The poor cannot be expected to wait

Poverty is a fact of life. Those who live in it know it. Those who deny it do not know it. Those with a sense of community combat it. Caritas Malta is at the forefront of Maltese society, actively offering relief to people in need through the various services it offers free-of-charge, including those to persons in abject want of essential commodities, living in a state of chronic deprivation.

Caritas Malta is this year highlighting the existence of poverty in Malta through its campaign Ilqa’ l-Isfida: Ġib il-Faqar fix-Xejn (Take Up The Challenge: Eradicate Poverty) This is in line with the action taken by the European Commission when it declared 2010 as the European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion (EY2010).

The European Union is not happy that, 10 years after adopting the Lisbon Strategy, 16 per cent of its citizens are living in poverty and social exclusion. That amounts to 80 million Europeans. EU commitment to combat poverty surged forward when Community ministers of employment and social welfare recently added material deprivation and jobless households to the criteria for identifying poverty. The EU is now adopting a strategy – EU2020 – for the next 10 years during which it plans to draw 20 million of these people out of their plight.

Caritas Europa, of which Caritas Malta is a member, is happy that the EU is sharpening its focus on combating poverty and social exclusion. However, it is not too excited with the EU2020 plan as it is estimated that the upheavals in the banking and financial sectors over the past three years have themselves spawned an additional 20 million Europeans living below the poverty line. Some of these are the newly unemployed but many others are the working poor whose income today is barely adequate to cope with the rising cost of living, let alone with extraordinary expenses.

As Marius Wanders, secretary general of Caritas Europa, said in Malta at the launch of the Caritas Malta campaign, “increasing numbers of people fall into poverty in spite of having a job: they simply cannot afford their housing, heating and food bills anymore. These are the new Caritas ‘clients’; these are the ‘working poor’. We are beginning to understand that some of the traditional middle classes will become poorer”. That realisation has spurred Caritas Europa to launch its Europe-wide Zero Poverty Campaign within the framework of the EU’s strategy for EY2010.

Caritas Malta director Mgr Victor Grech believes that poverty can be reduced if there is a strong political will on the part of EU member states and if the human person is placed at the centre of our strategies in the context of the needs and responsibilities of the family.

The extent of poverty in Malta gained profile when the National Office of Statistics registered that 14.7 per cent of the population living in Malta in the year 2007 was living at risk of poverty. That amounts to over 57,000 Maltese persons. Those at the highest risk are children under 16 and older persons over 65 years of age.

Statistics offer measurement by numbers. However, behind every number there is a human being who, more often than not, seeks to preserve his dignity by hiding the state in which he lives. That may camouflage poverty but it does not take away any of the hardship poverty causes. In the words of Archbishop Paul Cremona, it is no mean task to uncover the face of poverty. That task he has entrusted to Caritas Malta, whom he has described as the Church’s voice on the social realities of our community.

Caritas Malta seeks to address this issue by:

• Raising more awareness about the real needs of the poor.

• Widening its outreach programmes, particularly through its Diaconia commissions in parishes.

• Empowering people in difficulty to better their quality of life.

• Making material deprivation visible so that the poor would not be denied a just share of the common good.

Caritas Malta’s campaign aims to highlight this social issue with a view to raise the intensity of action at all levels to lead to a more cohesive society. The urgency of such action resounds in Mgr Grech’s call that “The poor cannot wait”.

The author is officer responsible for PR and fund-raising at Caritas Malta.