Poverty

No one can deny that our public housing developments are deeply troubled places. Isolated in the poorest sections of RTC Baltimore with few decent employment opportunities, residents of public housing find it hard to travel up the ladder of success. The provision of services in these communities has taken precedence over providing opportunity. It is a disempowering policy that turns public-housing residents into consumers, not producers.This policy perpetuates dependency and creates the expectation that generation after generation of public-housing residents will live in abject poverty in subsidized housing that has served to contain the poor, particularly the African-American poor.

LONDON -- By what yardstick does India wish to be measured as it celebrates this month (along with Pakistan) the 50th anniversary of independence as a sovereign country?As the world's largest functioning democracy it has clearly achieved renown. Every day by example it contradicts the lie that China is too big to be ruled any other way than by dictatorship.As a military power it has an unshakable superiority over all its neighbors, save China. And if India's rulers remain wise, as they have been since Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's tragic mistake, not long after independence, to go to war with China over an unimportant peace of Himalayan real estate, that power equation need never again be tested.

WASHINGTON -- Ten years have passed since President Bill Clinton signed a tough welfare-reform law. I feared the worst. It feels good to be wrong. The worst has not happened, but the success is mixed. Mr. Clinton signed the law, with Republican support, to fulfill a campaign promise to "end welfare as we know it" and to make welfare "a second chance, not a way of life." The law was not as tough as two Republican-based bills that Mr. Clinton vetoed that would have cut Medicaid, child care and other benefits for those moving from welfare to work.

For all his talk of "compassionate conservatism," President Bush has done remarkably little to empower America's poor. What a contrast with his predecessor, Bill Clinton, who radically reformed welfare, moved millions of people off the dole and into jobs, and made a serious dent in poverty. The Bush administration's inaction leaves it to America's next president to pick up where Mr. Clinton left off. But while Mr. Clinton's reforms encouraged welfare recipients - mostly single mothers with children - to work, it's time to focus on the other side of the poverty equation: the men who father their children.

THE DETERMINATION of the government of Baltimore, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to break up high concentrations of black poverty in the city is understandable. It is desirable. But it won't work.Not the way they want to do it. The way they want to do it is take poor residents of the worst-off neighborhoods in the city and move them to Anne Arundel, Baltimore and Howard counties. There are two things wrong with this. In the first place, the counties will resist, successfully, for they are more powerful politically than the city.

LAOJIE, China -- Far away from China's boom towns and beautiful people is Hu Bangjing, an intense 12-year-old who lives alone in a small hut with two pigs.Her goal is to be an elementary school teacher. Anything to get out of the mud and subsistence farming that has been her family's lot for generations and that 16 years of capitalist-style economic reforms have done little to improve.In this remote part of China's rugged southwest, poverty is not relative, it's absolute. Many people wonder how they will feed themselves, and up to 30 percent of children do not attendschool, some because their families can't afford to clothe them.

HERE IN broken West Baltimore, some things never change. The man stands on his North Avenue front porch yesterday morning, with several of its wooden front steps collapsed, and masking tape where a window used to be, and the house looks as if it hasn't seen a paint job since the municipal changeover to electricity. But the man has a sign next to his front door. It says, "Believe." Who can figure such a sense of faith? Here in West Baltimore, Catherine E. Pugh tries to figure it out sometimes, and it makes her brain ache.

ALEXANDRA, South Africa - Young boys are gliding down a dirt hill on toboggans made from car fenders. Goats graze on trash in the street. Rickety shacks stand in schoolyards, old factory compounds and almost every other patch of ground. Two miles from this township of 500,000 people stand the gleaming office towers of Sandton, the wealthiest suburb of Johannesburg, where many Alexandrans work as maids, laborers or retail clerks, if they are fortunate enough to have jobs. President Bush and other leaders of the Group of Eight industrial nations began meeting last night in Scotland to debate British Prime Minister Tony Blair's proposal to double aid to Africa, to $50 billion a year.

When the General Assembly began this year, the Maryland Alliance for the Poor handed out cookies to remind legislators, "Don't let poverty programs crumble."Three months later, advocates seem to be in agreement that the cookie didn't crumble, but it has grown decidedly stale.Appropriations for homeless issues and welfare grants stood still this year -- the first time in more than a decade that welfare grants were not increased.Advocates for the poor won an important victory when the state pledged for the first time to supplement a federal nutrition program, although the supplement won't start for another year.

"RIGOROUS poverty has been our safeguard,'' Mother Teresa once observed. ''We do not want, as has been the case with other religious orders throughout history, to begin serving the poor and then gradually move toward serving the rich. In order for us to understand and to help those who lack everything,'' she continued, ''we have to live as they live.''If any one word can explain Mother Teresa, the controversial Roman Catholic nun, whom some believe to be a saint, it's poverty. Members of the Missionaries of Charity, the religious order she founded in Calcutta, India, not only take a vow of poverty, as other religious orders do. They also live it. Missionaries of Charity see poverty as freedom, and believe the fewer material things one has, the fewer things one has to take care of.This way, the sisters can care for ''the poorest of the poor,'' whom they vow to serve.