In 2007, 20,650 dollars was the federal poverty level for a family of 4 in the United States. 17,170 dollars was the poverty level for a family of 3. 13,690 dollars was the poverty level for a family of two. "Research suggests that, on average, families need an income equal to about two times the federal poverty level to meet their most basic needs." There are over 73 million children in the United States, 12.7 million of which live in poverty. An additional 28.6 million children live in low- income families. That's 39% of children living in situations in which their most basic needs aren't met. 52% of low-income children live in single parent homes. 43% of low-income children are younger than six years old. 63 % of American Indian children, 61% of Latino children, 60% of African-American children, and 27% of Asian children live in low income families. That's more than 6 out of 10 American Indians, more than 6 out of 10 Latinos, exactly 6 out of 10 African Americans, more than 1 out of 4 Asians, and more than 1 out of 4 whites not having their basic needs met.

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Danny is not a number. I met Danny at the Downtown Learning Center run by the Brooklyn Tabernacle Church. Our group arrived at the Center at about 9:00 or so on a Wednesday morning, many of us still struggling to wake up from the previous long night. After a quick guided tour of the building, we were led into a back room where Joanie Schwartz, the Director of the Center on a pseudo-sabbatical, told us that our session would be interactive. "We know you might be a little uncomfortable, and we want to make everyone as comfortable as possible. So we're going to bring in some of our students to talk with you guys, to answer your questions." I'm not entirely sure this is her exact quote verbatim, but it was something of this sort. As we sat down in a row of chairs, sitting nervously next to each other unsure of what exactly was going to transpire, 20-something Danny ambled into them room and sat down. He looked a bit disinterested in this whole affair, with his slim white I-Pod headphones still affixed to his ear. Great, I thought. We're tired, it looks like the only person actually here to talk with us doesn't care. What a great way to spend a Wednesday morning. Then, a couple of minutes later, more and more people walked into the room, and sat down in the chairs across from us. We were then prompted to ask these people questions, as if this were a legitimate attempt to do some kind of research for our paper. There's no way this will work, I thought. So after a few attempts at repeating the same question (I don't even remember what it was) to about 6 different people, and have them talk at me for a minute or so before they rotated to the next interrogator, I decided to just strike up non-related conversation. Forget about research. We're here to talk.

I'm guessing Danny was expecting a question of legitimate, methodological proportions, but I asked him how he liked it at the Center, and why it seemed to be the case that so many children didn't value education enough. Truthfully, I wasn't expecting an in-depth response, but he gave me some truth. He went from someone who seemingly didn't care (I've come to realize that this perception was a construction of my own cultural biases, that poor, urban people didn't care--- this despite the fact that we might have grown up in similar situations, so I feel as if I should have known better), to a teacher. Kids see all of these rappers and basketball players, he tells me, and think that the only way you can make big money is by entertaining. They don't realize, he continues, that only very few ever make a decent living this way. The attitude in poor communities is that these expectations are unrealistically high, and when these expectations aren't met, kids give up. I conclude, in my head, that we must change the attitude in poor neighborhoods if we don't want these kids to quit. We need role models that make a good living for themselves not by exploiting their physical talents and selling them to the largest bidder, but by valuing education. It's not that children necessarily devalue education in and of itself--- merely, they seriously doubt the premise that a solid education can give you a solid foundation for life. But the attitude in poor America seems to be quite the opposite. Though I talked to Danny more throughout our visit at the Center, I never bothered to ask him much about what his childhood was like. Ostensibly, he was in this educational program because he dropped out of high school. I don't know whether this was due to socioeconomic issues or otherwise. Nevertheless, Danny taught me more about the essence of poverty in snippets of conversation than I learned in hours browsing the National Center for Children and Poverty website. He taught me that poverty, in some sense, has become a mindset. It is more than statistics. As the venerable Notorious BIG said, either you're slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump-shot. We need to change that. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Each day in America, 1,154 babies are born to teen mothers. Each day in America, 2,145 children are born without health insurance. That's one every 41 seconds. Each day in America, 2,483 children are born into poverty. That's one every 35 seconds. In New York alone, it's one every 10 minutes, 14th worst in the nation. Each day in America, 2,467 students drop out of high school. That's one every ten seconds. Barely 1/3 of public school students performed at grade level o on the New York state-wide Language Arts Exam in 2005.

