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Thoughts / Questions

1. As we try to contemplate how many people in the world are truly and desperately poor, how is poor defined? Is it purely an economic and physical condition?
2. Do the poorest of the poor just need aid and charity or do they need economic development? Do we give them a fish or teach them how to catch fish?
3. Is the task too huge? Is the number of poor so large we can never make a dent in it? Or are they like the starfish dying on the beach where some say, "There are too many, I can never make a difference" but one person on the beach throws one back and says, "I made a difference to that one!" (Is the task so big that only public money can impact it? Should we acknowledge how feeble our private and individual efforts to help will always be and devote our efforts instead to lobbying rich governments to help poor governments?)
4. Is "poor" best thought of as an economic term? And does trying to define and measure poorness in terms of money, income, or material possessions lock us into an economic model or paradigm which puts certain parameters and limits on our perspective and understanding?
5. Are attempts to define or measure how well people are doing by education levels, by caloric consumption, by literacy, by health care access, by rule of law protection, by infant mortality, by life expectancy or other "physical" measurements any better or are they all an extension or amplification of the economic model?
6. As useful and illuminating as the economic/physical paradigm is, don't we know that the ultimate well-being of people, indeed the final measure of the "success" of their life on earth, must be measured in spiritual terms? By the correct principles a person learns and lives?
7. Which of the physical/economic or spiritual models is the cart and which is the horse? Must people be fed physically before they can be fed spiritually? Didn't Christ often tend to physical needs before he addressed spiritual truths? Didn't Brigham Young say that people needed food in their stomachs before they could be expected to hear the restored gospel? Yet aren't we taught that the truths of the gospel are what will cause people to lift themselves out of poverty and that if correct principles are taught, people will govern themselves?
8. Does poverty produce evil or does evil generate poverty? Is there any cause and effect between the two and if so, in which direction? Most charitable people who experience the Third World see the poor as victims of circumstance or of the cruelty and subjection of others and excuse any evil or violence among them as the result of their poverty and deprivation. Yet I have two close friends who have lived in a variety of Third World countries most of their adult lives and concluded that poverty flows from evil rather than the other way around -- that dark, harsh, violent evil (even the killing of female children) is rampant among the poorest of the poor and continues from one generation to another (as the sins of the fathers are visited on the children and their children) and that it is this evil that precipitates and perpetrates the poverty. Which is true?
9. Just as there is a cart and horse question on the problem, so is there a similar question on the solution. Will people who learn and follow truth rise up from poverty (as Elder Brockbank used to promise the British saints who couldn't afford a car so they could get to church, "Pay your tithing and you'll be able to afford a car")? Or will people who are economically lifted out of poverty be better positioned to look for and find spiritual truth.
10. Are both models fatally flawed or doomed by built in limitations? The physical/economic model by the vastness of poverty and the fact that it must ultimately be people's own initiative and motivation that lifts them up? And the spiritual model by the fact that such a small percentage will actually listen to and accept spiritual truth.
11. Is there perhaps another model, somewhere between the other two, that focuses on personal principles and truths that virtually everyone can agree with and accept and that is such a win-win scenario in which the helpers benefit as much as the "helpees" so that the numbers of both can be dramatically increased?
12. Could that "in-between" approach be a family model where first world families need the perspective and fulfillment of helping and giving as much as the Third World families they link with need the subsistence they receive?
13. Could parents who are not overly motivated by altruism or the obligation to "give something back" be more motivated by the needs of their own children - to get perspective, to get away from instant gratification, to appreciate how blessed they are, and to know the joy of serving others - all of which are met by assisting the poorest of the poor in a hands-on way.
14. Could the whole thing be viewed through the lens of family, acknowledging that family is the most basic unit of society, that parenting is the most important societal role and the greatest of all stewardships, and that all good parents, rich or poor, share the same kind of love for their children - a love that makes them want to give their children what they need most, whether that need is food or clothing or education or whether it is the chance to learn to be grateful, to serve, to give, and to be sensitive and unselfish?
15. Could the whole goal be to build strong families - in the first world and the third? And toward that end to facilitate first world families helping and being helped by Third World families? Instead of Third World parents leaving their children in the care of others and traveling away to earn money by being maids and care givers for first world children so the first world mothers can shop or play golf how about a reversal where first world parents and kids travel together to the Third World where they meet their own needs by serving the needs of the poor parents and children they are trying to keep together?
16. Could the physical/economic thinking be a telestial model (beautiful but not the real answer)? Could the preaching the gospel/spiritual approach be a celestial model (wonderful but accepted only by a few)? And could the family focus be the terrestrial model that can reach everyone and prepare both rich and poor families to receive and embrace eternal truths?
17. How much should we all think about these things? Are they part of our stewardships? Or should we concentrate on our church callings and the needs of our own families and let the world take care of itself? How far do we extend the meaning of being our brother's keepers? Do Third World people without opportunities deserve more attention than first world people whose problems result from the squandering of opportunity?
18. Should the very richest people feel a special obligation to help the very poorest? Should the top five percent (who consume more than half the planet's resources) be especially obligated to help the bottom 30 percent who consume less than one percent of the world's resources?