How to Live on $2 a Day

Many of my Beninese friends, neighbors, and students live under the extreme poverty line of $1.90 per person per day. This is not particularly abnormal; just as many people live on under this sum as live on over $13,000 per person per year, or $52,000 for a family of four. The extreme poverty line, on the other hand, is $693 per person per year, or $2,772 for a family of four. This is really calculated to be equivalent to what $1.90 per day could buy and factors in how prices are lower in many poor countries (see the bottom of this post for more information on how this is calculated).

So, how do people live on such little money? While I think many people in wealthy countries have heard stats about extreme poverty, they either haven’t thought through how people could live on this amount of money or assume that people living in extreme poverty are starving and on the cusp of death. Yes, life expectancy is lower, infant mortality is higher, and malnourishment is common, but by and large people manage to get by and get on with life. My Peace Corps stipend of $250 a month left me much more comfortable than most people in my rural Beninese community, but here’s how people made it work with under $1.90 a day.

1. Eat on the cheap

In the US eating on the cheap could mean ramen noodles. A type of ramen noodles is in fact available where I live in Benin but only the richest people can afford them, so people are generally eating meals much cheaper than that. Their key is to make themselves full out of cheap ingredients. The most common meal people eat in Benin is called pate: corn flour mixed with water until it reaches a mashed potato-like consistency. It’s often eaten with a sauce from tomatoes or leaves. Proteins are typically not present. Fish, beans, or local soy tofu are affordable from time to time, but meat or eggs are available only on special occasions. This meal isn’t particularly nutritious, but it is filling. When people aren’t eating pate, they eat different variations of flour and water. One can ferment it, eat it in a porridge-like consistency, or use manioc flour instead of corn flour. But the vast majority of meals they eat come from the basic formula of flour and water.

To keep meals cheap, people try to use local ingredients and process as much as possible themselves. To make pate, they’ll get corn kernels grown locally, grind them, grind tomatoes or leaves for the sauce, and cook everything on a stove heated by firewood or charcoal. Vegetables are limited to what is grown in the area: tomatoes, onions, okra, and various leaves. Fruits like mangoes or pineapples are widespread when they’re in season, but there are long stretches of the year where no fruits are in season. During these times, people just don’t eat fruit.

2. Focus on the essentials for your house

People in my community tend to live in mud-brick houses or cement houses—which are sturdier but more expensive—with tins roofs. The houses generally have two to three rooms. There might be some chairs or a table, couches if you want to spend big, but generally the rooms are sparsely furnished; they also need to have enough space for people to sleep and often to store the materials people use to make a living, whether that’s the various goods they sell or their tools for farming. There might be a religious ornament or a photo of a deceased family member on the wall. People tend to sleep on reed mats on the floor. While a fair number of houses have latrines outside, a majority of people go to a wooded area and do their business. Some people in my community have electricity, some don’t. People who do have electricity use it sparingly to keep down the electricity bill. People tend to hang out outside instead of in their houses; houses are hot and not well-lit if you aren’t using electricity, and if you’re outside you get to see all your friends passing by!

3. Use transportation cheaply and sparingly

Basically no one in my community owns a car. People who are well-off might have a couple motorcycles in the family, people who are doing alright might have one for the family, and people who are struggling won’t have any. Even so, the motorcycle is reserved for the adult man in the family, and thus almost all women and children have no way of getting around except walking. People thus tend to stay close to home when possible, but some tasks like going to the farm, market, or collecting firewood require walking long distances—frequently with a heavy load on one’s head and, for women, often with a baby on their back. When one does travel to different parts of the country, for business or to see family members, it entails putting five to seven people in a five-seater car. More typically, however, people simply don’t travel—many people in my community have never travelled as far as the cities 45 minutes away.

4. Fill up on water at the well

Running water is virtually nonexistent where I live. People fill up jerrycans, buckets, or basins at pumps and wells and carry it home. This can be far, and water is really heavy. Even carrying a bucket of water for five minutes was difficult for me. And people need to carry a lot of water, as they use it for all things one needs water for—bathing, washing clothes, washing dishes, cooking, and drinking. This water is not particularly clean. While one could boil and filter water, this is a pain and adds more cooking costs, so no one really does that. As a result, people expose themselves to parasites.

5. Choose your luxuries carefully

People living in extreme poverty aren’t constantly fighting for survival. Like anyone, they like to have fun or comfort and want to buy things that help them do so. However, they have little money they can devote to this purpose, so they can only choose a very limited number of things. Most people have cell phones, and thus are able to use them for business or to keep in touch with family, but their phones often aren’t charged and they rarely have credit to call people. Even when they do buy credit they rarely have calls lasting more than 20 seconds; longer calls are more expensive.

