[English version below]
Je connaissais une petite fille très riche. Un jour, son professeur lui a demandé de faire une rédaction sur une famille pauvre. La fille était étonnée:
“Une famille pauvre?! Qu’est-ce que c’est ça?”
Elle a demandé à sa mère:
“Maman, Maman, qu’est-ce que c’est une famille pauvre? Je n’arrive pas à faire ma rédaction.”
La mère lui a répondu:
“C’est simple, chérie. Une famille est pauvre quand tout le monde dans la famille est pauvre”
La petite fille a pensé:
“Ah! Ce n’est pas difficile”
et elle a fait sa rédaction. Le lendemain, le professeur lui a dit:
“Bon, lis-moi ta rédaction.”
Voici la réponse:
“Une famille pauvre. Il était une fois une famille pauvre. Le père était pauvre, la mère était pauvre, les enfants étaient pauvres, le jardinier était pauvre, le chauffeur était pauvre, les bonnes étaient pauvres. Voilà, la famille était très pauvre!”
I once knew a rich girl. One day, her teacher at school asked her to write a piece on a poor family. The girl was shocked. “What in the world is a poor family?”
So she asked her mother, “Mummy, mummy, you’ve got to help me with my composition. What is a poor family?”
Her mother said, “That’s really simple, sweetheart. A family is poor when everybody in the family is poor.”
The rich girl thought, “Aha, that is not too difficult,” and she wrote up a piece.
The next day, her teacher asked her, “Well, let’s hear your composition.”
Here is what the girl said, “A Poor Family. Once upon a time, there was a poor family. The father was poor, the mother was poor, the children were poor, the gardener was poor, the driver was poor, the maids were poor. So the family was very poor!”
Such rich children with no idea of poverty are there every where. They need to be sensitized as there will be mostly a need for them sometime in life to come to the reality of poverty. Some lucky ones escape, without going through this during their life time.
Sensible parents will have to expose the children to the realities of life
N T Nair
That also reminds me of another story -> Grandmother asked the kid to watch for thief, to call for help, while she went for work. When she came back, something was stolen. The kid said, “I did not see any thief, an uncle came here and took something, that’s all”. May be a thief is our own creation, innocence can only see other lives, not a thief. Similarly, I might say, poor people are our own creation too, part of the economy, innocence/commonsense may not understand it.
Jaya