If you were face to face with poverty, what would you say?

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about poverty. Just like anything else, it's relative to where you are, where you're from and what your given society's standards tell you that poverty is. However, as I look around my surroundings for a better understanding of every day living of the Khmer people, I start to wonder: what does being "poor" really mean and what are we supposed to do about it?

For most of my life, I thought poor was your mom getting a welfare check every month from the government, paying for groceries with food stamps and not wearing name-brand clothing from the mall. I thought going to school, using a toilet, hot water, wearing shoes and three meals a day were a given. Not in reality. I was just blessed enough to have been born in a country where most of these things are a given, even to the poorest of Americans.

Then I walk out on my balcony and look down on the street. Everyday there are several kids outside playing and riding bikes or running around. Most of them do not wear shoes, one little boy in particular never even wears clothes (although sometimes he will wear a t-shirt). I automatically feel sorry for them, but I wonder if I should. They seem happy. They play and laugh and fight just like all kids do. Is there anything I can do to help these kids have a more promising future? Or is this the life they were given? Or do they even want help? I don't know. I have no answers to these questions.

I see the old man, skin brown and leathery from years of working in the sun, pulling a cart piled high with coconuts down the busy road, barely escaping the passing motorbikes as they whiz by, and wonder: where did he come from? Is he happy? How did this man end up pulling a cart of coconuts down the road? Does he know he's poor? Or does he just accept his life and make the best of it? I don't know.

I see the woman in tattered clothes and dirty hair and no shoes, going from car to car in the middle of a busy intersection, hold her sleeping little girl in her arms, showing the daughter to each driver, hoping that someone will feel sorry and give her money. What does she think each morning when she wakes up? How did her life bring her to use her child to beg for money? Does she have hope? Or did she give up hope a long time ago?

The naked kids, the coconut man, the child and her mother: are these their destinies? Was is their destiny to be born in Cambodia and be poor and struggle everyday to survive? to live? I don't know: only God knows the answer to these questions. I do have one answer though: given the fact that I was blessed with the means and ability to help others, I will do all I can to help even just one person. To help shape the future of just one life is more than I could ever ask for. If it is their destiny to be poor, then it must be my destiny to help them. What is yours?