English 7, Ms. Chen
25, February 2014
Poor in Wealth, Rich in Education
Poverty. Poverty has many definitions depending on the type of different people in this society. It can range anywhere from not being able to pay bills to not being able to feed a family and not having a place to live. Although, according to the definition found on dictionary.com, it articulates that poverty means the state or condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of support; condition of being poor. Two motivated authors, Muhammad Yunus and Lucy Lameck, wrote two different short stories in the book “Reading the World: Ideas that Matter” that have inspired me to write this essay on the poverty and social class in third world countries.
The first story is “Africans Are Not Poor” by Lucy Lameck. The reason I chose this particular story is because she goes into detail about how these people live and struggle to survive. Lameck chose to write about the Tanzanians because as a young adult she was an activist in the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU). Her mom was also TANU activist and they were close to the party’s leader. Lameck studied economics and sociology at Oxford and then international relations at WMU. Lameck wrote “Africans Are Not Poor’ in order to persuade a particular audience about the assumptions of poverty and provide …show more content…
This individual story was quite moving to me; to read that just one person who cared so much could make a difference is truly remarkable. Muhammad Yunus was born in British India in 1940. Yunus received his Ph.D. in economics from Vanderbilt University. After theorizing that small loans given directly to the poor could play a huge role in eliminating poverty, he wrote “The Stool Maker of Jobra Village” on behalf of his personal experience with the banking system and how against they are with helping the poor out of