Unpoverty-+Jones

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UnPoverty Communications, 2010

=Book Review: //UnPoverty: Rich Lessons From the Working Poor//= By Mark Lutz Compassion International Hardback, $20.99; paper, $14.99; 156 pages Includes a CD by Joshua Lutz, the author’s son, with five songs based on the book’s themes ||
 * **Understanding the Underprivileged**
 * Review by Laura Lynn Brown** ||  ||
 * UnPoverty: Rich Lessons From the Working Poor

Mark Lutz is acquainted with some of the most resourceful people in the world. Like Eduardo in El Salvador, who by day transforms his small family home into a tailoring business that employs his neighbors, and by night into a house church. And the Filipinos who rebuilt businesses destroyed by Mount Pinatubo’s eruption with bricks made from volcanic ash. And there’s Esther in Zimbabwe, who … well, you’ll just have to read about amazing Esther. Lutz, who grew up in South Africa as the son of missionaries, believes Jesus’ statement “the poor will be with you always” does not mean poverty is eternal. In his book UnPoverty: Rich Lessons from the Working Poor, he is a persuasive evangelist for the belief that ending extreme poverty is a realistic goal. [|Give the gift of hope!] By extreme poverty, Lutz means the 1.3 billion people who subsist on less than a dollar a day. He’s spent 25 years traveling to appallingly impoverished places, meeting people whose gutters flow not with runoff from neighbors’ lawn sprinklers but with raw sewage, who scavenge dumps instead of garage sales—and who are lifting themselves, families, even neighbors to a better life, one microloan at a time. Lutz is a senior vice president at Opportunity International, a nonprofit organization that provides microfinance (loans, insurance, savings and training) to 2 million people working their way out of extreme poverty. It works; only about 2 percent of recipients default on their loans. He defines “unpoverty” as a state with a trinity of goals: eradicating poverty, reversing perpetual deprivation and providing basic human needs. His stories of people who have benefited from loans as small as $30 make compelling reading, in part because he renders them as the human beings they are—people with dignity whose obstacles are simply a circumstance of their birth. The book also advances another of Lutz’ premises: to suggest that material abundance fosters other kinds of poverty, and that those of us with plenty can learn something about other kinds of riches from the very poor. “If you hang out with the poor long enough,” he says, “you find your own attitudes changing.” Chapters are named for these intangible riches, among them community, gratitude, persistence, self-reliance and ingenuity. And Lutz is humble in confessing how he’s been shamed by observing the poor; when moving away from a house he’d spent years renovating, he wept in regret that he hadn’t spent more of those hours with his children. This is a book one reads for content, not style. Lutz can be overly descriptive, particularly in a section on India. His generosity of spirit toward these working poor may tend to gloss over problematic realities of their lives. And while the interweaving of his work and his Christianity (not so much “What would Jesus do?” as “What did Jesus mean?”) is genuine, his talk of faith may be uncomfortable for some readers; a description of one prayer experience will be taxing even for many Christian readers. But Lutz’ desire to decrease poverty is admirable, and he wants to get others involved. For those motivated to join “the unpoverty revolution,” an epilogue recommends seven charities that each address a specific aspect of poverty, including Heifer International.

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