Poverty failed its course……

I have grown to read a lot of success stories, been both a fan and critic of sad poverty stories that seek to emotionally blackmail the reader. I have met people who have been through a lot, imagine being in a foreign country with no one to help you, a situation where you only had yourself to count on. I always criticized the celebrities who always found a way to include their tough upbringing into every interview, preoccupied with raising arguments like why every successful person claim to have been poor while growing up? I never got the essence of their survival story.

My survival story is no different to the one of those celebrities, just am not there yet but poverty will never win this round. I learned to draw inspiration from people who have been through HELL, people who did not give up even when giving up was the only option available to them. And then it finally made sense, how can I define myself without including what made me. The critic me went hiding to give way for a more founded argument, what keeps me going? Where do I get a renewed energy to look up a hill and believe I will climb it? The truth is everyone have a source of inspiration, and the simple “you too can make it” famous line never worked for me and if it does not work for you too, read a lot from novels to biographies, someone’s life story might do the magic for you.

Now back to the apparent enemy Poverty, I realized to some extend we exaggerate the power it possess. If we give more power to the enemy in our silence we are actually admitting loudly that we fighting a losing battle. Then I derived a new meaning of poverty, let us label it the absence of fancy things rather than the absence of hope. This way we can all survive under the cloud of poverty with HOPE. We can’t be defined by our circumstances and we can’t define who we are without OUR SURVIVAL STORIES. Kicking poverty’s ass and smiling with an empty stomach, holding tightly to HOPE because that is what will make tomorrow different fro today.

“label poverty as the absence of fancy material things rather than the absence of hope”

Article by Dimo wa Moraswi Sekele

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