You're only poor when someone gives you the feeling of being poor...

...and when you then accept it as your own truth.

I often remember a student of mine who was studying German with me in 2019. She was with a man who was a successful investor, and he had a beautiful apartment in Berlin with well-known pieces of contemporary art, where they both lived. She sometimes worked in one of his businesses but unfortunately without receiving a salary. I must also mention that she was gentle and beautiful, although she had undergone several plastic surgeries which, in my opinion, she didn’t need at such a young age, as her natural beauty was showing, too.

At the age of two, more or less.

One day in class, she told me how grateful she was for how her life had turned out. Looking out the window and comparing her life to that of the workers on the construction site, she realized how much she now had. She said that when she was young, her family was very poor. They usually took vacations in their country by car and often had no money left for a hotel. Her mother made their clothes by hand, and not being fashionable isolated her from other children and teenagers.

Throughout the last years, I have often come back to this statement and asked myself: Why did she feel poor? And why does she "claim" she was poor? Humble and poor, I always differentiate.

My family were farmers from the forgotten backcountry in Dalmatia. We had no car, no telephone, and vacations were not in fashion when we later lived in Germany, and by then vacations mostly meant visiting my grandparents in the countryside. Not for a single moment did I feel poor. I felt humble - and limited later on, but never poor. People treated my grandparents with respect and visited or called from afar to see how they were doing or to seek their advice.

When I visited a small Amerindian village last November in Acre, Brazil, I immediately saw people who stuck together and helped each other, coping relatively well with their limited resources by sharing and listening to the elders (although not everyone listened and of course they also had financial problems on an individual level). They had humble houses and humble clothes. There was no paved street, and when it rained, you had to wait so as not to get covered in mud.

During the time I spent with them, I never considered my Amerindian hosts poor, but I recognized their humble lives and limitations, and also their richness in understanding life and the people close to them. This morning, while having breakfast, I remembered my Ukrainian student from those days and thought that, in her case, someone, or several people, had given her and her family the feeling of being poor compared with society’s understanding of wealth at the time.

If she had understood by then that she was only humble, not poor, would that have changed her perspective enough to make her more self-confident and self-determined? How can we avoid giving others the feeling that having less is something to be ashamed of? How can we educate our children to grow with others and learn from each other? How would the world feel if everyone had the chance to grow up with the idea of "I'm OK. You're OK."

#ImOK #YoureOK #transaction #poor #wealthy #reflections