POVERTY -- THE SOVEREIGN

Friends,

as university routine has got its firm grip on our weekly timetable and as we are back to our usual activities like correcting exams and student papers that have the nasty custom to pile up on our desks until they reach the ceiling, there is one thing where routine never gets a stronghold, that is, the very and every time different development of the seminar sessions themselves.

This afternoon, we were dealing with the topic of economic policies combined with social welfare programmes drafted and implemented in the post-apartheid era in South Africa under Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki respectively, and their effectiveness or rather ineffectiveness on the every day living conditions and perspectives with regard to health, education and work for the vast, black majority of the South African people, and contrasted South African economic and social plans with those implemented in Venezuela, targeting the same problem: poverty.  

When the last of the five students, who had presented their papers on the topic this afternoon, was speaking, suddenly and literally out of nowhere an old woman appeared in the door of the classroom, emaciated, desperate, her fist clasping a scrap of paper, imploring all of us present for a contribution to buy a medicine.  

"Abstract", "clean" and "distant" poverty, the concept poverty we had been discussing just a few minutes before in terms of economic variables, had adopted, for this specific moment, at this specific and rather "poverty-unsuspecting" place as is a university classroom, an individual face - old, female, creased from pain and sorrow. There she stood in the door-frame, clad in what was probably her only piece of garment, holding up a torn-off piece of paper where somebody had scribbled down the name of a medication she urgently required yet which was inaccessible for her to buy, desperately begging for a monetary contribution. "Come in", said Franz in a friendly voice, "we´ve just been talking about you. In fact, we are talking about you every day". He handed her a contribution, and when she was about to approach the students and make her petition, he politely asked her to wait until the class was over and to take a seat meanwhile.

Before a completely stunned student audience, which visibly felt uncomfortable in the face of this peculiar situation, the woman actually did take a seat somewhere among the crowd and as the speaker proceeded, hesitatingly and slightly taken aback, with the presentation of his paper, she listened just like anyone else. About twenty minutes later, after the general concentration of the students had long been directed back and fully focused upon the topic presented by the speaker, she had disappeared - somehow gotten up and walked out of the door almost as unnoticed as she had entered.

"She", said Franz after the woman had gone, "is the sovereign. She is, where sovereignty resides untransferably, she is, where the political power and its institutions emanate from, and to whom the latter ones are subordinate. She is the majority of Venezuelans, Latin Americans, Africans, Asians, planetarians. She is, what the Bolivarian Revolution refers to, and why it has come about in the first place, the very reason of every social revolution that takes its task and itself serious. As long as we see her, we know there is still so much to do, so little done!"

As true as it is, that we have seen the faces of poverty a thousandfold, have handed our contribution a thousandfold to a begging hand, as true is it, that this afternoon, our academic reflections have uniquely and directly been matched by reality, in the face of which Franz did not decide to close the door, as I´m sure many, if not most of his colleagues would have done.

Jutta.