Tom, you have clearly touched a nerve with certain people who appear to be grappling with their own emotional issues. As far as I am concerned you are not obligated to explain anything to anybody. I for one appreciate the viewpoint you have shared with us here.
A year in a Slum
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This thread is growing very divisive...
I'd like to remind Tom that this is not the first thread on poverty in Argentina on this site. You can search for a zillion incidents from first impressions, to people wanting to volunteer, to people giving cold, starving homeless seniors some help.
I don't know about your real Argentina but I have seen starving children in a normal barrio in Tucuman, a prosperous thriving multicolored Villa in Retiro with healthy children playing ball and going to school and church, and people literally dying on the sidewalks of Av. Entre Rios a spit away from El Congreso.
Siddhartha comes down from his palace and doesn't believe what he sees.....
I'd like to remind Tom that this is not the first thread on poverty in Argentina on this site. You can search for a zillion incidents from first impressions, to people wanting to volunteer, to people giving cold, starving homeless seniors some help.
I don't know about your real Argentina but I have seen starving children in a normal barrio in Tucuman, a prosperous thriving multicolored Villa in Retiro with healthy children playing ball and going to school and church, and people literally dying on the sidewalks of Av. Entre Rios a spit away from El Congreso.
Siddhartha comes down from his palace and doesn't believe what he sees.....
stefano
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A person doesn't have to travel very far from wherever they live to experience poverty first hand. I live in California, and with the economy in the tank, I see homeless people who were once members of the middle class pushing shopping carts full of junk with their kids in tow. Poverty is everywhere....not just in Argentina. It's a sad state of affairs and, unfortunately, I think it's only going get worse as the world economy continues to slide downward. Good luck to us all.
pompeygazza
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I don't doubt Tom, but there's a lot of vagueness in his story. There are no specific anecdotes or descriptions of specific people. An anecdote can be immensely powerful. All there is is vague generalizing. There are also some inconsistencies:
1. If you have access to water, you have access to hot water. Get a bowl of water and put it over a fire. I also learned from a long ocean voyage I made years ago, that in a cold climate you can comfortably go 6 weeks without washing and not feel any real discomfort, look dirty or smell. Every 6 weeks you can then fill a bowl with hot water and soap yourself, finishing by emptying the bowl over you. In a warm climate there's no problem - shower in the rain. There's no need to ever be really filthy.
2. I wonder where Tom gets his internet access. Does he have a laptop he keeps to himself, hitching a lift on a local wi-fi network, or does he use a locutorio? If the latter, how do they feel about this dirty slum-dweller using their facilities?
Years ago, while on the previously mentioned ocean voyage, I stopped off in Massawa, Eritrea. This is one of the poorest countries in the world which was at that time still recovering from 30 years of war. People lived in houses that had no roofs, had entire walls missing, and had no electricity or running water. Yet the streets were clean, there were no smells anywhere, the women wore brightly-coloured, clean dresses, the men played chess on the street corners and the children played happily in the street. There was no threat of violence or robbery, and I could safely walk the streets at night. The Eritreans were, in my experience, warm-hearted and generous with what they had. It all seems so different from Tom's description and I'm struggling to find out why.
As I said, I don't doubt Tom's story, but there are inconsistencies, and I also can't really see the point in his posts.
1. If you have access to water, you have access to hot water. Get a bowl of water and put it over a fire. I also learned from a long ocean voyage I made years ago, that in a cold climate you can comfortably go 6 weeks without washing and not feel any real discomfort, look dirty or smell. Every 6 weeks you can then fill a bowl with hot water and soap yourself, finishing by emptying the bowl over you. In a warm climate there's no problem - shower in the rain. There's no need to ever be really filthy.
2. I wonder where Tom gets his internet access. Does he have a laptop he keeps to himself, hitching a lift on a local wi-fi network, or does he use a locutorio? If the latter, how do they feel about this dirty slum-dweller using their facilities?
