There was not much money to spare but it was not penury.
Officials insist they are moving as fast as they can to overhaul their labour laws and improve conditions for construction workers, who face privation, penury and harsh restrictions on workplace rights in the Gulf state.
With his club still in penury, manager John Askey revealed that the £67,000 prize money guaranteed by a win against Championship strugglers Sheffield Wednesday would help a club and players "that are barely surviving week to week" stay afloat for another few months.
It needs to be jolted out of any belief that Greeks can be made to return mostly Germany's reckless loans by being plunged into perpetual penury.
It was also on the road to penury, thanks to Mutharika's increasingly eccentric economic policies and his alienation of the foreign donors upon which Malawi relies.
The more pessimistic fear a drift towards becoming the next North Korea a regime that brandishes nuclear weapons at the outside world while its people slide into penury.
Half of the population is in penury, and half is under 16 years old.
Queuing and penury have become a way of life.Back in my hotel, the hardship of daily life in Zimbabwe usually vanishes.
These places contain pockets of penury: unemployment in inner Chicago, for instance, is twice the average for the remainder of the city.
Yet in California, where independent lobbies were spending freely in campaigns even before the Supreme Court recently allowed it, penury need not spell political death.
Paddy Ashdown, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, accused Mr Blair of a "scandalous" decision to proceed with Tory legislation, which he said sought to "deter asylum-seekers by treating them with a mixture of delay, penury and injustice".
