Blog Post 3, Group B: Progress Through Perspective by Kathleen Paxtor

Living in poverty with intensely devastating situations it a huge social and political subject that most of us are aware of. This happens nationally and globally yet the lives of many people in third world countries are never really understood. While discussing The Bronx Slave Market I got to thinking about a documentary I had recently watched, it was called Living On One Dollar. Cooke went undercover as a worker and told her first hand experience, which resonated so much with the audience. Being a middle-class, working woman people were able to imagine themselves in her position—being degraded and overworked. Much like Cooke’s story, this documentary shows that to truly understand the lives of others one must submerge themselves in their life and culture to get a better understanding-a different perspective.

Living On One Dollar is about four college students that decided to film what life would be like living in extreme poverty. They had heard, seen statistics, pictures, and data but had never experienced poverty. They decided to embark on a two-month journey of living in rural Guatemala and living their lives like locals. They lived in a small house in an even smaller neighborhood. Their income was varied (much like the locals and under the equivalent of one US dollar), and they had to sustain themselves as they could. As the two months go by you can see the physical appearance of all of the men deteriorate quickly. They had to undergo starvation, sicknesses, restlessness, and hazardous situations. At the end the students were relieved that they could go back home and leave yet acknowledged that for the locals this was their everyday life—a life they could not leave after a couple of months.

The motive behind this film was more than just showing poverty, it allowed the audience to submerge themselves in it. It was easier for the audience to relate to 4 white, middle class men than 4 native, poor Guatemalans. Because these men are something that America knows; it was easier and quicker to relate to what poverty could be like. The idea of “they look like me-that could be me” was really important to get the high impact of what it is to truly live in poverty. There are billions of statistics out there that will tell you what is going on in the world but why won’t just reading/learning the data help?

Poverty as a whole has been “widespread, persistent, and deeply rooted social and historical problem, poverty has been addressed, defined, and debated for centuries (Ravallion, 2011) (Jerneck)”.But because poverty is currently, and generally understood in terms of multicausal origins, multidimensional features, and multiscalar effects the subject of poverty goes beyond statistics (Jerneck).“Poverty is not only about destitution or maldistribution of material and immaterial assets and resources but also about social exclusion, cultural marginalization, and the process of being deprived of prospects and opportunities” (Jerneck). Poverty goes beyond economy and environment it also has to do with how people are able to socially, physically, mentally, behaviorally (etc) connect materialistically and inmaterialestically within their community. When the four students became a part of Guatemalan society they left behind anything that would reel them back into their “real world”. They received the full experience—by the end they were emotionally, mentally, and physically distraught and for us as the audience we felt like we had lived everything they had as well--progress through a different perspective. 

References:

Jerneck, Anne, et al. "Understanding Poverty: Seeking Synergies between the Three

 Discourses of Development, Gender, and Environment." SAGE Open, vol. 5, no.

 4, 2015, pp. 215824401561487