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Roberto is not a number. I'll never forget Roberto, ironically, precisely for the fact that he quickly forgot me. I introduced myself to him at an after-school program at St. Pious X in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx. I was supposed to be helping him out with his vocabulary homework, but I had enough difficulty getting he and his friend to stop running around the cramped cafeteria/gym/basement space in the school. After I finally got him to sit down and open up his vocabulary book, I gave him my name, he gave me his, and it is likely the case that what I told him went in one ear and out another. I'm guessing I was one of the long assembly line of volunteers; there were many before me, and there will be many after me trying to create some kind of connection with him, even if it was only for one day, even less, for 2 hours. I know the feeling. As I reflect on the time I spent at the Boys and Girls Club during my youth, I came into contact with hundreds upon hundreds of volunteers. I can hardly remember any of them. It's not that I didn't care, but somehow I knew that they weren't the first nor the last people I would encounter. So why attempt to bond?

Roberto was a Dominican kid, perhaps fourth grade or so. For 20 minutes, he blatantly refused to even focus on his homework. He was more focused on chatting with his friend across the table, as they were leafing through a WWE video game booklet. He wanted to finish it quickly, as most other children are wont to do, so he was guessing. As I watched him "randomly" circle answers, I realized that most of them were in fact correct. Which struck me for two possible reasons: 1.) He was an absolute prodigy when it came to random guessing, or 2.) He somehow knew the answers and didn't want to admit it. I noticed that a couple answers were incorrect, however, and I asked him what he was doing. I asked him why he wasn't reading the questions. " I don't know how to read. I'm only guessing." This statement struck me. I knew that he knew how to read. I've worked with many children, and I can fairly accurately determine if one is struggling to read the material. The statement struck me not because he was lying about not knowing how to read; but rather, that he expected me to believe him!

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Sociologist Claude Steele once postulated a theory known as stereotype threat. Stereotype threat occurs when one fears that his behavior will confirm an existing stereotype with which his group identifies. As such, one's performance may be greatly hindered by this psychological fear. Roberto is a Dominican fourth-grader, living in the poorest congressional district in the United States. Dominican+poor community=can''t read at grade level, or so the stereotype goes. Perhaps Roberto has an innate psychological fear that no matter what his particular abilities are, he will never be anything more than a poor Latino kid living in the South Bronx. I, at least, could tell that Roberto could read, and read on par with any other fourth-grader across America. Perhaps, because of stereotype threat, he didn't believe that he was intelligent, or perhaps, he felt that despite his intelligence he would never fare as well as a white peer. I am not sure what the case was, but in any case, it seems to me a striking indictment of the relationship between minorities, poverty, and education. Nevertheless, Roberto taught me more about the essence of poverty in snippets of conversation than I learned in an hour listening to the pretty Indian woman recite from data sheets and powerpoint slides at the Children's Defense Fund in Harlem. He taught me that poverty, in some sense, has become a mindset. It is more than statistics.

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Three billion people--- approximately half of the world's population--- live on less than two dollars per day. The poorest 40% of the world's population owns 5% of the world's wealth. The richest 20% own 75% of the world's wealth. Nearly 30,000 children, across the globe die from poverty-related causes every day. The United States has the world's largest Gross Domestic Product, with a total of 13, 794 ,000, 000, 000 dollars as of 2007. 20% of Americans lack functional literacy skills. 61% of New York City Public School students either drop out or do not graduate on time.

