Notes from the Favela: A Lesson from People Living with Scarcity

As universities and graduate schools offer more degrees in social responsibility, the numbers of young people interested in careers that help the poor is growing, adding to the ranks of public policy, public health, and other academic disciplines dedicated to ending human suffering.

So what exactly is a successful career for these young professionals? The elimination of poverty? Probably not. The answer, I believe, lies buried inside one’s response to the following question: Do you believe that people living in poverty can be happy? For some, the question surprises. For me, the answer is a more recent revelation, one that I am just beginning to understand.

Here in the United States, the roots of academic interest in social improvement began during the 1960s when professors joined forces with the U.S. government to declare a “war on poverty.” They built President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.”  Decades later, one of the Great Society’s architects, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, observed that the poor were actually not the ones who declared that war. Instead, it was academics and other “professional reformers” he included among the ranks who had inserted themselves to speak for the hopes and aspirations of the huddled masses.

I am one of those professional reformers. In my job, I work to fund organizations that help the poor. I travel to visit nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) around the world, whose mission it is to help those of limited means. As a guest of these organizations, I meet many adults who live in places called slums, informal townships or favelas, places where employment rates are low and rates of crime, poverty, illiteracy, and disease are high.

But when I travel, I reflect how those conversations are filtered through my university degrees and American middle-class values. When I am invited into houses that lack running water and floors made from the dirt, homes to millions of people around the world, I am reminded that my hotel room is a very comfortable place.

Yet, I have seen children playing in shantytowns and heard their laughter. I have listened to music in the slums surrounding Bogotá and Johannesburg. Celebrations in Rio’s favelas are dramatic. Listen deeply and one can hear the passion in the music as well as in the adults’ laughter. I watch people dance that passion and I taste it in the food. Life is tough; lived as though the future is an illusion. But, each minute, lived fully, becomes a ritual in gratitude.

Today, the battle against poverty has gone global. And armies of reformers, like me, arrive armed with volumes of statistics and an equal number of opinions about solving the problem of poverty. But book knowledge doesn’t make us experts because poverty is not a day job. Instead, the millions living with scarcity teach us all a lesson not covered in the text books: How to live in the moment, to play hard, feel every emotion, to adapt and appreciate. In these places I learned that I must confront my own preconceptions about poverty, my personal conflicts about success and my compassion-gilded guilt. If this didn’t happen, I would return home from the favelas with only pity in my heart and have learned nothing from the people I met.

The huddled masses embody King Solomon’s lesson about impermanence: The moment (this one) is the only reality. And about gratitude: There is much to appreciate, not pity, in these places. So if you truly want to help people living in poverty, ask them. Watch the smiles, then listen deeply. And learn something about yourself.

Rick Martinez, MD is a director of corporate contributions for Johnson & Johnson, a member of the Council on Foundations.