The poor will always be with you
Stories of our lives in the slum and other marginalized settings
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 …
Last week Holly mentioned that plastic recycling is in trouble in America too. I found out from an article in the Atlantic that cities across the country have ended their recycling programs. Why? Because China has stopped accepting our soiled trash due to health risks, environmental damage, and increased labor costs. Without tens of thousands of Chinese …
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 …
(I shared this somewhere else when it happened, but recent events have me thinking about it again.) Sultan’s ears perked up to hear the mosque's announcement. I usually ignore them because, in a slum of close to 10,000 people, the messages rarely concern my own circle. But I stopped and listened because Sultan wasn’t going …
Tough-looking teenage boys who reduce themselves to goofy noises to try to make Sakeenah smile and then melt to pieces when she does Seeing a new bird fluttering through the slum that I've never seen before Shadia making phone calls home to her 'mata ji' and 'papa' Every moment that one of my learners puts …
Pooja was a late addition to my literacy class, not asking to read until a month after her brother had started. As a 15-year-old who had never attended school, she wasn't accustomed to academic work and had a lot of home responsibilities which took her time away. But from her first lesson she was hooked, …
In a recent post I mentioned that we took in a foster daughter a few years ago, and we have been through many struggles together. One of the central struggles has been our young Shadia's battle with Borderline Personality Disorder.1 It was the impetus for a lot of tears in our family. But also a lot …
