For me, poverty is not mere deprivation; for people may possess fewer things than I and be richer; poverty is wretchedness. It must then be an experience more than an economic state.
Working in January on a mission trip based in Honduras, I felt something I had never experienced before while around the deprived and impoverished: a lack of sympathy. For perhaps the first time I felt as though ignorance was truly bliss for those who knew nothing outside their 1-mile radius - mud floors, 55-gallon drum bathtubs/laundry bins, open-air doorways. Who cared if these people never got addicted to a particular sitcom? Who cared if these people never developed the task of keeping up with their text messages? They found joy somehow. They had family. They had neighbors. They had church friends. And for as far as I knew, they were better off because of their deprivation, and I didn't feel sympathy for their apparent lack of American commodities. What a horrible life it must be to be without People and a daily onslaught of divisive politics! We may very well envy them.
Later in his text, Vollmann quotes a Mexican prostitute that he interviewed.
He asks: Why are some people rich and some people poor?
There are no rich and there are no poor.
Then what are there?
We're just humans.
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