What the Poor Say

The Good Life and the Bad Life

Being well means not to worry about your children, to know that they have settled down; to have a house and livestock and not to wake up at night when the dog starts barking; to know that you can sell your output; to sit and chat with friends and neighbors. A middle aged man in Bulgaria.

A better life for me is to be healthy, peaceful and to live in love without hunger. Love is more than anything. Money has no value in the absence of love. A poor older woman in Ethiopia.

 

Poor people were asked to share their ideas of good and bad experiences of life, "wellbeing" and "illbeing". To be poor was to experience illbeing in many ways, and to suffer multiple disadvantages that reinforce each other and interlock to trap them. Again and again, the psychological dimensions of wellbeing and illbeing were of paramount importance. 

Wellbeing was variously expressed as happiness, harmony, peace, freedom from anxiety, and peace of mind. In Russia, people said, "Wellbeing is a life free from daily worries about lack of money"; in Bangladesh, "to have a life free from anxiety"; in Brazil, quality of life is "not having to go through so many rough spots" and "when there is cohesion, no quarrels, no hard feelings, happiness, in peace with life." In Nigeria, "wellbeing is found in those that have peace of mind, living peacefully"; in Bolivia, "quality of life is high when you have a family, to feel supported and understood. You can have money but without a family it’s worth nothing"; in Thailand, livelihood was simply defined as "happiness"; "It is to be filled with joy and happy. It is found in peace and harmony in the mind and in the community." For many, too, spiritual life and religious observance were woven in with other aspects of wellbeing. The importance to poor people of the church, mosque, temple and sacred place was repeatedly evident from their comparisons of institutions, in which these frequently ranked high, if not highest, as key supports in their lives.

Illbeing was described in terms of lack of material things, as bad experiences, and bad feelings about the self. In Bosnia, the poor described illbeing as follows: "Children are hungry, so they start to cry. They ask for food from their mother and their mother doesn’t have it. Then the father is irritated, because the children are crying, and he takes it out on his wife. So hitting and disagreement break up the marriage." A group of young men in Jamaica ranked lack of self-confidence as the second biggest impact of poverty: "Poverty means we don’t believe in self, we hardly travel out of the community…so frustrated, just locked up in the house all day." Poor people spoke about loss, grief, anguish, worry, over-thinking, madness, frustration, anger, alienation, humiliation, shame, loneliness, depression, anxiety and fear.

Next: What Makes the Good Life