Years ago, while on the previously mentioned ocean voyage, I stopped off in Massawa, Eritrea. This is one of the poorest countries in the world which was at that time still recovering from 30 years of war. People lived in houses that had no roofs, had entire walls missing, and had no electricity or running water. Yet the streets were clean, there were no smells anywhere, the women wore brightly-coloured, clean dresses, the men played chess on the street corners and the children played happily in the street. There was no threat of violence or robbery, and I could safely walk the streets at night. The Eritreans were, in my experience, warm-hearted and generous with what they had. It all seems so different from Tom's description and I'm struggling to find out why.
As I said, I don't doubt Tom's story, but there are inconsistencies, and I also can't really see the point in his posts.
You know, I was a bit surprised at some of the vehemence shown here about Tom's comments.
I can understand some doubt perhaps - it is difficult to understand WHY someone might purposefully spend a whole year in a slum (or on the edges of one in Tom's case), but to each his own on that. As I mentioned previously, I don't think you need necessarily live there and put yourself through a horrible experience personally to understand poverty better, but some people take things to greater extremes than others and it will sure as hell give you a better feeling for it than watching it on TV. I'm not one to criticize someone trying to understand life in their own manner.
Some people never stir out of their comfortable situations in their home countries, and look at things on TV and say "oh what a shame" and go on with their day. I understand that completely, because the truth of the matter is, that is NOT on the heads of people in the States or other well-off countries to make sure that everyone else in the world lives equally materially-enriched lives.
That is a place where Tom and I disagree I think, but that's OK, he draws different conclusions based on his life experiences.
In my opinion, the US has done more good than bad over the last 100 years, but that's my opinion. I'm also a staunch Libertarian, and believe that we shouldn't be doing a lot of things that we have done as related to foreign policy; not because we shouldn't be sticking our fingers into things and trying to be a world cop necessarily, but because it is the inalienable right of every person on this planet to stand up for their own rights and until they do they will never (at least the majority) really be successful in any change that may come about due to outside influences. Wanting to make people over in our societal image is not our duty and giving poor countries foreign aid is nothing more than taking money away from the originating country's citizenry at gunpoint and rarely achieves the end that is the target.
I don't think Tom is a very good story teller (sorry dude), but that's not to say because of that, that he is disingenuous, false or even pompous. I think he's been genuinely honest as far as he understands things, and I still commend him for having the strength of his convictions to do what he considered to be the right way to understand a huge problem this world faces.
As to the people there not wanting to be written about and shown in photos - that rings extremely true to me. On my first trip to Paraguay to meet my wife's family, I took a lot of pictures. Even in the depths of poverty there, a lot of people have cellphones (cheap and not very durable, but many have cameras) and take pictures when they are together, at a birthday party, etc. They didn't see anything wrong with me taking pictures at the time, thinking they were only for memories.
However, one of the first things I did when I got back to BA was send a photo commentary to my folks back in the States. I made commentary on the situation there visually and verbally and when my wife saw that I had done that, she was horribly embarrassed for her family. She wouldn't tell them that I had sent these to my parents because she knew they would be horribly embarrassed as well. I have sent only certain photos to my folks since then, photos and themes which are not so embarrassing.
In fact, I still didn't quite understand the depths of poverty at first. For example, we ate meat at every meal while I was there.
There being 12 kids and one small wooden table for all to use to eat (no chairs - we ate standing up, outside, when it wasn't raining,, which isn't very often when was visiting), we ate in shifts. I ate with my wife, her mother and father, and occasionally a neighbor who was visiting. We had beef and chicken and pork. Mixed with rice or noodles usually.
I didn't realize until a couple of years later when my wife told me, that the kids actually loved my visits. Not just because they liked me (I was the RICH AMERICAN and I talked to them like normal people, which counts for a lot!), but because they ate meat. Their usual meals consisted of beans, noodles, rice, mandioca, with deep fried batter (nothing else!) made from eggs, flour and milk. They didn't have enough farm animals, even after I bought their starter herds, much less before, to eat meat on any kind of consistent basis. The first time I was there, they didn't have any animals and actually borrowed money to buy meat while I was there.
