World poverty to end in nine years?
by S. Pathiravitana
The further you go into the past the lesser your chances of meeting
the word poverty. This may come as a surprise to you, but that's because
you and I have been taught to look at the past as a dark, gloomy and
primitive era compared to the state of enlightenment we are living in
now. When we see a thatched roof, mud walls and cow dung floors, what
comes to our minds is 'poverty'; but as an adequate source of shelter
only a foreigner, surprisingly, can see its advantages.
What they said
Let us see what the foreigner says: "Such a house, since the rain
cannot beat very much against the walls, can stand unharmed for a long
time. The floor is also made of beaten clay, and on their feast days
they take fresh cow dung, mix it with water into a thin paste, and smear
with their hands both floor and walls quite flat with it.
Although while being put on it smells badly, yet after a few days,
when it is dry, this changes to a pleasant odour; and the ants, which
are a great plague in this land, avoid it," written by Heydt, a German
who served the Dutch in the 17 hundreds, living in the Maritime
Provinces for three years.
Another foreigner, a British civil servant, A. B. Denham, who had
even a closer look at our people and country makes the following
reflections on poverty.
He was here at the turn of the 19th century and what provoked him to
make his reflections on poverty was "the enormous quantities of goods
which are poured by the West into the Eastern store and "the
extraordinarily few wants of the Eastern people." He says that comforts
among the people of the East have to be created. "The villager never
possessed any." All he had was his mud built house and the clothing and
the household goods, which could be stuffed into a small bag to flee
unencumbered into the jungle at a pinch.
"Such conditions in the East do not indicate a state of poverty, but
a complete lack of comfort, the absence of which was not felt... The
chroniclers of the reigns of Eastern monarchs do not concern themselves
with the standard of comfort among the subject people for the very good
reason that no historian of those days would have understood what was
meant by such an expression, or if he had would have scoffed at the
idea."
So, having introduced comfort to a people who had nothing to do with
it, we have today, thanks to the imperialists who introduced it, not for
the welfare of the people but for their own profits, and in consequence
we are impoverished today.
Poverty has been here with us for a while and it may be here for some
more time because it is a useful slogan at election times to mislead
people by promising to 'eradicate poverty.' The United Nations, not to
thwart the aspirations of our politicians as such but to join them, is
planning to introduce a series of 'quick win' proposals under their
Millennium Plan to eradicate poverty. They have set the target year for
eradication as 2015.
The proposals don't seem to look as being any too startling because
all their plans seem to be only a going back to the days when things
went on smoothly before the 'comfort' program stepped in. By the way,
the Millennium Poverty Eradication 'quick win' Plan needs $40-60 billion
for a year.
Compared to what the US is reported to be spending on its armaments
contracts amounting to $230 billion a year, the poverty eradication
money is just a pittance. One way the UN has proposed to help poverty
eradication is to introduce what we call free education and they call
'elimination of school fees.'
This is not a new scheme at all, but one that they may even have
borrowed from our country where education right along our history has
always been free, and I don't mean the days of the Kannangara Plan, but
our ancient pirivena system of studies where the monks acted like talent
scouts to spot the brighter students among the young. And neither was
education compulsory then.
Free people
Being a free people we only created opportunities for all those
interested in pursuing either linguistic studies or the arts and crafts
and sciences in which Sri Lanka has done pretty well. And all this
without the help of any 'quick win' Millennium Plan.
Supporting breast-feeding is another of the plans that are thought of
as being able to eradicate poverty. This country never had anything
except breast-feeding in all its history. If a mother ran out of milk,
which was exceptional, then they looked around for a foster mother to
help out. Such co-operative efforts went into disuse with the arrival of
the business fraternity from the West.
The business fraternity took a lot of trouble to persuade the medical
fraternity to advice mothers to change over to the bottle. And along
with the 'comfort' plan introduced to our country by the imperialists it
didn't take very long to persuade mothers to change over to the bottle.
"Stuff and nonsense" says the Millennium Plan now, and they are
determined to go ahead to persuade mothers to throw out the bottle and
get back to the breast.
User fees for basic health care is a term that is being used to say
that in developing countries, which is the polite form of telling us
that we are poor countries, who are now paying for obtaining medical
help to keep ourselves alive, must be discouraged.
There was a time in very recent history when medicine was freely
given in all state hospitals in this country. Our then international
money-lenders frowned on us for this and screwed our then Finance
Minister, Dr N. M. Perera, to charge twenty-five cents per patient. Now
all this is forgotten - the Millennium Plan will now take the health
costs under their wing.
We had no problems, however, under our own kings when medical
treatment was freely given with the King himself acting the physician.
Community health training in rural areas, another one of those 'quick
win' plans to eradicate poverty, is to be introduced under the
Millennium Plan.
But this is something that we always had, with each village having
its own ayurvedic physician, who advised patients to look after
themselves with inguru-kothhamlli treatment as a preliminary before
visiting him, and the payment in any case was a gift of a sheaf of betel
leaves.
Our women
There is also evidence that our women could also look after
themselves quite well without any medical assistance. "The Sinhala
women," says Heydt who is mentioned above,"are not accustomed to have
midwives, as do ours, to assist at births or give a helpful hand; but
they take to them only the women of their neighbours, who serve as
midwives.
They rarely die in childbirth, and such a death appears strange to
them, from which one can deduce the ease of their bringing-forth."
Then there is going to be instruction for women on women's rights as
part of the poverty eradication campaign. How the two are related is
somewhat difficult to conceive. There was a time, however, in the
history of our country when the Sinhala law prevailed from north to
south and from east to west and this law was particularly generous to
our women. Marriage and divorce was a very simple affair.
And when it came to divorce, "They divorce for a small cause, and it
is no disgrace among them... When they cannot live with content
together, they separate themselves, and the man seeks another wife and
the wife another husband."
As for any conditions for separation there are none, for the law
entitles her to take with her, "the dowry that she brought, perhaps a
few heads of cattle, some clothes, and now and then, if she is of higher
rank, some slaves; and goes to her parents or nearest relatives or other
friends, until she sees another opportunity better to her liking than
the first." So, as we can see, the Millennium Plan has nothing new to
offer us except to restore now the 'balance of power' destroyed by our
puritanical Victorians from England.
And one more item from a list of about 14. The Millennium Plan
recommends tree planting as a measure to eradicate poverty. We had
prophets who asked not only to care for trees but also for wild animals
and in fact the entire environment as the Arahat Mahinda did when he
surprised King Devanampiyatissa while he was hunting animals, in the
following words: "O great King, the birds of the air and the beasts have
as equal a right to live and move about in any part of the land as thou.
The land belongs to the people and all living beings; thou art only the
guardian of it."
And this has its echo in a modern prophet, E. F. Schumaker who says,
"The teaching of the Buddha... enjoins a reverent and non-violent
attitude not only to all sentient beings but also, with great emphasis,
to trees.
Every follower of the Buddha ought to plant a tree every few years
and look after it until it is safely established, and the Buddhist
economist can demonstrate without difficulty that the universal
observation of this rule would result in a high rate of genuine economic
development independent of any foreign aid."
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