Status Updates From Poor People: Understanding ...

When the issue of poverty cannot be solved, hope has to be found wherever possible. Children having fun playing for a few minutes, drugs, booze, lottery tickets, religion. Any drug will do, even if it isn't good for you. Vollmann tries to rationalize escapes with all those means.

He wishes that community could help but doesn't believe in it. Only on small scale like the jointly cleaned toilet in a Kenyan slum.

In the first part, he asks people for their own opinion. Are they poor? He goes on to classify his observations about poverty into categories like invisibility, dependance and alienation. Poor people have to face moral dilemmas: prostitution to survive, work destroying health and environment to earn money in the short-term.

Vollmann engages with the people we usually avoid. Also back home in the US.

Vollmann's framework consists of a few definitions, putting poverty into context. Normality, false consciousness, poor/rich - always in comparison to the reality of the people. Objectively poor people (as seen from a Western standpoint) can feel rich. People owning more can feel poor. Relativity is important and the respect to accept their point of view. Most of them believe in predetermination, fate, karma, god.