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The name of our tour guide was Aaron Moses, who, quite serendipitously, desires to become a pastor. He is definitely not a number. He looked and talked a bit like he was erratically nervous, as if it were strange that 14 college students from one of the country's most prestigious universities were there observing what it was like to be a participate in the Downtown Learning Center. He was quite inquisitive as to how our college experience was like, as he told us was headed off to college soon. Yet I couldn't shake the feeling that there was a metaphorical glass wall between "us" and "him", as if we were the scientists, and he was a guinea pig, or as if we were grade-school students on a field trip to the museum, and he was the exhibit, as if to say "Don't Touch". When it came time for us to branch up from our individual conversations and into small groups, his was the fourth group I talked to. As I remember, the conversation didn't seem to resemble anything like a conversation about children and poverty, but it struck me for two reasons: 1.) Aaron seemed to have experienced some psychological trauma during his childhood (bullies often taunted him as too small, questioned his sexuality, and questioned his church-going ways) and 2.) His optimism and hopefulness were legitimately inspiring. Here was an 18 year-old kid, who was essentially bullied into dropping out of high school, and he was now back at the Learning Center struggling to obtain his GED, so he could graduate from college, enter the seminary, and become a clergyman. For somebody like me, or for any of my peers on the trip, Aaron would seem to be in an unfortunate situation. But I didn't hear any negative comments or resigned sighs from Aaron. All he could talk about was how he just had to put his faith in God, and rely on his family, and he was going to be alright. The smile never wavered from his face, except at a few points when he obviously felt the pain of his past. I don't know how often he has talked about his past, or who with, but I felt the sense that this was an opportunity to speak. And be heard. And feel like someone was taking his experience to heart, locking it up inside, and saving it until they could sew together his personal experience into the quilt of narratives that came from the scrap-bin of the Learning Center. This is my attempt, at least, a preliminary attempt, to take out his experience and start sewing. Nevertheless, Aaron Moses taught me more about the essence of poverty in snippets of conversation than I learned in the 6 articles I read for our preliminary classes. He taught me that poverty, in some sense, has become a mindset. It is more than statistics.

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The basic needs for a family of four in New York City, including rent, utilities, child care, health insurance, transportation, taxes, and other necessities, are 55,140 dollars. Each person, according to federal poverty guidelines, is worth 3,480 dollars. The lowest child poverty rate in the United States is in New Hampshire, where 6% of children live in poverty. Mississippi has the highest rate, with 29% of children living in poverty. Approximately 20% of former welfare recipients are "disconnected", meaning they leave the welfare program but do not find work. 12% of families who have never received welfare are "disconnected", meaning they have no discernible source of income.

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Aaron Quarles and Mary Clare Rodriguez, two of my peers on the trip, are polar opposites in the political scale. He, an extremely liberal Barack Obama groupie on the one hand, and she, an extremely conservative Republican from Texas on the other. One of their arguments particularly struck me: Should the government be the institution giving impoverished people a safety net, or is the best solution letting wealthy people be the charitable ones? That raised an even more interesting question: Do wealthy people even want to give? Do they have an obligation? That is the essence of the poverty debate. It can reasonably be argued that impoverished classes (thereafter to be known as "the other") will always exist in a market-driven capitalist society. As classes struggle to wealth and power, and even worse, zealously struggle for wealth and power, there will always be a class that comes out at the bottom of the scrum. The dominant classes cannot define themselves as an essential category without the other. What does it mean to be wealthy? Is that an essential predication, or merely a derivative one? What can "rich" mean without "poor"?

These are questions which have no "right" answer. But there is one answer we all agree on: We have an unquestionable obligation to our less fortunate human brethren to provide them with the inalienable dignity that comes with life. Perhaps it is debatable as to who should bear the responsibility of this obligation. But one thing we do know is that there are people. And there is a struggle. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So is poverty inevitable? I do not have enough economic intelligence nor training to be able to make a claim either way. Will there always be a certain percentage of people living below an methodologically weak and arbitrary dollar figure known as the poverty line? What is our goal here? Is it to eradicate poverty, or merely make it less pervasive? The "War on Poverty" declared in President Lyndon Johnson's State of the Union Address on January 8, 1964, though widely criticized for its interventionism, in some sense alleviated the poverty level from 19% when his address was given to 12.3% as recently as 2006. Does that mean we have, at least in some sense, erased more than one-third of the previously impoverished populations?

