Looking into the Slums

Kampala, Uganda

It is difficult to look with true understanding from a life of luxury into a life of poverty. Concrete observations are only a framework for understanding the daily concerns confronting each family; these in turn merely hint at the longterm challenges, which leave the imagination far from comprehending the mindset and emotions of individuals. To approach emotional understanding of such a contrasting life, one reaches perhaps for experiences of lesser comfort – the rainy camping trip, tiny dorm room, power or water outages, the time the car broke down on a highway in winter. But these are nothing. We pass through them smoothly because they are temporary.

To understand the experiences of those living where such a situation is not temporary – as is the case for inhabitants of slums throughout the world – one must ask how the difference in standards and experience affects how challenges are perceived. I predict with certainty the concern for daily food, for clean water, warmth and shelter. But how does the priority of cleanliness relate to where I imagine prioritizing my own discomfort? Are they plagued, as strikes me personally, by back pain inherent in bending over in small rooms, bending over cooking fires, bending over laundry, carrying food, water, and supplies? Do they find comfort in a calm and quiet place; can one yearn for a privacy one never experienced?

To see these personal lives even for only a moment is to feel the helpless struggle of improvement. How do we fix such a world?

The images I keep with me are of families stepping out of one-room wooden huts, clothed in jackets and stocking caps against the cool morning. Rain in the night means mud covering the ground. The wide spaces between slats in the walls and ceiling over the dirt floors remind me of the fierce, swirling wind of yesterday's storm. Women stoop over cooking pots outside the doors, near wooden tables shared with neighbors. Men toss bricks along a line, from a stockpile down hill to the top of a quickly laid wall. Is the wall new, or did it crumble in the storm? The homes are clustered by the highway; there were more before the highway was laid over the unlucky ones. Are the remaining inhabitants benefiting from living along a transportation hub, or are they merely exposed and disturbed by the speed, the noise, the black clouds of exhaust? Between the highway and the muddy plots are piles of refuse. Some men are working on the piles; some cows are feeding there. Between two piles is a water hole where two workmen are washing their rubber boots in opaque brown water. Where do they find water for drinking and washing? Is this the only source? Walking out of the community toward the highway, and presumably into jobs in town, are a steady trickle of adults, mostly men. Several men are dressed in very well-pressed western business clothes – collared button-down shirts, slacks – ironed and not a drop of red mud. How do they manage? How do they wash these clothes so clean, iron them so smoothly, walk with such clean dignity over the mud?

Even if stopped the car in the inching traffic jam and alighted to ask many questions, I doubt I could ever fully understand, deep in my mind, what this life means. And I could certainly not devise that efficient solution my mind tries to grasp.