When they can find a little money to spare, some people buy their children better school supplies or books. Others buy a better stove that makes cooking faster and easier. Some people, primarily men, buy alcohol. Some sources of entertainment, like a soccer ball or a TV, aren’t widely owned but are widely shared. A soccer team will often have one ball between all the players and practice with it together, while people without TVs will frequently spend their evenings at the house of someone who does have one.

6. Avoid bad breaks or face crisis

Up to this point I’ve described a life that has few amenities but is one that people are used to. They normally don’t go to bed hungry, are able to keep clean and sheltered, and have their sources of fun and fulfillment. Money is arranged so as to cover basic needs—until something goes wrong. More than deprivation, the thing I’ve found to haunt people living in extreme poverty the most is precarity. They can make things work with the money they have, but they have almost nothing saved to carry them through rough times.

One source of crisis is a failure in their source of income. A business venture could not work out. More commonly, as most people in my community are farmers, crops could fail. Sometimes it is just a particular farmer’s crops that don’t work out, but a lack of rain or a drop in price puts all farmers into difficulty. It’s doubly damaging when all farmers are struggling; there are few people you can ask for help.

Perhaps the largest source of crisis, however, is health. While illness is part of life everywhere, malnutrition, dirty drinking water, open defecation, and living in a malaria-endemic zone all increase people’s vulnerability to health problems. A serious illness requires significant expenses on health care, which almost always surpasses people’s savings. While preventative care could resolve some health problems before they become serious, people don’t want to spend on health care at an early stage as the person might just get better anyway. Getting treatment is risky too; it’s more expensive to get medicine at the health center or pharmacy, but other vendors often sell fake medicine or medicine that isn’t appropriate for the person’s illness. Even when a person goes to the pharmacy or health center they can struggle to take the medicine properly. Many people are illiterate and can’t read the instructions, and in any case medicine bottles often come from abroad and are written in English, Chinese, or other languages people don’t understand.

Once a family decides to treat a seriously ill person, even if they recover the family will often be left significantly in debt; for an illness like cancer, the treatment would be so far beyond anyone’s income or the capabilities or the local health center that the person would simply die. Crucially, death or chronic illness to a wage-earner leaves the family in permanent difficulty. Although community members are very supportive they have relatively little to offer, and families can rarely make up the lost income. If they’re lucky they will have relatives able to take them in, but frequently the result is working even longer hours for little pay, going hungry, and pulling kids out of school.

And this risk of crisis is crucial to my understanding of living in extreme poverty. Hundreds of millions of people do make things work on under $2 a day. There are real difficulties and many of the opportunities we have in rich countries are out of their wildest dreams. Still, people take pride in what they have, they laugh and joke and have fun, and they do what they can to create a brighter future for their children. But they are always, always, on the edge.

 

Note: In calculating the extreme poverty line, income is adjusted to reflect what $1.90 would actually buy in dollars. Thus, In Benin an absolute income of $0.72 is judged equivalent to $1.90 per day given how prices are significantly lower in Benin than the US. However, that income is per person per day. So, if one wage-earner is providing for four people, that $0.72 would have to be multiplied by four to remain at the poverty line, thus requiring a daily income of $2.88.

ASSK and the Problem of Advocates’ Remorse

Criticism of Aung San Suu Kyi has increasingly mounted in recent weeks for her denial and tacit acceptance of mass killings and ethnic cleansing of Rohingya, with many even calling for her Nobel Peace Prize to be revoked. For me, some of the most wrenching criticism to watch has come from advocates that once idolized her. They have been forced to take down posters of her that have stood in their house for decades, or discovered that a prized photograph of them with a human rights hero had suddenly transformed into a ghastly image of them beaming next to an accomplice to crimes against humanity. Even more sadly, this is hardly the first time that actors human rights advocates have championed as the solution to mass atrocities have become perpetrators themselves. This pattern is far too frequent to be ignored, and if we want to move towards the more just world advocates do so genuinely want, we must take its implications seriously.

Like Myanmar, South Sudan presents a case where almost all are deeply disillusioned with the actors advocates once promoted. Few cases have demanded as much attention in mass atrocity prevention circles as South Sudan, and South Sudanese are currently facing mass killings and are on the brink of famine. Yet this time the conflict originates in a 2013 split in the leadership of the SPLM, the organization that American advocates championed for decades, ultimately playing a crucial role in pushing South Sudan to independence.

