. Maybe it goes beyond the obvious things that we see and has more to do with attitudes and perspective of ones' individual experience. I'm not trying to say that poverty is not a real and destructive thing, but I'm curious as to what this world would look like if those in power looked beyond the obvious conditions of poverty and more into the perspectives of those living in the situations that we only read about.

Is this where incarnational ministry begins?