Poverty is a desease

POVERTY IS A DISEASE

Poverty! Can anyone who has not really been poor, know what poverty is? I really doubt it.

How can anyone who enjoys three square meals a day explain what poverty means? Indeed, can someone who has two full meals a day claim to know poverty? Perhaps, one human being grabs the real meaning of poverty when one struggles really hard to have one miserable meal in a day. Poverty and hunger are cousins, the former always dragging along the latter wherever he chooses to go.

If you are wearing a suit, or complete traditional attire, and you look naturally rotund in your apparel, you cannot understand what poverty entails, nor can you have a true feel of poverty if you have some good shirts and pairs of trousers, never mind that all these are casual wears. Indeed, if you can change from one dress into another and these are all you can boast of, you are not really poor. A person being to have a true feel of what poverty means when, apart from the tattered clothes on his body, he doesn’t have any other, not even a calico sheet to keep away the cold at night.

Weakened by hunger embattled by cold and exposure to the elements, feeding on poor water and poor food, the pauper is an easy target for diseases. This is precisely why the poorest countries have the shortest life expectances while the longest life expectances are recorded among the richest countries poverty is really a disease that shortens life.