Poverty, Thy Name is Evil

A colleague shared her life story with me yesterday:

- she earns a meagre take-home pay of $1,300
- she is a single mother of two young girls
- she is going through her second divorce
- the First Boss refuses to endorse her placement of being a permanent staff
- her second husband was abusive and is serving his term in jail
- she does not have family support

As she was sharing, feelings of embarrassment and ashamedness gushed up within me - for constantly feeling sorry for myself, when I am in a much better situation than she anytime.

She has always been bubbly in school. If you're none the wiser, you wouldn't have guessed the sorry state that she is in.

I always thought that I am strong for all the meekness and weakness that I am. Friends told me that I am strong. But as I talked to my colleague, I felt that my issues were nothing next to hers.

Living from hand to mouth

Sometimes she comes to school with only some coins in her wallet. In a good month, she can save a good $200 with what she earns. At other times, she is left with just $40 - $50 to last till the end of the month.

She does not even have enough to pay the yearly staff fund in our school. She tried to talk to the colleague in charge of collecting the fund and for some reason, it ended up as "She does not want to pay." What the!!!

When the treasurer colleague finally got the message and communicated it properly to the Head in charge, the Head said,"If everyone claims that he or she got problem and refuses to pay, then everybody also don't have to pay already." Educators are patient and compassionate? My foot!

She has to support both her daughters. She needs to buy the milk powder and diapers for the baby.

You can never feel the impact of the expenditure on a baby until you are a parent yourself. If you go to the supermarket and check out the prices of milk powder and diapers, you'd think it's no big deal. "Only $28 per tin what," you scoff. "And babies don't have to drink top grade milk. Just get the cheapest possible will do."

But when you are a parent, you will naturally want the best for your child. It's totally natural for a parent to be kiasu - to want nothing but the best for their children.

You can settle for less, but not horribly less.

And a tin of milk powder does not last forever. It runs out every one or two weeks, depending on the consumption rate of the baby.

The same goes for diapers. For a pack of 50, a baby uses 7 to 8 diapers per day. How many days can one pack last?

And these two items are just the extremely basics of a baby's needs.

A colleague who wanted a baby badly tried to estimate the cost of having a child. She said,"Every month, you just need to spend a few hundred dollars on raising a child."

Then how about the invisible expenses like that $2.50 drink taken by your child when you eat out, the party dress, the cake, the food and the present you need to invest in on her birthday?

I signed Coco up for a piano lesson. The purchase of a piano ($8, 600) is just the beginning. There is the monthly payment of the piano-learning fee ($128), the bi-yearly tuning of the piano ($60), the servicing of the piano ($100), the piano books ($infinity), the metronome (the 'tick-tock' meter for timing your beats) ($60), the piano exams (approx. $120 each) even the cover for the piano ($100).

Apart from the one-off payment for the piano and monthly piano lessons, the rest are invisible expenses that eat into your pay without you tangibly realising it, until you really need to pay up.

I always thought that I have it rough, that although I am married, I am much like a single mother. But compared to my colleague, I have so many blessings to count for:

- my take-home pay is much more than hers
- I have family support
- I have the stability of a permanent job, no matter how f-up it is

She worries about the bread-and-butter issue, and here am I, worrying about which high-end enrichment classes Coco should attend. I feel like I have forgotten about the more important things in life.

She is easily contented. She is happy with a slightly-more-than-two-k pay, an offer made to her by her friend who runs a student care centre.

I can attribute her easily-contented self to her race. I can say that she does not have much choice since she only has an A level cert. The fact is, I could have been her, in a Chinese version. If not for the family support that I had, I could not have gone on to further my studies beyond an A level.

Marriage

She no longer believes in the yellow ribbon programme. The husband was a criminal before they married. He turned abusive after the marriage. She went to work with a bruise on her eye. He is now in jail again. She said,"To hell with the yellow ribbon programme! I hope these people die in prison, rot in prison!"

I can't help but feel that we are so alike.

We are the girls who give a second chance. Yet, does life give us a second chance? Perhaps, in some ways, it does. Yet, we can never regain our youth and our trust in men again.

What matters more to a woman than her youth?

At work

She faces a lot of unhappiness at work. Compared to her, I have chosen to be ignorant or ignoring of others' underlying messages.

She constantly feels that others dislike her or look down on her. That's the danger of sharing your personal life with colleagues. The fact is, most people feel holier-than-thou when you reveal the skeletons in your life, even if it is not your own doing that lands you where you are.

She shared tangible, real circumstances where she experienced colleagues refusing to respond to her when she needed help. Perhaps she had expressed the need for help in a manner that others did not take pleasure in. Other colleagues' displeasure with her seeking of help could be so blatant that they shared what she needed by talking to each other right in front of her instead of facing her.

In some cases, I thought she had been a tad too sensitive though. She felt offended that when she tried to sit on a chair at a staff meeting, another colleague put her arms over the chair in a bid to 'protect' it and said,"No no no! So-and-so is going to sit here!" and turned round to seek approval from others in the clique,"Huh? Right?" I tried to assure her that it is the same everywhere, although it does appear that the people in this place are more 'clique-kish'.

Her beau

There is a saving grace though.

She has a beau who has refused to marry anyone else ever since her first marriage.

For women who have gone through two marriages, we are more practical now: I asked her if the man contributed to the household expenses, whether he did household chores. She was happy that he was close to the kids.

One thing is for sure: both of us feel that cohabitation is not a bad idea, contrary to its counter-religious nature.

I used to adopt the holier-than-thou stance against cohabitation. I thought it irresponsible and immature, and that it is just a duress for legalistic fornication.

Now I realised that nothing is more immature than going into a marriage not knowing what to expect. And you truly won't know what to expect until you really live with a man.

My thoughts

Apart from feeling fortunate and grateful, I am not fit to say anything less than that. I always knew that family support is important, but my colleague's situation made me realise that family support is the ultimate support when all is lost.

As I was chatting with her and listening to her sharing, what I face in my life - all seem so small.

It also brought me back to the book 《小狗钱钱》in which the author states that poverty is the root of evil. It is poverty that traps a person in a lowly situation and causes her to be unable to rise above the circumstances. It is poverty that causes a person to lose her dignity, her pride. It is poverty that compels one to accept humiliation and insults. It is poverty. Not riches.

Poverty is indeed a curse. That's how wise Pastor Kong is. He knew from a young age that it was a curse and it cannot be from above.