Poverty! I doubt if anyone who is not really poor knows what poverty means. Yes, I really doubt it. How can anyone who can afford three square meals a day understand what poverty means? Indeed, someone who can even boast of two meals a day may not understand what abject penury in real sense of it means. Perhaps, one begins to grasp the real meaning of poverty when one struggles really hard to have one miserable meal in twenty-four hours. Poverty and hunger are relatives in the sense that poverty always drags or gives birth to hunger.
If you have clothes to wear and you look good in your apparel, thank God because there are many people out there who cannot afford one from January to December of every year. You have shoes and other essentials of life then don’t see yourself as poor. Indeed, if you have many dresses to wear, then consider yourself blessed. A kind of poverty I am talking about is when a person lacks basic things of life such as lack of money even to rent a house; having nothing good to wear; inability to afford a little money to cook food and thereby going to bed almost every night with empty stomach.
Let us talk. Many people are really facing harsh conditions and the people who have are behaving as if nothing concerns them. Anyone who can afford to meet his daily needs and responsibilities such as: paying house rent, paying school fees of his children, clothing and other obligations should appreciate his Creator. The really poor man has no roof over his head, and this is why you find him living in squalor, alas at the mercy of mosquitoes, thieves and men of the underworld.
The poor face the world with little or no hope of where the next income or help will come from. To compound the problems of the poor, his opinions do not count in the society. In every facet of life he is looked down upon, notwithstanding that he has sensible views. The poor is not heard because he is not wise, but, because the well-to-do see poverty in him rather than the wisdom God has endowed him with. Oh! What an irony of life!
God has allowed the poor to co-exist with the rich so He will know whether the rich love Him. To love God, you must love the poor. It is the duty of the rich to help the poor.
Aminat Adesope is one of our Staff writers.
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