That was my ignorance and I felt hugely terrible when I found out that they had done everything they could to hide some of the extreme poverty because of the embarrassment they felt.
And BTW - the word is "verguenza" which translates to shame or embarrassment. But I also come away from experiences like this with a better understanding of how the extreme poor use the word - it is more like an understanding of their place in the world and is often referred to even as far as talking to or relating with someone that they consider to be of a higher class. I go back to comments I've made about nearly feudal societies in Latin America...
I've heard people (and thought I saw it mentioned once or twice in this thread, but upon a quick I review didn't find it again) where people talk about the happy poor, that they are in reality better off than us horrible, rich foreigners who have material goods but no real spiritual life, so on and so forth.
That's bull. Yes, they are happy - to an extent. They are very close in a family sense, but they are far from happy in an overall life sense. They spend every day struggling to survive. They know nothing about nutrition and lose teeth, as an example, at a horrible rate in many cases. Most poor people in Paraguay I know, late teens and early adults even, not just older people, have lost many of their teeth, or they are literally rotting in their head (that makes for some seriously bad breath). They smile with a hand over their mouth in embarrassment. Or they don't smile. My mother-in-law, who is 49 this year, has one natural tooth and until recently, she had no dentures. She wasn't happy about that, for sure.
She also isn't happy when her kids gets sick and she feels like they are going to die, even when it's what we consider "nothing much more than" a chest cold. For them it too easily turns into pneumonia because they don't have access to decent doctors, and even if they did, they couldn't afford the doctor's visits or the antibiotics when they're prescribed.
There are many, many things for which they are not happy. But like most humans they find within them and their family something to be happy about or they wouldn't survive. I can guarantee you, they would be much happier with the problems most of us have to deal with, for the most part.
I take exception to those who say (including Tom, it seems) that the "rich" in this world are somehow at fault for sitting on their asses and not doing anything about the poor in the world, that there is enough money in the world to give everyone a decent life.
To me, that comes from a non-understanding of complex issues of economics and how money is created and used, and the motivations behind doing for yourself rather than have others do for you. Give money to the poor and you will watch it return right back to where it started as the poor spend it and the rich earn it back. The poor must learn to generate wealth themselves, not look to others to give it to them.
Unless the poor pull themselves up on their own merits, nothing is going to happen. They have to have the desire and the understanding to do that, to an extent. I believe that the extreme poor need help, even if they don't realize it - or maybe because they don't realize it.
I have made mention once or twice, here and there, about feral children. There are supposedly cases of children raised among wild animals that most people point to when talking about feral children. Some say at least some of these cases are verified, others say not a single one. But you don't have to go to such extremes to find real cases of feral children who were raised by human animals called their parents. Kids locked in their rooms for years and years with little or no interaction, as an example.
These feral kids are often unable to communicate properly and if they do, it's after years of therapy. Some, depending on their situation, never really adapt to society and may not even be able to talk with much of a vocabulary if they missed some very important things like talking and interactivity during their early years and/or as a baby.
They were not taught to be "human." It is incredible how it seems that we truly learn how to be human. There are few human instincts beyond feelings, fight/flight, breathing, eating and getting rid of waste. Everything else is taught to us, including the ability to speak and reason completely, by our family, friends, enemies, etc.
I use the feral children as an example only to show the extremes to which we learn, or don't learn, to be human. People who have grown up NOT ONLY poor, but ALSO ignorant of certain fundamental concepts as a right to life, liberty and the PURSUIT of happiness, do not see that as a possibility, at least not until someone actually shows them.
I remember stories of my grandmother's childhood, where they lived in extreme poverty when she was young. She was born in 1913 and lived in poverty until the 50's. My father (the grandmother I'm talking about being his mother) was born in 1938 and he remembers being poor growing up.
The difference, for whatever reason, was education and the culture. At least in the States at this time, under mostly protestant religious pressures (where my grandmother and father grew up, at least), education, even for the poor, was considered important, at least amongst themselves. They were taught cleanliness, they were taught morals, they were taught a work ethic as well. Some were more lacking in more liberal education, but some very important basics were covered.
