We were so poor growing up

Our whole town was so poor that when no one paid the water company, they turned off our rain.
The local Mafia couldn't afford a Godfather; instead, it was run by an Uncle.

When we went swimming, we couldn't use a pool -- we had to use the neighbor's septic tank.

The schools had to rent their space to the local bars after classes were out so they could meet their operations budget.

We couldn't afford to watch TV. We just stared at the pictures we had hung on the walls instead.

No one in town had telephones either. We would just lean our heads out the window and shout our messages. The neighbor would hear them, and pass them along. It took five hours once to get directions to the corner store.

We couldn't afford canned laughter, either. We were so poor, the only way we could get laughter was to sneak around at night and steal it from people's yards or from fields where it was growing wild.

And I have to say, to this date, I still enjoy wild laughter in moderate amounts. Too much of it can get really annoying, but I find that a helping of wild laughter once in a while keeps me on an even keel.

My family growing up was so poor that I had to take the neighbor's trash can lids to practice the cymbals for the school band.

My family today is so poor that Evangeline's toy drum has a picture of a Quaker on the front.

We're so poor that we don't have a computer. Instead, whenever we want to go online, we have to call the ISP manually and screech into the phone.

We would have considered sunshine to be sheerest luxury. For light, we had to scrape phosphorescent algae off decaying logs and old rocks and gather them in a pile to pretend we had sun, and even then we only got to enjoy for a minutes in the afternoon (the afternoon of July 23, to be specific) before government representatives would come to remove it as part of the sun tax.

(Missionaries love to play a variation on this game, called "My Support Stinks This Month." I was going to downtown Port-au-Prince one day with some other teachers from the school where I taught English to work on our driver's licenses, when a few of them started the game going. I listened for a few minutes, then tossed in, "My support was so low this past month that I had to send my supporters money." Game ended. I won.)