…And yet now that I am older, less easily frightened by images of poverty, now that I know poverty can also contain riches - deep friendships, for instance, or a faithful, devoted love - I wonder more than ever about the inner life of those who have been up and now are down. There’s always the outsiders look at an impoverished life: it seems pitiful, a waste, a shame. Yet seen from within the poverty, perhaps a different reality might be sketched. A reality of lessons learned the hard, hard way that lessons are learned.
‘The way forward is with a broken heart by Alice Walker’
