Injustice and Failures

I usually don't title these, and I'll probably regret it later. I can't sleep. I can't sleep. And there are various factors and details, complex threads to even begin resolving these issues for those living below the poverty line, even those right above it, in the US... and it has me up thinking. Someone else please, please read it and tell me if there's anything to be done. Or do we say, "That's horrible" and go back to our day? I'm exhausted. Before I read the article, I was ready to shut my eyes. So I picked up a book I got at the library today - Cannery Row, John Steinbeck - and read just up through the most anticipated and wrenching part of the novel (so far).

"So long. Say, Mack -- what happened to your wife?"
"I don't know," said Mack. "She went away." He walked clumsily down the stairs and crossed over and walked up the lot and up the chicken walk to the Palace Flophouse. Doc watched his progress through the window. And then wearily he got a broom from behind the water heater. It took him all day to clean up the mess.



In the Philippines, in the trash pile slums and I don't speak Tagalog except for 'Hello' and 'May I take your photograph?' so the kids that flocked us from the moment we stepped out of the vans and pressed up against the windows when we got back in were still kept at that distance. The older ones eagerly smiled at us, shook our hands and beamed while their younger siblings trounced about in a language we didn't understand, but would hear for ten enormous days. I asked Ate Rachel to ask one girl what she wanted to do when she grew up, expecting the same kind of answer we'd been receiving from the school children (doctor, doctor, lawyer, nurse). She answered timidly, but quickly, and Rachel threw her head back and laughed. "She wants to marry an American." Hahahahahahaha. The girl's younger sister (it's hard to tell how old they are because filipinos are short and, even as they grow up, they don't age... at all) bravely, enthusiastically grabbed our hands and took us around her home and I wish I had been able to speak to her and her sister and ask them, ask their parents, what they needed most. It might be that what they need most is cash - they're fumbling for it all day to feed their kids and keep healthy, stay energized. Cash that might keep the older sister from submitting her body at night, that she actually lives a life we feared in our suspicions and then heard about later, from Ate Rachel and Ate Marian. That it's a common, ugly fact. What does that do to self-identity? For a growing person's already complex, and confused, understanding of value and worth? God damn it. It might have been that what they, like some impoverished families in the States, need most was a few weeks in an apartment, with plumbing and steady food and a phone line and a chance to work towards progress instead of barely scraping by. Some families managed, somehow, to send one of their kids to school. It's an appalling thought to be fortunate enough to send ONE child to school, when you have five. That's enormous pressure and urgency to put on one child. Who is there to encourage that child, attending a school where one teacher leads a classroom of fifty/sixty kids? If the family is dependent on that one child to "make it" and bring the family out of poverty, where the economy has been faltering for much longer than it's been "bad" here in the States, what happens when the child fails? For that matter, how can that child possibly succeed?

Jeremy told me about visiting the orphanage in Nicaragua. Mike did later, briefly, as well. I'll be spending roughly twelve days there after the program is over, with the still and video camera. OK. I'm expecting desperate, almost-feral children falling upon us as we step through the door, soaked in piss and shit and there aren't enough workers to wash their bodies. Orphans - having had given up on the notion of existence, trained to carry out their days with glue-soaked rags wrapped around their faces, covering their noses and mouths. Twelve days documenting them and then I step on a plane to go back to class. What do they need the most? Funding? Workers? Books? Tutors? Families?