What does it mean to be poor? Does it mean being a single mother with two kids in New York City, waiting for the next
paycheck in order to buy groceries? Does it mean living with almost no furniture in your apartment because your income
doesn’t allow for extras like beds or chairs? Or does it mean having to live with the distended bellies of the chronically
malnourished throughout the peripheral nations of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia? Poverty has a thousand faces and a
thousand gradations; there is no single definition that pulls together every part of the spectrum. You might feel you are
poor if you can’t afford cable television or buy your own car. Every time you see a fellow student with a new laptop and
smartphone you might feel that you, with your ten-year-old desktop computer, are barely keeping up. However, someone
else might look at the clothes you wear and the calories you consume and consider you rich.