Out of Poverty: And Into Something More Comfortable - Hardcover

Stackhouse; Stackhouse, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679310258 ISBN 13: 9780679310259

Verlag: RH CANADA, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

From East Timor to Timbuktu, John Stackhouse has met and lived with hundreds of the world's poor. When he set out on this journey in 1991, he was certain that the new age of global markets and economic reforms would end decades of extreme hardship in the developing world. But as the nineties rolled on, he found poverty still entrenched in dozens of countries -- except where people had some control over their lives.
In an intriguing blend of travel writing and analysis, moving portraits and comic tales, Stackhouse tells the personal stories of some of the world's poorest people and shows how "they" are going to end global poverty in the next century. He provides haunting details of lives and communities destroyed by misplaced aid and government interventions. But more importantly he shows how individuals are finding the creativity and means to make their own lives better -- from women in the remote shea-nut forests of West Africa who are learning to bypass their corrupt government to cash in on rich international markets to a trade union of prostitutes in Calcutta that is actively demanding basic human rights. Stackhouse's journey proves that poverty is not an inevitable part of the human condition but a direct result of human actions. Poverty is something that people can change.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Few foreign journalists have travelled to more villages or remote districts than John Stackhouse. <i>The Globe and Mail</i>'s development issues reporter, Stackhouse has been based in New Delhi since 1992, but has spent much of his time living with poor farmers, fisherman, lepers and slum-dwellers, travelling by third-class rail through India or by boat through Borneo. He has won three National Newspaper Awards, a National Magazine Award and an Amnesty International prize for foreign reporting. This is his first book.

Aus dem Klappentext

mor to Timbuktu, John Stackhouse has met and lived with hundreds of the world's poor. When he set out on this journey in 1991, he was certain that the new age of global markets and economic reforms would end decades of extreme hardship in the developing world. But as the nineties rolled on, he found poverty still entrenched in dozens of countries -- except where people had some control over their lives. <br><br>In an intriguing blend of travel writing and analysis, moving portraits and comic tales, Stackhouse tells the personal stories of some of the world's poorest people and shows how <i>they</i> are going to end global poverty in the next century. He provides haunting details of lives and communities destroyed by misplaced aid and government interventions. But more importantly he shows how individuals are finding the creativity and means to make their own lives better -- from women in the remote shea-nut forests of West Africa who are learning to bypass their corrupt government to cash

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From Chapter 1

No one along the highway could tell us where Biharipur was, not the paan shop men or the bidi wallahs or the horse-cart drivers. We tried the hospital, the police stand, the local pharmacy. “Biharipur?” Each person looked equally confused, as if the village of seven hundred people had vanished from the earth. And maybe it had.

My Indian colleague Rama and I looked at each. Neither of us had a suggestion. We had travelled more than three hundred kilometres southeast from New Delhi to find a little hamlet called Biharipur that had been recommended to us by a social activist, Suman Sahai, as a quintessential north Indian village. Suman had been there once and was struck by the poverty and its permanence.

I had been living in India less than a year and hardly knew my way around New Delhi, let alone the countryside. Rama, who worked as a researcher-reporter for The Washington Post, wasn’t much help with directions either. An ethnic Tamil, Brahmin and graduate in English literature from Delhi University, she was as out of place here as I was. She was also drugged silly to prevent car sickness. But Rama did have a passion for the poor and an uncanny ear for the dialects of north India, where Hindi is more a framework than a language. She finally thought to rephrase the question, asking a chai wallah, “What about Rajinder Singh Yadav? He is a lambardar.”

“Ohhhh. He is a lambardar, is he?” the chai wallah replied. The tea-seller’s sarcasm suggested he doubted that such an important man could be found in such an obscure place. No one knew Biharipur. The lambardar, the chief, that was something else.

Out on the Gangetic plains, where three hundred million people base their existence on fertile soils, abundant rains and ancient traditions, a lambardar is king of the locality and master of all he surveys. He is a man of prestige and influence. Little happens without his approval. Nothing proceeds unless he benefits. And his name is known at tea shops.

I knew nothing of this tradition, or that it determined the success of all development efforts in northern India, as social customs and political behaviours do just about everywhere. All I knew was that Rajinder Singh Yadav was a farmer whose approval we needed in order to stay in his village.

“You go straight,” the chai wallah said. “At the culvert, there is a big tree. You turn left.”

