This makes my blood boil. I know of countless stories of people who were dirt poor -- and I mean poor -- who worked their way up to middle if not upper middle class. People who lived in tents -- tents -- or whose parents were drug addicts and died before the kids were out of their teens. And they worked their way up. WORK. That is the answer. Stop the pissing and moaning and put some effort into it.
Again I say it: I could teach her to make a six-figure income within 1-3 years. Many others here could too. It’s all attitude. She’s obviously more literate than many people. But being poor is more righteous and pious, I guess. If she’s really poor.
When my Mother’s father lost the Kansas farm in the depression they homesteader in eastern Colorado where she was born, #8 of nine children that lived. They lived in a sod hut. My uncle had a photo a neighbor must have taken of the family standing in front of it. Until I saw that photo I never understood what my father meant when he said they were so poor they “didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of”. She was the first in the family to go beyond eight grade and graduate High School, one of three females in a class of thirty-eight. Decades of hard work and Bible reading. The whole family was pretty serious about faith. My mother told me just because a person is poor doesn’t NECESSARILY mean they have no dignity. Treat folks according to the Golden Rule, at least until they have demonstrated that they, indeed, actually do have no integrity.