Someone reminded me of an issue I’ve been trying to reconcile for a long time, especially since I’ve been here: the poverty in my own society — my own neighborhood, no less.
Memphis is stinted by poverty; that is no secret. That, coupled with the poor public education system, the high dropout rates, teenage pregnancy rates, infant mortality rates, and violent crime rates (not to mention countless other depressing statistics), paints a picture not so pretty. And in some ways, not so different from Uganda or Rwanda.
The poverty on this continent is obviously more shocking, more heart-wrenching to witness. People with literally no food and no way to get it. People whose limbs are thin enough to break with one hand, and weak enough that they can only sit on the side of the road holding a hand out for money. People who have to crawl to get anywhere, either because they lost their legs in war or genocide or to harrowing diseases like elephantisis, or their feeble limbs simply have no strength to bear their weight. People whose entire families were murdered, and they grew up with no options, no aspirations other than survival.
But those are the poorest of the poor. One rung up, countless families consist of an older sibling caring for his fellow orphaned siblings, each member struggling to string a life together while still trying to go to school. Primary education is free, but beyond that, it costs a pretty penny. So most people stop going to school after primary. Most houses are mud huts; most beds are mats on the floor; to most, electricity and water are luxuries of the rich. Hunger reaches beyond the homeless. Malaria, and various other diseases, infects far more than just the lowest rung. If a child makes it to her fifth birthday, it is cause for real celebration. Malnutrition is simply a fact of life, as is danger… Fear is a daily occurrence, unless they’ve just become numb to the feeling. Elections bring violence; power goes to whoever has the most ammunition. Men have absolute power over women, and adults over children. Few exceptions to the rule.
The poverty in the developing world is crushing; it’s a death sentence, much worse than a hard way of life. But in some ways, sometimes, I think I’d rather be poor in Uganda than in Tennessee.
An orphan in Rwanda goes to his cousin, his aunt — hell, his third cousin twice-removed — when he needs school fees. He either works as a houseboy in his benefactor’s home, or the fees are paid (begrudgingly, usually) without strings attached. The generous aunt or cousin hopes that the kid will use his education to get a good job, and never have to come asking for money again. Since I’ve been here, I’ve met countless families housing their distant relatives, paying their way through school. It is a norm here.
But back home, I feel like that would almost never happen. Our highly individualistic culture seems to isolate the poor, the homeless, strangling them, leaving them with no way to escape their plight. They are usually addicted to drugs, slave to their cravings. Many are mentally ill. Not that those aren’t stereotypes about the homeless here, but it seems a much harder burden to bear utterly alone. And we blame them for their condition; it’s America, the land of opportunity. The rich are rich because they made themselves that way; the poor are poor because they did something wrong… right?
We don’t recognize that opportunities are lavished upon the already rich, not so often upon those without immediate privileges. All too often, I feel the poor don’t really have a chance — they can’t pull themselves up by the bootstraps if they don’t have boots, after all. Here in Africa, at least, poverty is recognized as a problem of society as a whole.
Bottom line: Memphis, with its embarrassing rates of children dying needlessly, of women having babies before they can legally consent to sex, of kids dropping out of school and falling into gangs and violence as an alternative, of men abusing women, of people judging others by the color of their skin, seems to me a Third World microcosm within our First World.
Someone told me today that he pays for his cousin’s school fees because “it’s morally right to save them.” I recognize now how lucky I have been in my life… I’ve had the world at my feet. Most people don’t, for no other reason than bad luck. I don’t know how to rectify that injustice, but I do feel the need to do SOMETHING. Both in Memphis and in a wider scope.
good entry
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