dirt poor

“We were dirt poor so I couldn’t afford to go to the movies too often, but I went whenever I could and focused in on movies as if they were more important than anything in life.”

“We were dirt poor so I couldn’t afford to go to the movies often,” he told the AP in 1998.

He had grown up dirt poor in what is now South Korea, then occupied by Japan.

"Patients who were put in there were dirt poor," said Clare Blackmore, one of the volunteers.

“We were dirt poor, surrounded by gang violence and fires — you could always smell the smoke,” Estrada says.