Many didn't graduate from high school, but had some schooling. There was no government-sponsored welfare state in my grandmother's time and they mostly all grew up with the ideals that there were possibilities if you worked hard enough. My father never went to college, but ended up as first an engineer, then later a manager for Western Electric.
As bad as many people paint those "horrible" rich people of the time, they were creating opportunities and jobs with their investments, within a culture that taught a work ethic, and the society itself made people believe that they could do something with their lives.
Of course, it wasn't all rosy - I understand that it wasn't that way for many minorities, but that goes back, in my opinion, to cultural issues similar to feral children - it is how the people of the time were "taught" to be human. Evolution must continue, both physically and mentally.
We learn from others around us, how to be human. In places that are still poor, there is one main reason for it, I believe. The people who run poor countries are more interested in their own pockets and power than they are in creating an environment where people can succeed. In fact, they actively pursue policies which will ensure that their people remain poor, ignorant and basically nearly incapable of any real advancement because of it, and it continues to profit those in power and with money.
The truth is, we as a family might have already moved to Paraguay instead of living here with the rising prices and political uncertainty if it weren't for one thing: my wife. She is proudly Paraguayan, yet is ashamed and hateful of many of her countrymen at the same time. She remembers so many bad experiences growing up dirt poor in Paraguay that the thought of living there, particularly as a "rich" person in a nice house, gives her the heebie-geebies.
She told me a story one time about the attitudes of some (if not many) of the rich people in Asuncion. She worked as a maid there before coming to Buenos Aires to do the same. The patrona for whom she worked was about the worst example of someone who grew up rich and feels an entitlement to superiority as can exist, from what my wife tells me. My wife made the equivalent of about $50 USD a month, working about 15 hours a day, EVERY DAY. She cleaned, she cooked, she took care of the woman's kids, the husband made passes at her at least a couple of times a week. She was treated as a non-human much of the time.
One day there was a fair nearby and my wife wanted to go. It was a Sunday and she was supposed to have a day off (although she rarely got it). When she asked the patrona if she could go, she was told absolutely not, she was needed there at the house and how could she think about leaving at a time like that? When my wife complained and said she was going anyway, the patrona said "oh, how I miss the days of slavery. People like you don't understand how good you have it now. I'm sure one day those times will return."
That was the last straw for my wife, and she quit, and has held a raging hatred for that woman for years now. That experience with those people, and others for whom she worked, clouds her judgement on her own countrymen. They're not all like that, I know, but she can't get past some pretty bad experiences of her own.
I've seen some of the root causes of it and probably didn't make a very clear explanation relating many of the poor I know to feral children, but that is a root cause - the transmission of memes/thought patterns from a parent and other members of society to a child to continue the pattern. It is the most difficult root cause to solve, because it is a heavy factor in how a product of a certain society will think and feel about himself and surroundings, including the possibilities of changing anything in his life for the positive. Despair and resignation.
Sorry about yet another long rambling diatribe, but to return to the original reason I wrote this particular post - I still admire the convictions behind what Tom says he did, and I believe that he really did it. Just because he doesn't tell a good story doesn't mean he's being disingenuous or false.
Much of what he said rings true with me, even down to the not bathing in cold weather because it's COLD and there is no hot water. People who think that, well, you just go and heat the water up and bathe with that are not necessarily conversant with the realities of such extreme poverty. These poor people are so used to living without, that they don't see not having hot water as a lack of luxury, and being dirty because it happens to be cold at the time and not wanting to bath is quite normal.
The poster who suggested that they heat the water is looking at things from our point of view, not theirs.
One last little (hopefully) story, related to everyone of my wife's family members who have come here.
When I built them their bathroom in Paraguay, we had a water heater that heats the water directly as it comes out of the shower head. I used that religiously - it was such a great change to be able to bathe in warm water when there! The biggest problem for me was that it wasn't hot enough.
