Poverty

Laura Vatui
School 49, Bucharest, Romania

What did poverty mean in the past?
In the past, poverty meant that people had no house, no food or just not enough money. In the past people were poorer than now, but they helped each other more. They worked together, they shared things and they were willing to give more.

What does poverty mean today?
This is a question we can answer easily because nowadays there are many poor people.
For many people today, poverty means that you can’t pay your bills, you can’t buy expensive clothes, you haven’t got a big house or you just can’t buy what you want when you want. But there is another type of poverty; it’s when you don’t have a house to live in or you don’t have the every-day food. This is something we don’t want to hear about, but it is real and it is very painful.

How did people use to help each other in the past?
In the past there weren’t special organizations or houses for poor people, so people helped each other by visiting and giving food to each other.

How can you help people in need nowadays?
Nowadays we can donate food, clothes and toys to some special centres for people in need. There are charity organizations such as “Save the Children” or “The Romanian Red Cross”.

Unfortunately, poverty was and still is an awful phenomenon which humanity does not seem able to defeat.