Such cases stretch quite a bit further than Myanmar and South Sudan. A clear case that comes to mind are the enormous atrocities carried out by Communist governments, with the responses of foreign leftists ranging from disillusionment to denial. More recently, in Syria, Western advocates have often backed opposition forces that have carried out torture and executions, used child soldiers, and maintained uncomfortably close relationships with extremist groups. Paul Kagame, so often praised for bringing the Rwandan genocide to an end and building development success, has masterfully used this political capital to carry out mass killings in the DRC and tighten authoritarianism within Rwanda. And in South Africa, the government officials that oversee massive self-enrichment and shootings of striking miners are often the same ones that heroically fought against apartheid a few decades ago. Indeed, when looking at countries facing violence and authoritarianism, it is quite a bit easier to find ex-heroes than heroes.

For some of these fallen heroes, the abuses were not fully clear until they had taken power. More frequently, however, advocates turned a blind eye to warning signs. The SPLA carried out mass killings throughout their war for independence, including resulting from conflicts between different factions of the independence movement. Similarly, the RPF conducted mass killings prior to, during, and in the immediate aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. Aung San Suu Kyi has long held a blind spot towards the abuses of the Rohingya.

In many respects it is easy to understand why this is such an common trap for advocates to fall into. When Omar al-Bashir, Bashar al-Assad, or Burma’s military government are the points of comparison, seemingly minor warning signs seem a lot less severe. And in the face of massive injustices, seeing brave activists sincerely and eloquently denounce injustice is compelling.

Yet time and time again, these same heroes later turn out to be disappointments. If I could draw one conclusion from this pattern it would be this: advocates place far more faith in agency than they do structure, only to be disillusioned when structure has its say. In the face of Myanmar’s military government, the story became Aung San Suu Kyi’s moral righteousness and bravery rather than the political force she represented. Only now, after she has overseen horrific abuses of the Rohingya, do we see that she was an imperfect vessel of democratic progress within a system of institutionally entrenched authoritarianism and exclusion.

In an extremely thoughtful piece, Max Fisher and Amanda Taub write that “Myanmar’s transition to democracy was ascribed to Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s heroism. Now its persecution of Rohingya is ascribed to her cowardice. Maybe she was always more a symptom of Myanmar’s best and worst than she was their cause.” Surely the same holds true of the SPLM and Paul Kagame.

As Fisher and Taub argue, it is far easier to see heroes and villains than systems. But this world of heroes and villains begs the questions of why authoritarian countries so often find those who are supposed to be liberators from authoritarianism turn out to be authoritarians themselves, and why war-torn countries so regularly get new leaders just as violent as the old ones, and why previously persecuted minorities, once having gained power, end up persecuting others. Could it be that countries like Myanmar and South Sudan have populations unusually devoid of moral sentiments? And that they have irregularly high concentrations of malicious and villainous people?

Far more likely is that people in these countries, just as we are, are largely products of their environments. While some agency remains, it is nearly impossible to come from a place where violence, abuses of power, and exclusion are norms and emerged without having internalized some of these norms. Even if one were to hold the purest of intentions and consciences, creating change requires gaining power, including all the morally ambiguous trade-offs and hard to swallow compromises that come with it. When the ceiling for our heroes is slowly muddling through towards a better society, overseeing unsavory practices in the process, it is a far shorter fall to a floor of ghastly atrocities.

So when the next generation of heroes comes along, whether that be Lucha’s efforts to finally bring accountability to the DRC or Mohamed Mohamed’s charming story and work to rebuild Somalia, or Raila Odinga’s successful attempt to re-do Kenya’s presidential election due to irregularities, we should be much more cautious. It may very well be that these are heroic individuals using the agency they do have to move towards justice, but that is by no means incompatible with the idea that they could be subject to many of the flaws of their environments and be forced into morally dubious decisions.

Or they may simply let us down, and we should remember not to let our hope for change in the face of horrors blind us to the failures of our heroes. But above all we should remember that it isn’t really about them, our selected band of heroes. Young activists that risk death for their ideals are far more compelling than abstract ideas of the rule of law, competent bureaucracies, and the just distribution of political representation, but our heroes are far more likely to let us down than the ideals they represent. And we would be well-served keeping our focus on the slow, messy, and essential work to transition to more just societies rather than chaining ourselves to a flawed group of individuals highly constrained by the injustice we seek to fight.

 

*This piece was originally published in 2017. After its citation in a New York Times piece caused the Peace Corps problems I agreed to take it down, and I reposted it at the end of my Peace Corps service in 2019.