We brought her oldest brother to BA a little less than 5 years ago. He continued to take showers here in the cold. He didn't even realize that the third knob (one for cold, one for hot and one for turning on the shower) was the hot water. The water took forever to heat up in many cases and he would even turn the hot water on and shower fast enough to never realize it would turn hot. It didn't actually occur to us to show him (my wife had lived a "civilized" existence for some time by that point and it didn't occur to her either). Even after he was shown this, he continued to take cold showers, EVEN IN THE WINTER, because he said that warm water made his skin itch. The difference in the winter was, he wasn't in an outside, breezy situation trying to get clean, he was in a nice, warm apartment and it felt as good as summer to him.
The heater on the shower I bought for the family has failed three times. Every time, we only discover this because we go to visit and I don't have the warm water I consider a luxury. It doesn't really matter to them if they have hot water or not - they're extremely thrilled to have a covered, completely enclosed area to bathe in with running water instead of hauling water from the well and throwing it over them in a rickety shack barely big enough to move around in, with no roof and wind blowing through.
It's amazing what you can learn to live with, particularly if that is the normal way of doing things for all of those around you, and amazingly difficult to change people to think about things in a similar way that you do when trying to change things.
I can understand some doubt perhaps - it is difficult to understand WHY someone might purposefully spend a whole year in a slum (or on the edges of one in Tom's case), but to each his own on that. As I mentioned previously, I don't think you need necessarily live there and put yourself through a horrible experience personally to understand poverty better, but some people take things to greater extremes than others and it will sure as hell give you a better feeling for it than watching it on TV. I'm not one to criticize someone trying to understand life in their own manner.
Some people never stir out of their comfortable situations in their home countries, and look at things on TV and say "oh what a shame" and go on with their day. I understand that completely, because the truth of the matter is, that is NOT on the heads of people in the States or other well-off countries to make sure that everyone else in the world lives equally materially-enriched lives.
That is a place where Tom and I disagree I think, but that's OK, he draws different conclusions based on his life experiences.
In my opinion, the US has done more good than bad over the last 100 years, but that's my opinion. I'm also a staunch Libertarian, and believe that we shouldn't be doing a lot of things that we have done as related to foreign policy; not because we shouldn't be sticking our fingers into things and trying to be a world cop necessarily, but because it is the inalienable right of every person on this planet to stand up for their own rights and until they do they will never (at least the majority) really be successful in any change that may come about due to outside influences. Wanting to make people over in our societal image is not our duty and giving poor countries foreign aid is nothing more than taking money away from the originating country's citizenry at gunpoint and rarely achieves the end that is the target.
I don't think Tom is a very good story teller (sorry dude), but that's not to say because of that, that he is disingenuous, false or even pompous. I think he's been genuinely honest as far as he understands things, and I still commend him for having the strength of his convictions to do what he considered to be the right way to understand a huge problem this world faces.
As to the people there not wanting to be written about and shown in photos - that rings extremely true to me. On my first trip to Paraguay to meet my wife's family, I took a lot of pictures. Even in the depths of poverty there, a lot of people have cellphones (cheap and not very durable, but many have cameras) and take pictures when they are together, at a birthday party, etc. They didn't see anything wrong with me taking pictures at the time, thinking they were only for memories.
However, one of the first things I did when I got back to BA was send a photo commentary to my folks back in the States. I made commentary on the situation there visually and verbally and when my wife saw that I had done that, she was horribly embarrassed for her family. She wouldn't tell them that I had sent these to my parents because she knew they would be horribly embarrassed as well. I have sent only certain photos to my folks since then, photos and themes which are not so embarrassing.
In fact, I still didn't quite understand the depths of poverty at first. For example, we ate meat at every meal while I was there.
There being 12 kids and one small wooden table for all to use to eat (no chairs - we ate standing up, outside, when it wasn't raining,, which isn't very often when was visiting), we ate in shifts. I ate with my wife, her mother and father, and occasionally a neighbor who was visiting. We had beef and chicken and pork. Mixed with rice or noodles usually.
