March 12, 2009

It’s the people that you meet each day.

How do you talk to children about poverty and hunger?  This is the question I am thinking about today.  I work in the sector that helps feed the hungry in Kingston.  I also have a child, age nine, and I think he more or less understands what it is that I do. But more to the point, I am scheduled to speak to a bunch of grade five students about my work.   Of course I Googled my query “talking about poverty with children” – that’s how we do research now, right? I didn’t find what I was looking for.

So what is it that I want kids to understand?  I want to teach them empathy, compassion and community.  I want them to believe that our community includes everyone we encounter.  That even when we don’t know what to say to someone asking for spare change on the street, or when someone’s public behavior leaves us feeling uncomfortable, they are still people worthy of our respect.  I also want them to know that there isn’t an unbridgeable chasm between “us” and “them” when it comes to low-income people in our community.  I want them to believe, too, that they can make a difference –. So how do we teach all of this?

I find myself turning to personal stories of the people I meet.  Each person we meet has a unique story and sometimes these stories are hard and complicated. Predictably, a lot of stories don’t have happy endings but then again, some of them do.  And some stories that may look hard from the outside are also full of joy and laughter, connection and love when viewed from closer in.  This is how I talk to my own child about poverty and privilege, about illness, disability and other kinds of social justice issues.  I think it’s a pretty good strategy for teaching empathy and compassion but it doesn’t quite get at what I want to say.  Not completely.  What gets lost in this approach is the big picture, the politics, budget cuts, things that make it harder for people to rebound from adversity or to avoid it in the first place. What gets lost are the strategies for changing things.  But maybe those are other lessons for another day.

For someone of my generation sometimes it all comes back to Sesame Street – “who are the people in your neighbourhood?”  It is all of us. Those of us with plenty, those with enough to get by and those who just don’t have enough.