"Poverty"
Written by Hannah, LGH Uganda Staff

A part of the LGH mission in Uganda is to empower “Africans through the encouragement of economic sustainability and creative endeavors.” However, a barrier to achieving this goal is the grief and trauma that many of the women experienced from living in the North during the war, their displacement and migration to southern Uganda, and the ongoing losses and changes in their lives. In order to address these issues, and help the women reach a place where they can dream and hope for their futures, I began a Grief and Loss support group.

Through listening to the women’s stories and walking through pain alongside them, I gained a deeper understanding of poverty. This week in the group we talked about allowing ourselves to feel the pain of grief. We began by discussing emotions and feelings in a more general sense. For one of our exercises, I asked each woman to think about a strong emotion that they typically tried to avoid or cover up. We then focused on the feeling for 30 seconds to reduce the fear of the feeling. One woman shared that a feeling she avoided was embarrassment. She said that she felt embarrassed when she had to go to her neighbor’s home to beg for food. I was not expecting her answer, and was stunned for a moment. Her answer reminded me of all the different forms of poverty that surround us. I shared that I was afraid of feeling alone, and that I would avoid this feeling – a very different form of poverty. What are the other types of poverty that I experience? I have poverty in my self-esteem, poverty in my hope, poverty in my care and concern for others.

While poverty is not the state that we want to remain in, we must learn to accept and befriend it. For it is in our poverty that goodness, truth, and beauty are closest to us. There are so many types of poverty, countless ways that we try to cover it up. It is not as easy to cover up in Uganda when many of the forms of poverty are physically manifested. It is much more difficult to accept our poverty in a world that is so focused on becoming rich. We must learn how to uncover our poverty, because this is where our blessing lies. In a way, we need to view our poverty as the place where our treasure is hidden.