Development Issues (Poverty)

People use to say and think that poverty is an issue from developing countries. Well I used to think the same, until February.
When I arrived here, I thought that perhaps I would be moving to one of "THE BEST" places in the world. The fact is that no matter how rich or poor are you, there will always be something that you miss. This is the POVERTY.
We can't ever compare two things completely different. Everybody has their needs, so the needs of someone can be different then your needs, it doesn't mean that you are best or worse than anybody, just that we are not identical.
During the preparatory seminar, we discussed a lot about poverty, once this project aims to share experiences, nothing better than tell everybody what would be the possible lacks that we (the Northern and Southern participants) might face on each others countries.
For a person coming from Africa, like me, maybe the first thing that he/she would talk would be the economy, it affects in every single ways the whole system in a country. I came to this conclusion after having a game on which we've split into groups to talk about poverty in our countries and in Norway. In the group there was a Filipino, a Kenyan, a Norwegian, a Salvadoran. Wow, from such a big list of nationalities, for sure we are going to get different opinions!! The conversation started and we found out that for all the countries except Norway the problems are alike, slightly differences were found, but just because of the politics applied in each country. The problems that we manage to find very quickly were in the Education, health and care and transport.
Conclusion, the developing countries has almost the same problems due to what they need, that most of the times is the same thing, MONEY.
Now the tricky question, WHAT AND HOW IS TO BE POOR IN NORWAY? To answer this question we took the most of the 20min given, and suddenly one member of the group said that poverty might be the fact that you don't own your house, you cannot afford a new Mac or iPhone, and we started laughing.
But wait, lets think together, in Norway the basic needs for a citizen are costed by the government, in some point everybody has the same conditions, that was the conclusion that we came up with.
After the 20 min, we had a general conversation, where every group had the opportunity to share.
and there we got stuck in the same question, because we thought that the idea of being unable to pay for an iPhone be considered as a sign of poverty was out of question. What was our surprise, it was a sign of poverty.
Final conclusion, poverty is not only not have money until the point of starvation, poverty is not only a economic issue,  poverty can also be the an social/emotional issue, poverty is the feeling or state of inadequacy.