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The numbers say yes; my experience says no. My experience still tells me that Danny still laments poor children looking up to star athletes and musicians rather than doctors, lawyers, or businessmen. My experience still tells me that Roberto likely thinks less of himself and his abilities because he is a poor Dominican kid from the South Bronx. My experience still tells me that Aaron Moses still hides his pain and his fears behind his child-like grin and his infinite optimism. My experience still tells me that there are school kids in the South Bronx running around, chasing each other, and playing dodge-ball in the basement of a school because their neighborhood is the epitome of inner-city poverty--- concrete instead of grass; masses of people and shops instead of fresh air; dilapidated buildings instead of trees; pessimism instead of hope; struggle instead of childhood.

My experience tells me all of these things. The numbers are important, but they don't tell the whole story. The difficulty with studying poverty from a theoretical perspective is that it's difficult to get people to know poverty. It isn't enough merely to get people to care. Almost everybody cares that there are 8.7 million children without health insurance, or 18% living in families with an annual income under the federal poverty line. But how many people know this experience enough to feel it in their heart? Poverty, per se, can't be studied; it can only be experienced. You can't come to know poverty through numbers. You have to experience it. You have to feel it.

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Due to unfortunate health circumstances regarding my parents when I was about five years old, I had to live virtually my entire childhood under the "poverty line". I have felt poverty. My friend and fellow seminar mate, Aaron Quarles, lived in a single-parent home, in a poor neighborhood in Cleveland, also under the poverty line. We shared a similar childhood experiences, and thus in a way we were able to learn from each other. At times throughout our experience in New York and in our interactions with our fellow seminar mates, we discussed with each other the possibility that something was missing. We were all hearing the numbers; but we, as a group, weren't listening to the problem. As stated in our course syllabus, this seminar wasn't going to be an opportunity to engage in first-hand field experience. But the couple of field experiences we did participate in, I think, resonated with Aaron and I in a way that theoretical, abstract study couldn't. Frustratingly, we felt, these experiences didn't seem to resonate with everybody else as we felt they should have. One of the conversations I will always remember most is the one Aaron and I had after our experience at St. Pious X school in the South Bronx. We were sitting at a long brown cafeteria table, in waiting for Roberto and his friend to stop chasing each other around at full speed; but it made no use to try and catch and stop them, because pretty much everyone else was chasing each other around as well. I made the observation that these kids looked like caged animals who haven't been set free. He said to me, "These kids just need some place to run around. But there's no place for them to run here." Aaron Quarles taught me more about the essence of poverty in two sentences than I learned in the hours upon hours I learned researching facts and figures for the research paper that I am supposed to be writing now and instead discarded to write this reflection.

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You have to engage in conversation with Danny or Aaron Moses, talk with somebody like Aaron Quarles, or tutor somebody like Roberto to even get a sense of what poverty even could be like. Of course, one can never fully know the problem of poverty unless they have considerable experience living it, and living it for real (as opposed to a simulation). But getting a sense, I think, is enough to get on the right track.

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Poverty is not only about what we (as relatively privileged citizens) can do for the poor. It is also about what we (as relatively privileged citizens) can help the poor do for themselves. The old Chinese proverb says if give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, and if you teach a man how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. As the venerable German economist E.F. Schumacher once extended the proverb to say: Teach a man how to build a fishing rod, and he is self-sufficient. Alleviating the American poverty problem is more than transfer of knowledge; it is about providing the tools for poor children and poor families and poor adults, for that matter, to allow them to succeed. It is to allow them to overcome the mindset of poverty, and into a mindset of self-sufficiency. It is to remind them that they are not a statistic; but rather, a human life with human inalienable dignity who is capable of success.

We won't ever fully eradicate impoverished classes in a market-driven capitalist system. And it doesn't necessarily make me feel better that the national poverty rate has declined 7% in the last 44 years, because we can all still see it, and we can all still sense it. Part of the problem, perhaps, is our macro-strategical, theoretical approach to combating poverty. We certainly need that kind of approach on some level. But one set of question s I must leave is this: Is it enough to solve a problem and strut away knowing you've done an admirable job? Or do we have an obligation to live in real communion with the human brethren we have shared our help with? Is it enough that I have taught the poor man how to fish and now am finished, or should I stay there, sit alongside him long into the sunset,, and cast my own rod into the water?