Poverty Project International Stories

Please, Mama, tell me about love? Love is when we see the hurt, the pain, the suffering. We do not deny it. We feel it. We let it run through us and in it we see beauty. We see comfort, we see compassion, we see appreciation. We rise above the pain and we see the beauty in the world because without the contrast of the dark, the light is never so beautiful. We lift our hands and our hearts and we dance in the rain. We celebrate our breath and the sun and the heat and the coolness. We smile at a homeless man and he smiles back at us. We play in the dirt with a child who has only an empty soda can for a toy and we laugh as he shows us how the game goes. We get up in the middle of the night when we cant sleep and we look at the vastness of the stars and we know somewhere deep inside us that all of this human experience is designed to teach us to love. It is designed to show us the contrast, the depth of despair and the height of joy and the sameness of our human-ness no matter our

Maria and her baby brother used to live next door along with the rest of the seven people in their family. They had a little house with running water and electricity, a privilege many do not have in this community. But several days ago all seven of them were asked to leave their home because they could not pay the rent. They stood outside my house, hearts broken, a few simple things in bags, and said they planned to live in the parking lot at the bank. There was a policeman there and a wide over hang on the building, so it was a good place to sleep. This is the house out behind my house in rural Panama. Both homes belong to a lovely older woman named Shirley. She is tall and dark with high cheekbones. She wears her silver hair in a bun and always dresses in skirts and she has the mostly lovely Jamaican yah-mon English. Shirley is a woman acquainted with sadness. She lost her soul-mate, the husband of her youth, when she was in her twenties and became a widow. She lost two mo