You Are Not Allowed to Think We Are Poor

I can hear that edge in your voices, my children. What is it? Self-pity? Envy? You mention the kid at school who gets picked up in a Lamborghini. Or the friend who has a vacation house in Mexico. 

You spend the night at a friend’s beautiful, large house and tell me in shocked amazement how decorations are changed for every season. “Even the soaps in the bathroom!” you exclaim. Your camera roll syncs with mine, so I see how you took pictures of your friend’s walk-in closet, rows of shoes and clothes. 

I overhear another one of you talking to your friend in the backseat about the cars passing by. You like cool cars. Fancy cars. You know they are expensive, so you tell your friend that we can’t buy one. 

“We’re kinda poor, aren’t we, Mom?” you ask.

This did not happen in Tanzania. 

In Dar es Salaam, the shopping mall had only one small store that sold art supplies and stuffed animals–the kinds of things young girls love to buy. The rest of the mall was filled with a grocery store, several banks, and a few clothing stores. But you wore uniforms to school, so there wasn’t much there to tempt you. Now, for the first time in your lives, you are confronted with hundreds of beautiful, glittering stores, with aisle upon aisle of every sweater, shoe, necklace and tube of lip gloss that could ever delight a girl’s heart. 

You boys have always been entranced with electronics, but now, instead of being something you have to order and wait to receive for months, all sorts of electronic goodies are dangled in front of your noses wherever you turn.

The American Consumer Machine is sucking you in. I am fighting back.

You are not allowed to think we are poor. I look you right in the eye and tell you this sternly. Never think that.

In Tanzania, you were privileged, and you knew it. You played soccer games on a beautiful field, and right on the other side of the fence you could see small children with no shoes peeking through the chain links. If you listened carefully enough beyond the roar of the spectators, you could hear the rhythmic sound of pounding rocks, dozens of those children’s parents spending their day turning boulders into gravel, trying to eke out a living. 

No. We are not poor.

I remind you of names and faces you know personally. The child you played with who went to school with 150 other students in one classroom. The home we visited where the mother had to haul water and wash clothes in buckets. The villages we would pass on the way to a vacation, with hundreds of homes made of mud and sticks.

No. We are not poor. 

I remind you that as long as you have a place to live and enough food to eat and a good school to go to, you will never be poor. I remind you that actually we have much more than that–a house with hot water and electricity that never goes off, heating and air conditioning. We have several computers, two cars, toys, games and books. You can see a good doctor whenever you want, and three of you got braces. We have everything we could possibly need. 

No. We are not poor. We are some of the wealthy ones. In fact, we are some of the richest people in the entire world. So don’t you ever feel sorry for yourself because you don’t have as many shoes as your friend or because you don’t go to school in a Lamborghini. Do not compare your wealth to theirs. Compare your wealth to the child who sits beside his mother in the market every day, selling tomatoes instead of going to school. Compare your life to the child who dies of malaria because her family can’t afford the five dollar medication.

Wealth is always a matter of perspective, my children. Lord knows I am going to fight to make sure you remember that.