Part Time Indian Poverty

In the early 1900’s poverty was at the highest point in the world. Poverty is still a problem in a lot of places all around the world but can also help some people. Most people think that poverty makes people have a terrible life and fail, but poverty actually helps people to strive for more. In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie Arnold goes to Reardon because he wanted to be better, in The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid Changez goes to Princeton to get a good job so that he can support his family and live a good life, and in “The Balek Scales” by Heinrich Böll the Grandfather investigates the legibility of the scales to get more money.
Changez, like most people, saw his poverty as a restriction even
Arnold saw this poverty as a bad thing but when he looks back he can see that poverty is the reason that all the good things in his life happened in the first place. After Arnold threw a textbook at a teacher and got suspended the teacher told him he would be better at a different school; no because he would expel him otherwise but because there was so much potential that would go to waste if Arnold stayed here. That potential would be wasted by the poverty that kept almost every Native Indian on the reservation. Arnold saw this as a terrible thing and thought that he was being punished when he was motivated by Mr. P when he said, “‘Son […] You’re going to find more and more hope the farther and farther you walk away from this sad, sad, sad reservation.’” (Alexie 43) Arnold saw this as an insult that he didn’t belong there anymore because of what he did but it was actually a gift. The poverty sent him to a different, better, more educated school through Mr. P. Arnold was starting to doubt the one good change in his life of switching to Reardon when “[He] only had five dollars, not nearly enough to pay for anything — not for photos, not for food, not for gas, not for a hot dog and soda pop.” (119). This lack of money put him in a deep spot because he couldn’t have any social life at this school that was already so different for him because of his race. He
The Balek family was the wealthy family in that area of Germany and they made sure to nickel and dime every person that ever worked for them. This angered the grandfather in this story and his lack of wealth made him double check every amount of money that he was paid and it also made him “[Bring] out great quantities of mushrooms; he even found truffles” (Böll 897) to sell to the Balek family to make more money. The Grandfather was driven by his poverty to bring all of these goods to the Baleks to support his family with the money that was not only crucial to their survival but also to have fun; he was a child after all. This Grandfather wanted so much more that when he saw a moment he defied the rules to check the scale that the Balek family used to determine the price of goods. “His heart thudded as he watched the black finger of justice come to rest on the left of the black line: the scale with the pound weight stayed down and the pound of coffee remained in the air” (897). At this point the Grandfather driven by his poverty went to a neighboring village, through the cold snow to find the difference of the scale that the Baleks own. He went to an apothecary and said, “‘I wanted to have these weighed […] It is the amount that is short of justice’” (898). This justice was how much money he could get for his family. He was so