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At a sidewalk table in Palm Springs on a Sunday late fall afternoon, I've got a cup of coffee and a cigarette, and nothing else matters. |
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Hard Times in
Ougoudougou |
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All up and down Palm Canyon, people are drinking four-dollar designer coffees and munching 28-dollar, artfully presented entrees. I'm alone with my thoughts of the Prophet Ezekiel; was it visions of God or schizophrenia?
Meanwhile, in Ougoudougou, an HIV-positive mother is giving birth in a tin-and-cardboard shanty, unassisted, while three feet away from her, on the other side of what passes for a wall, a dope deal gone bad ends in gunshots and death.
Most likely, you've never heard of Ougoudougou, even though it's as big as San Francisco... |
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I hadn't heard of it either, until I began making a renewed effort to figure out why a few people have so much while vast multitudes have nothing. I already knew of the huge shantytowns of Bombay and Beijing, Tegucigalpa and Lagos, but was unaware of the dozens of slum cities that were no more than |
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wide spots in the raod a few years ago, with names like Nouakchott and Antananarivo. Knowing that, it was less surprising to find out that one third of the world's three billion city dwellers now live in slums and shantytowns, most of them in the least developed parts of the world*, where there are no services, no sanitation, no safety, and no future.
As I pondered these thoughts, people strolled by on the avenue, dressed in khaki shorts and expensive sneakers. They had the clean, confident look of prosperity -- winners who had made it, and had it made. A few yards away a schizophrenic beggar sat on a bench, panhandling for change. Most passers-by simply ignored him. |
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Where is Palm Springs in relation to Ougoudougou? Jesus told a story about a beggar named Lazarus, who camped out beside a rich man's gate. They both died on the same night. You'll have to look it up to see what happened next. |
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I gave the schizophrenic a dollar, but he didn't notice; the voices in his head were too loud. Jesus's handprints were on his shoulders, but Jesus doesn't spend much time in California these days. He's mostly in West Africa now, where the biggest footprint of human misery on earth lies between Abidjan and Ibadan*, and where the fastest growing religion is Pentecostalism. People there know that if Jesus doesn't help them, nobody will. But what do I know? I'm not even a Christian.
*U.N. Human Settlements Programme, The Challenge of Slums, New York, 10/03.
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