We left the chai wallah to his vat of buffalo’s milk boiling on a clay stove, over some sticks and straw, a scene so rustic it was hard to believe this was the beginning of the nineties, a decade that would create more wealth than any other in history. Bill Clinton was in the White House, Boris Yeltsin was almost in the Kremlin, North America’s tough recession was over and a new decade of liberal reforms, of free markets and free speech, was underway in dozens of developing countries. The World Bank and imf promises in Bangkok were starting to pay off, it seemed, despite those nasty riots. For most of the world’s poor, this was at last a time when the rise of individual rights and opportunities would overcome the ages of dictatorship, monopolies and state control, a season of victories for students, entrepreneurs and subsistence farmers who for generations were the serfs of the developing world. Biharipur, I hoped, would be one of the new liberation zones.

But Suman Sahai was more ambivalent about the village’s prospects. “Biharipur is five kilometres from Tilhar town,” she had told us before we set off. “Five kilometres is not such a distance. One would think that if the nucleus is strong and developed, the benefits would filter down to the peripheral villages. But that has not happened there. Biharipur is isolated and untouched.” She spoke with the remorse of her heritage. Suman’s ancestors included the royal princes who once ruled the countryside around Tilhar. They were gone, but a new class of lambardars had taken their place–and so little else had changed.

We found the big tree described by the chai wallah, and turned on to a narrow tarred road, which followed a lazy path of broad curves, unannounced bumps, potholes filled with broken bricks and sudden turns around barren rice paddies that were so whimsical they seemed to be the design of a mad engineer, or a contractor trying to unload a lot of asphalt. We passed a fishing pond, a small hamlet of mud huts and more rice fields, and soon the national highway was well behind us. Still no one had heard of Biharipur, but more and more people knew of Rajinder Singh Yadav. “Over the railway tracks, and straight,” a young man on a bicycle told us. “You follow a dirt track to another dirt track and turn left at the next dirt track. He is living there.”

Sleepy, the driver who came with our rental car, balked. He had barely said two words since we’d left New Delhi the previous day, covering one of the world’s most dangerous highways with little comment and his eyes half-shut. But now Sleepy looked ready to argue. It was not so much the railway tracks that threatened the undercarriage of his low-riding V-8 Contessa Classic, the car favoured by north Indian gangsters, but the road beyond the tracks, which looked as if it had been bombed recently by the Pakistani air force. Sleepy told us to walk.

With our backpacks, water bottles and Suman’s letter of introduction, Rama and I set off by foot, down the bumpy dirt road, on to a narrow footpath and across the glorious golden wheat fields of a north Indian winter. It was still early. The mist had not yet risen from the small forests, while a thick dew covered the wheat. As we walked, a gentle winter breeze rustled through the fields, shaking the young wheat stalks as though it was shuffling paper. Hawks soared high above us, looking for snakes and field mice. In the distance, on a small hillock where someone had built a little one-room temple, kingfishers darted from tree to tree. We were in the heart of civilization, and there was not a person in sight or a human sound in the air.

We continued along the narrow embankment, trying to spot Biharipur on the horizon, but I was too concerned with staying on the footpath, away from the snake-infested fields, to keep an eye out for anything. I probably would have missed the boy across the field had he not yelled to us. He called again and ran along the embankment, barefoot, as nimble as a squirrel on a tree branch. The boy wanted to know where we were going, but Rama, the cautious one, wanted to know first who he was.

“Dhanvir,” the boy said. “A Dalit. From the next village.”

The Dalits are the people once known as “untouchables” in the pernicious Hindu caste hierarchy. Dhanvir said he was in the fields watching water pumps for the higher-caste landlords. Rather than getting an education, he spent his time watching water gush from the ground through a machine of nineteenth-century design. Rama asked Dhanvir if he knew the way to Biharipur, which he did. It was his village. Rajinder probably was his landlord, I thought. The boy pointed across the fields to a clump of mango trees, and beyond it, beneath the mist that was melting in the winter sun, to something resembling a medieval compound, a cluster of mud buildings packed tightly together.

We thanked Dhanvir and continued to walk to the village, which seemed more like an outgrowth of the mango grove than a planned settlement. There were no signposts, electrical wires, telephone poles, sewers, ditches or pavement to interrupt the natural landscape. At first glance, the only evidence of modern development was a cement culvert that connected the rice fields with a buffalo pond.

A few boys,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: RH CANADA
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0679310258
• ISBN 13: 9780679310259
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 382
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Yeepin GmbH; 492000000000; sunshine12232@outlook.com; ; Alleestr.11; Kaiserslautern; Rheinland-Pfalz; 67655; Deutschland