TOGETHER IN DIGNITY DIANA SKELTON AND MARTIN KALISA PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY ACT FOR CHANGE This chapter sets out to explicate All Together in Dignity (ATD) Fourth World, a movement founded by people in extreme poverty, and its approach, developed within a range of contexts and countries. We will describe who we are talking about when we say "people in extreme poverty" and how we see the differences between charity and solidarity. We will give background to the approaches that have developed over time, and will sketch two vignettes to provide the reader with a flavour of the challenges in our work. We will then discuss the pedagogical approaches to challenging the politics of knowledge and the reasoning behind these. BACKGROUND ABOUT ATD FOURTH WORLD Joseph Wresinski, founder Joseph Wresinski (1917-1988) grew up in poverty and exclusion. He was born in a World War I detainment camp for enemy citizens where one of his sisters perished of malnutrition. When he was growing up, his family was stigmatised and insulted by others. He recalled, “Contact with others was based on charity, not friendship. From my earliest memories, the lack of money was linked to shame and violence.” As an adult, Wresinski saw the roots of that violence in his father's humiliation at being unable to find steady work. He said: My father shouted all the time. He would beat my older brother, much to my mother's despair […]. My father frequently cursed my mother, and we lived continually in fear. It was only much later […] that I understood my father was a humiliated man. He suffered because he felt he had failed in life; he was ashamed not to be able to give his family security and happiness. This is the true consequence of extreme poverty. How can anyone endure such humiliation without striking out? The poor react in the same violent way, nowadays as well as in the past. […] Without realising it, violence was becoming — for myself and for my father — the means of washing away the numerous humiliations inflicted on us by extreme poverty. i Wresinski — who first began working at age 5, and left school at 13 — did not let his childhood destroy him. When offered a chance to return to school in his 20s, he took it and became a Catholic priest. Later, he discovered a vast emergency housing camp in Noisy-le-Grand where he would found ATD Fourth World. He drew on his own family's experiences to understand not only how people were suffering, but also their potential to change society together. He told them, “You will be the liberators of your people. Instead of transforming the humiliation society imposes upon you into self contempt, you should learn to recognise each other's capacity. You have an experience and a knowledge that can transform society.” ii How ATD differentiates between poverty and extreme poverty Within low-income communities, there are always some people whose situation is even more difficult than that of their neighbours. They may be looked down on and disparaged by others. In Rwanda, for example, one woman says, “Before I joined ATD, no one ever set foot in my home because I am so poor. Even when one of my children died, not one person came to help me. I had told my neighbours about the death, but two days went by with the body unburied. Finally it was people responsible for public works who dug the grave. I thought that I was the only one living so miserably in poverty.” iii In an urban slum in Spain, a woman says, “When I go through rubbish looking for food, neighbours tell me I'm making all of us look bad. But what do they think? That I enjoy doing it? […] We're poor so we don't think of anything but tomorrow. Thinking about how to get the next day's bread stops us from thinking any further. From the minute you wake up, if you can only ask yourself, 'How can I manage today?', you can't think of anything