POVERTY, CYCLE OF

John Perkins, black evangelist and social worker in Jackson, Mississippi, related a story concerning a black woman who was trapped in poverty. She had ten or twelve kids packed into a four-room house.

All her cupboard held was cornbread. When Perkins encouraged the small Oak Ridge Church outside of Mendenhall, Mississippi, to help this neighbor out, they began to send food. But it didn’t produce much change. The church asked itself, “How could Christ’s love deal with these needs?”

The answer began to surface when Perkins observed that in the summer, while it was hot and humid, the woman and her children tore wood off the outside of the house to use in their cooking fire. You could look right through the whole house. It seemed stupid to tear up the house when winter was just a few months away, so many of the people in the community quit trying to be charitable. They began to blame the woman for her own problems. To a certain extent, she was to blame, but Perkins recognized that she was trapped in the cycle of poverty.

The root problem was that for this woman and many folks like her, poverty had moved beyond her physical condition to claim her whole mind. To the poor, poverty leads to thinking just for the moment. It leads to an inability to think about the future because of the total demand to think about survival in the present. It is a culture, a whole way of life. Money can’t help until there is reason to have hope for the future.995