People behind the numbers

On the blog named “Heroes not Zombies”, kept by dr. Bob Leckridge (see link on blogroll), I read tonight his post of september 10th, in which he tells us about what aparently shocked him the most on the the WHO report on the social determinants of health, which states that about 40% of the people around the world live with an income below two dollars a day. Well, I absolutely had to make a comment to that post, given that the information is indeed shocking and I felt I had a view to add on the subject. Then, what was supposed to be a short post kept growing until it no longer looked like a comment, but seemed more like an entire article that I decided to share here too. I really hope that anyone who reads it may find it useful in raising their own awareness about the absurdities that we know about and feel outraged by but tend to dismiss as something banal – sometimes due to distance, other times due to the sheer frequency with which we face such horrific realities and become used to them.

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Homeless man kicked out of a bar by the manager (in white shirt by the door)

Although the notion of world’s misery has always been boiling in the back of my mind, these past few years it stuck in it to the point that I can no longer understand what is it that makes us able to even sleep at night knowing of the circumstances under which the majority of mankind lives.

Like every Brazilian middle-class citizen, I’ve been skipping “bums” all my life. There they are, on the street, always looking down towards the ground in search of any scraps they can sell (soda cans, paper, etc), or sleeping in the sidewalk or (depending on where you’re walking and at what time) using cheap drugs such as marijuana or even glue with ink solvent. Not a day goes by without that scene repeating itself right before my eyes. Yet, when you grow up seeing this all the time, it sort of becomes natural to watch your step when you’re walking in the metropolitan area so that you don’t step on the guy sleeping in your way to the bus stop. Of course, you always understand that this situation is brutal, but it only affects you in a distanced manner. It’s sort of like when you think about your own death: if you ever had a near-death experience (as I did), you know how incredibly scary it is to know that you are going to die, but, when you survive it, death goes back to the end of your priorities. You get used to know that you will die someday, and it worries you a little bit, but that thought does not strike with such horror again until your life is threatened once more. It is that feeling, that little weak worry, that walks with you once you are aware that many people live and die in such degrading situations of famine and diseases that science has been able to cure for over a century. Of course, when that happens in mass proportions in your own country (as in my case), it affects you even more, usually contributing to harden your heart – given that the alternative would (and, really, should) be gruesome despair.

Mostly, people dare not to try and break that distance apart. They walk around dodging “bums” as one dodges a stray dog on the streets. The difference between the way those homeless people live and the way we, “upstanding” citizens live is so huge that one cannot really put oneself in their shoes without a great amount of willed effort. But it wasn’t really by will that I first got that awareness. Let me share an experience here:

In the World Social Forum of 2003, which was held in my city, something pretty curious happened. I was 18 years old by then, and was sitting on the grass with some great people I had just met – a group of “hippies” (I think the term describes them roughly, but well enough for the present purpose), including a few Canadian people. A south-African reporter was interested in taking pictures on the local trenchtowns, but, since you have very little chances of getting out of a trenchtown alive with a camera unless you have someone trusted by the drug-dealers to vouch for you, he called for the help of my friend Marcus, who acted on NGOs inside some trenchtowns and thus was able to take him there. So Marcus and the reporter also joined us.

Suddenly, a homeless man, appearing interested in what was going on in such a meeting of odds speaking in these strange languages, came around us to hear and watch. Marcus invited him to sit with us, and so he did… in a few minutes, that generic homeless guy had a name and a voice that, for my surprise, was not begging for money or anything. As a matter of fact, he took a bit of marijuana out of his pocket and rolled it into a cigarette, then began to smoke it and tell us about his life. He was clearly mentally challenged, and I wondered how brutal it is that a man in such conditions was left to wander the streets in search for whatever he needed to survive. He even offered us to share with his cigar, which some of the “hippies” in the group accepted and, although I didn’t take the offer, I found myself in a pretty new position: a homeless guy was offering something to me!

And, please, let us not judge the act out of pretense politically correctness and say “damn, he offered you drugs!”. He was not a dealer, and never tried to charge anything from those who shared it with him. Marijuana is no taboo for him – and certainly not for most middle-class kids. I had already met homeless people and even talked to them. I had worked on charity before, so it was not particularly shocking that I shared a conversation with this guy, shook his hands and shared anecdotes (as I believe that the notion of spending an afternoon with a homeless person may sound shocking enough for the European or even to the regular alienated middle-class people in my own country), but what makes this experience particularly memorable to me is that, for the first time, I was put in a very different position in this relation with the miserable: I was being offered something! That mentally challenged man, who could not even buy a set of clothes or sleep on a bed, was offering me something that, for him, must have been extremely expensive! Then I considered that, with just the money I had on me in that very moment, he could probably feed himself for the whole week! And yet, I did not give him a single cent – I certainly would if he had asked, but the fact that he didn’t is part of what kept him apart from those other people I dodge everyday in my memory. The fact that I never offered anything except for the sandwich (which, by the way, I got for free) I had on my backpack is also part of the glue that made this experience stick with me. That guy, that day, was not a homeless guy, he was one of the friends I met there and, to be honest, one of the people I never saw again after the social forum was over.

After that, whenever someone posts on a blog that 40% of the people in the world live in misery, this is no long such a distanced number or such generic people. These are people just like me and you. They shiver in the winter cold and their body ache after a night sleeping on the ground. Seems to me that we shouldn’t have the right to sleep before we change such brutal, abysmal, horrific reality – and yet, here I am, going to sleep in my warm bed and soft pillow, and wondering how it is that I can actually do it knowing the things I know.

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PS: Just something for you to think: Brazil, although considered a poor nation, is not really such a cheap place to live. Given my experience, I am convinced that even the homeless guy I mention above can’t survive here with less than four dollars a day in the current currency conversion rates. That said, he must make about twice more money than 40% of the world’s people, and the proof of that is that he is (or was) alive. Given the absurdity of his condition as it is, I must say I cannot even imagine the situation of a person in an even poorer country that has to live with the two dollars a day reported by WHO. And to think that almost half of the population lives in circumstances that I cannot even imagine… well… sleep on that thought if you can.