A few years ago, a friend’s intelligent and well-read teenage son saw Hotel Rwanda and said, “I didn’t know they had houses in Africa. I thought they all lived in shacks.” I suspect that was a common reaction. Wars, famines and floods may make for good entertainment, but the media’s relentless portrayal of the developing world as a cauldron of endless disasters is so seriously skewed that most Westerners have no understanding of what life there is really like.

This was a short excerpt from an article from the most recent issue of Maisonneuve magazine. It almost seems too hard to believe that anyone could think there were no houses in Africa but if I say the word poverty to you, the first images that pop into your head are probably from those old World Vision ads like this one:

You may know there are houses in Africa but there are a lot of other things you probably don’t know about the poor. Aid groups need money to do the work they do but sometimes I think that the humanity of the very people whose lives they are trying to better get lost in the shuffle. But there have been a couple of efforts recently to try and bring a more realistic face to those 2 billion living in poverty. There are lot more like us “rich” people than those world vision ads let on.

“What was this person doing a few moments before the photographer arrived? Or an hour later? Did the photographer exchange a few words with her subject, or just snap the shot on her way to somewhere else?” Those are questions that Laura Freschi (blogger at Aid Watch) asked herself whenever she saw pictures of poor people. Duncan McNicholl, at his blog waterwellness.ca, helps answer that question by demonstrating the power of the photo shoot. By taking two photos of people living below the poverty line, one embracing the looking poor stereotype and another with the subject “looking at their finest”, we can see that these people’s lives are far from uni-dimensional. The post has a couple more example you can see here including how hard it can be, at times, for poor to try to actually look poor.

And though I haven’t had a chance to get my hands on it yet, it sounds very much like this is the kind of idea that is expressed in the book Portfolios of the Poor: How the world’s poor live on $2 a day. William Easterly–someone whose opinion is, more often than not, on level ground–sings the praises of the book and says it best when he says the poor have a life too. Click here for the Easterly video. It’s definitely worth a couple minutes.

And in case you’ve never seen the movie Time Bandits (I haven’t–its cult classic status apparently makes it difficult to get at my video store), here’s what the title of post references: John Cleese as Robin Hood (skip to 2:40 for the good part).