The most commonly used threshold of low income is a household income that is 60% or less of the average (median) household income in that year.
I have to admit, I had a rough idea what I was going to discuss on here, did some research and came across this quote from The Poverty site which made me rethink what I was going to write about.
Why?
Well at some point in our lives, the majority of us have been hit by poverty.
As a child there was not a lot of money coming into our house. Add to this fact that it was the 70’s and strikes were a common theme, so dad seemed to always be on strike for something or other. As a postman when he was working, money was tight. Mum stayed at home, believing that this was her place in life and struggled to pay the bills and feed my sister and I. We weren’t unhappy, if anything my childhood was happy. We made do with what we had - we amused ourselves. We didn’t have central heating. In our house there was only one coal fire in the living room, the rest of the house you froze in. As I say to my children you are not cold - you are cold when you have to scrape ice of the windows and you get into bed, amongst crisp cotton sheets and hope the dog will want to join you to keep you warm!
Mum and Dad tried their hardest to make sure we didn’t go without. We didn’t have waste. You ate the very last morsel of food on your plate; to throw food away was a waste – if you didn’t eat it then you certainly didn’t get anything else to eat. To feed my sister and I was something that made my mother creative – many a time my sister and I would sit down to food and mum and dad would eat cheese sandwiches, believing we should get what was good and wholesome and nutritious if there wasn’t enough to feed all four of us.
The 80s came and I experienced my first recession as an adult. We purchased our first house and like so many, we ended up with a huge negative equity. Nigel was self-employed, I had our first child and couldn’t work as I was working in London and to get there and pay childcare costs would have taken up all of my wages and some of Nigel’s as well. Our worst experience was Nigel having to sign on after being laid off and being given milk tokens, no money, just tokens for milk. It wasn’t long before he found work again! he was totally humiliated!
Money was scarce again and I certainly appreciated everything my parents had done to keep a roof over our heads when we were little. I experienced some of the trials and tribulations of having very little money coming in and having to make good wholesome food go a lot further. Scrimping and scraping became part of our life. Though we didn’t have to hide from the milkman or the rent man like my mother had to, there were times when I felt overwhelmed at how little we did have yet the bills didn’t stop arriving. Spiralling into depression, wondering how I would ever cope, I eventually took things into my own hands, taking over the finances and gradually being able to see a light at the end of the tunnel again. It was to take many years to pay of those creditors who kept writing to us demanding that we pay them or they would take us to court, the endless hours on the phone talking and arranging payments, the constant feeling that you were never going to be left alone, but in the end we did it. We caught up, paid up and deflected the endless threats of repossession, bailiffs; court orders that threatened to overwhelm us.
It wasn’t easy, it still isn’t. One thing it taught me though was to not take money for granted. We no longer have to ‘rob Peter to pay Paul’; we are financially sound – for now but to get there means that both of us have to work, like so many families we cannot get by on one wage. We work hard and have a budget which we stick to, which is getting smaller each month as prices rocket seemingly out of control.
As we head into another recession, a global one, I want to refer you back to the quote at the beginning of this tale. How many of us can say our purses are getting lighter? How many of us are coping with the spiralling costs of fuel, food, interest rates etc? Today it was announced that 1.79million people are unemployed, the highest unemployment this country has seen for 17 years. In an age where we are considered an 'affluent society', how many people will be classed as ‘in poverty’? How many children will suffer because they live in poverty? What is poverty and what does it mean to you? are children in poverty because their parents can't afford to buy a home computer? Of course not. Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor. Poverty is not having access to school and not knowing how to read. Poverty is not having a job, is fear for the future, living one day at a time. Poverty is losing a child to illness brought about by unclean water. Poverty is powerlessness, lack of representation and freedom. Of course it doesn’t just affect us here, neither is it a new phenomenon. It has always been with us, all over the world. We have all grown up with it. We all suffer from it. Unfortunately in some parts of the world, men, women and children face poverty every single day of their lives.
We are lucky because no matter what happens to us here, we can get help. We don’t go without food. We don’t have to traipse miles each and every day to get some water. We don’t go without heat or light. We are educated. We have access to the doctor, hospital, medical services. We have clean water, heat and electricity. We are not deprived. Yes we may struggle with rising prices. Yes we may lose our jobs and worry about if we will ever get another one. We may worry about how we will pay our bills. We may worry about if our bank will go under or not. We are lucky as help is there for us. We can claim benefits, not a lot admittedly, but we get some. It may not be enough to pay our bills but there are advice centres we can go to to get help and advice to keep a roof over our heads, to help us to budget, to help us to get by. Even with repossessions on the increase we are still fortunate to be able to get help. It isn't easy, it never is, never will be, because even in this country where we are fortunate enough to get more than others in the world, people die, people go cold, people lose everything they have because they get very little help.
Millions of people and children in the world die from the effects of poverty every day. The true horrors of poverty is death, disease, hunger, and cold. Let us hope that we do not become another statistic, that we never have to experience what others in the world suffer everyday of their lives.
