Notes on Poverty

We chatted with Josefina during lunch and learned a lot. What it boils down to is poverty is poverty regardless of your skin, nationality or culture. Poverty holds people down.

Josefina told us that many women in the community don´t finish high school and even fewer go on to a college or university. The woman´s role is still seen as solely to have children. Many uneducated women work for the flower companies, but because they are unable to write their own names or the date, they are unable to cash their own checks, their own money, at the banks. So, their husbands or other family members must do it for them, so their own money isn´t ever really in their own hands. Josefina saw this and organized a literacy class for the women to at least learn to write their own names and the date so they could cash their own checks. However, when Josefina started the classes, she also knew that a lot of the same women were beaten by abusive husbands. So, Josefina used this time to also educate the women about their rights.

"You are human beings, no one has the right to hit you or make you feel pain." For many of these women, this basic human right had never been expressed to them. Josefina said she has seen a difference in the women and they way they allow themselves to be treated since the classes.

Another interesting phenomenon that is occurring in this community is that the young people are getting married younger and younger. In Josefina´s generation (she is 43 years-old) to get married at 20-25 years-old was very common. However, now it is common for 15-16 year-olds to get married which means a lot of them aren´t finishing school. Josefina feels a lot of the young people are getting married to escape abusive homes. But by getting married so young and quitting school, the cycle of poverty continues.

Josefina was adamant that women should definitely finish high school and go on to a college or university. She kept saying that women need an education to defend themselves, to support themselves. They need an education so they don´t have to depend on anyone else for their livelihood.

No matter where you are--in Chicago, in the South, in Ecuador--it is these cycles of poverty that are the hardest to break. As long as their is sustained poverty without education, the cycle continues. Josefina is trying to set an example for women in her community. She is the first woman elected official in her community as she is the president of the community water board. She presides over some fifty people including three commercial flower companies to determine how the community water should be shared and distributed. She is also planning on returning to school to finish an agricultural engineering degree. She has four years down and two more to go. It has been so wonderful to get to know Josefina and her family. She has been a wealth of knowlege for us and has so graciously opened up her home. By far getting to know her and her family was the best thing about working on the farm.