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I don't know what western country you live in, but I'm guessing you have a very different definition of poverty than the article is using. The UN has a list of criteria such as:

- Lacking access to electricity

- Lacking access to drinking water within a 30 minute round-trip walk

- Lacking access to sanitation facilities

- No household members have completed at least 6 years of schooling

- Any child in the household has stunted growth due to malnutrition

You need at least a third of the criteria to be true in order for a household to be considered in poverty.

It's likely that practically no one in your country meets this definition.



During my childhood I fulfilled the first three for about four years or so and knew many others in similar situations. This was in the US, any country with significant undeveloped land is going to have areas that have people who fulfill the first three pretty easily.


Just out of curiosity, how far did you have to walk to fetch water, what was the source, how much did you carry back at a time, and how often did you do this? Sorry for so many questions, but I always think of the U.S. as such a developed country that it's interesting to hear counterexamples.


Every year I lived in a different location but the shortest was a bit more than half an hour trip by bike and I could only safely manage a single gallon. Usually though we'd get water when we hitchhiked into town as we could get more at once. Both of these sources came from water resupply points for trucks but no on cared if you filled a few gallon containers. Rain water was also usable in many cases but we avoided drinking it. We went out maybe once a week or so?


I’m not calling you a liar, but I am heavily skeptical. Where and when did this occur within the continental United States?


I never said continental, this was on the Big Island in Hawaii. Though I would be shocked if there weren't similar places in the large patches of undeveloped land in the west side of the US.




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