Sure, it's self-indulgent and reflective...but it's my blog

Actually, I think being an adult is learning not to be
ashamed of what you want. And I think for a lot of us, it's hard to
admit even to ourselves what it is that we want.
Much less to have other people see it.
– Ira Glass

Amen.

I’ve often heard people say about law school or any other defining experience in your life…that you should write a letter to yourself before you begin the experience and keep it so that you can read it when you get out and remember or rediscover the dreams you had.

Well today I was in my gmail account and I saw this label that I didn’t recognize called “Emails to Remember,” so I decided to click on it and see wtf it was, and I found this email exchange I had with one of my development professors at Duke that I had written from India in February of 2005.

Reading it over again, I realize that I was still very young and that I was just treading on the surface of deeper pool of understanding (as I still am)…but I was just so engaged. I was pushing so hard for understanding that really meant something to me. This is all I thought about all the time. I was passionate and so invested about what I was passionate about.

Isn’t that what anyone wants? Is it youth? Or is it just not admitting to myself what it is I want, and that desire no longer being poverty developmental policy? And if so, then what is it that I want? (besides another round of mama wrasslin with…you guessed it.)

Anyhow, me…circa 2005. It's just amazing how far I've drifted in some ways, and coming to a realization about whether or not being back in that space is a dream of mine anymore....I think it is...


Anirudh,

After thinking about it…I'm not entirely clear on what you mean by
"Poverty as an absolute state." I've been thinking about what that
means…but I wonder if that's how I see it…If you could clear that up a
little I might be able to respond better. I'll try as best I can
below, but I might be off the mark.

As for the causal arrows on illness and poverty…I do agree with you
that it goes both ways. The main distinction I was trying to make I
think, was that HIV/AIDS may not be independent as an issue of health
and poverty. Maybe it's just the way we frame the issue as the Battle
against HIV/AIDS, and the War on Poverty and such… One of the papers
that I remembered most clearly from your class…(well not the paper
itself, but the general idea) is the study you did about WHY many
people in India were in "poverty." And an overwhelming reason was
because a single illness would create problems that often drove people
into debt and difficulty. So definitely recognize that factor, but it
still doesn't answer the question of who gets sick…it tends more to
answer the question of "what happens to people when they get sick."

But I think it might also take some defining on what poverty means.
The more I think about it…Poverty to me doesn't seem like a status of
any sort, but the convergence of many factors on a person's life…from
education, to opportunity, to environment, to illness. In that way,
susceptibility to disease and the repercussions of disease are a part
and parcel of "Poverty." In my head, poverty seems to be
like…Murphy's law applied to life. One problem exists, but it
connects to another problem, which connects to another problem…so that
from a single issue like lack of education, an entire web of
compounding problems like debt, malnutrition, disease susceptibility,
lack of birth control, and on and on spread out from there. I think
when I wrote before I referred to poverty in a common understanding
way…of socioeconomic difficulty, of financial instability, and of
living on a razor's edge in terms of basic sustenance…but
realistically I think I tend to have a holistic perspective on it so
that poverty very much includes disease as a major factor. As for
"is everyone who is poor born into poverty and remain poor" I don't
think a statement like that is true…but I do tend to think that the
people who are born into disadvantage (whether it be social, economic,
or opportunity related) have a much higher chance of struggling with
poverty in the future. Am I misunderstanding where you're getting at?

As for my research…I think it's going very well in terms of my
awareness of the limitations of "research" and in putting me in
situations where I can more clearly see issues like health care, child
care, and poverty more clearly. In many ways I'm falling into the
general cliché of "The more you learn, the less you know." I learn a
lot from interviewing people, but I also learn that you can't simply
trust what people are telling you. I'm also seeing a lot more of the
problems like health care costs, nutrition, and lack of education
causing serious problems for families, and learning a lot about what
is causing so much difficulty for so many people…but I'm increasingly
I find that the more people you try to include in any given solution,
the more difficult it is to pull off. Basically, I'm shying more and
more away from macro-level policy and just trying to figure out what
it would take to get one family on its feet. I do now believe that
most change in people's lives has to start in themselves…and that the
most we can do is remove barriers. To give people a shove in a random
direction that we find appealing doesn't make sense unless we really
know what's going on. I also don't think removing barriers is the
hard part, I think the hard part is removing barriers without throwing
in 100 new barriers to someone else, or even to the people we're
trying to help.

With all the work I'm doing with children in these orphanages, I'm
getting a little anxious about what I'm really going to find out at
the end of it all. I guess I always kinda assumed that a solution
would be there SOMEWHERE. That there WOULD be a model, or there
WOULD be some sort of revelation that could make things the way they
should be. Not necessarily that I would be the one to figure it out, but
that it existed somewhere. But the more I study children, it doesn't
seem to be an issue of ideas, or of models, or of institutions…it
comes down to nurturing the child, caring for them, loving them, and
providing them with security and stability. If that's actually true,
all you can do is hope that there are people out there willing to
devote their love to someone else's child. And if children need
individualized, human solutions to their problems…wouldn't that mean
that all people need individualized, human solutions as well?

I may have completely missed the boat on the questions you asked.
I've just been thinking about some of these issues and I think I just
rambled through them for a few paragraphs. I hope it makes some sense
and it gets at some of what you were asking for. Feel free to swipe
at and knock down anything I said…sometimes flowers spring up from the
rubble.