The poor will always be with you
Stories of our lives in the slum and other marginalized settings
The electricity just went out for four hours. It wouldn't have been a problem...except the one appliance we're running in the middle of the day is the ceiling fan. That matters in August. Thank God it was only 90 degrees with manageable humidity, one of the more pleasant days we've had. But little Shakeenah struggled …
My first slum homestay was in a large, decrepit house. The entrance was split into narrow hallways by particle boards. I followed my homestay "brother" down one of the makeshift paths to the right, then left, right then two more lefts, shuffling between flimsy dividers that didn't leave enough space for my shoulders. We arrived …
I would have found out sooner if I hadn't been out all day. Turning down the alley I could see that something was up. People were out of their homes, disturbed, grouping. I started towards them but then they rushed to me instead. "Four boys! They've been missing since 3pm yesterday! It is your kids …
Most folk don't want to hear me talk about slums. I once thought that slum life would make this blog unique. The internet is saturated with almost everything, but there aren't many English-speaking slum bloggers. Maybe people wouldn't want to hear what I had to say about money, power, or nonviolence, but at least they'd …
Three years ago our 14-year-old friend Neha was married off illegally. As we were very close to the family the preparation was done in secret, so we wouldn't know about it and couldn't stop it. I found out what was happening halfway through the wedding (which was only supposed to be for her older sister's …
The tiny girl in front of me was learning to read with incredible speed. Though she only knew three letters when she started, by the second lesson she could identify ten letters and combine them to form words. By her 16th lesson she had memorized the entire alphabet (there are more than 50 letters in ours) …
A post by Peregrine Occasionally something happens in the basti that just so encourages and delights me as a picture of God's dream for the world, already happening in a place of "poverty". I was visiting a Muslim neighbor in her mud-floor hut, one of the poorest that I know well. She was having stomach …
When my young friend Hamza built his electric cars, he procured the material from local recycling shops. This network of recyclers is a remarkable process quite unlike anything we see in the West. In America we took our recyclable material to large depots in industrial zones. Here in the majority world those depots tend to …
The mirror image of the "Things that bring me joy" post. A few things that make each day that much more difficult to get through. Slum demolitions Shadia being a long ways away People who tell me that I shouldn't live where I do because there are "bad people" there The ultra-prevalence of tiny …
I posted about my friends' loss of their fathers because I was thinking about Danish. He left the slum two weeks ago to work in Saudi Arabia. He will be gone two years. Away from his home, his family, his country. They saw it as the best option for Danish to begin to help the …