I didn't realize until a couple of years later when my wife told me, that the kids actually loved my visits. Not just because they liked me (I was the RICH AMERICAN and I talked to them like normal people, which counts for a lot!), but because they ate meat. Their usual meals consisted of beans, noodles, rice, mandioca, with deep fried batter (nothing else!) made from eggs, flour and milk. They didn't have enough farm animals, even after I bought their starter herds, much less before, to eat meat on any kind of consistent basis. The first time I was there, they didn't have any animals and actually borrowed money to buy meat while I was there.
That was my ignorance and I felt hugely terrible when I found out that they had done everything they could to hide some of the extreme poverty because of the embarrassment they felt.
And BTW - the word is "verguenza" which translates to shame or embarrassment. But I also come away from experiences like this with a better understanding of how the extreme poor use the word - it is more like an understanding of their place in the world and is often referred to even as far as talking to or relating with someone that they consider to be of a higher class. I go back to comments I've made about nearly feudal societies in Latin America...
I've heard people (and thought I saw it mentioned once or twice in this thread, but upon a quick I review didn't find it again) where people talk about the happy poor, that they are in reality better off than us horrible, rich foreigners who have material goods but no real spiritual life, so on and so forth.
That's bull. Yes, they are happy - to an extent. They are very close in a family sense, but they are far from happy in an overall life sense. They spend every day struggling to survive. They know nothing about nutrition and lose teeth, as an example, at a horrible rate in many cases. Most poor people in Paraguay I know, late teens and early adults even, not just older people, have lost many of their teeth, or they are literally rotting in their head (that makes for some seriously bad breath). They smile with a hand over their mouth in embarrassment. Or they don't smile. My mother-in-law, who is 49 this year, has one natural tooth and until recently, she had no dentures. She wasn't happy about that, for sure.
She also isn't happy when her kids gets sick and she feels like they are going to die, even when it's what we consider "nothing much more than" a chest cold. For them it too easily turns into pneumonia because they don't have access to decent doctors, and even if they did, they couldn't afford the doctor's visits or the antibiotics when they're prescribed.
There are many, many things for which they are not happy. But like most humans they find within them and their family something to be happy about or they wouldn't survive. I can guarantee you, they would be much happier with the problems most of us have to deal with, for the most part.
I take exception to those who say (including Tom, it seems) that the "rich" in this world are somehow at fault for sitting on their asses and not doing anything about the poor in the world, that there is enough money in the world to give everyone a decent life.
To me, that comes from a non-understanding of complex issues of economics and how money is created and used, and the motivations behind doing for yourself rather than have others do for you. Give money to the poor and you will watch it return right back to where it started as the poor spend it and the rich earn it back. The poor must learn to generate wealth themselves, not look to others to give it to them.
Unless the poor pull themselves up on their own merits, nothing is going to happen. They have to have the desire and the understanding to do that, to an extent. I believe that the extreme poor need help, even if they don't realize it - or maybe because they don't realize it.
I have made mention once or twice, here and there, about feral children. There are supposedly cases of children raised among wild animals that most people point to when talking about feral children. Some say at least some of these cases are verified, others say not a single one. But you don't have to go to such extremes to find real cases of feral children who were raised by human animals called their parents. Kids locked in their rooms for years and years with little or no interaction, as an example.
These feral kids are often unable to communicate properly and if they do, it's after years of therapy. Some, depending on their situation, never really adapt to society and may not even be able to talk with much of a vocabulary if they missed some very important things like talking and interactivity during their early years and/or as a baby.
They were not taught to be "human." It is incredible how it seems that we truly learn how to be human. There are few human instincts beyond feelings, fight/flight, breathing, eating and getting rid of waste. Everything else is taught to us, including the ability to speak and reason completely, by our family, friends, enemies, etc.
I use the feral children as an example only to show the extremes to which we learn, or don't learn, to be human. People who have grown up NOT ONLY poor, but ALSO ignorant of certain fundamental concepts as a right to life, liberty and the PURSUIT of happiness, do not see that as a possibility, at least not until someone actually shows them.
I remember stories of my grandmother's childhood, where they lived in extreme poverty when she was young. She was born in 1913 and lived in poverty until the 50's. My father (the grandmother I'm talking about being his mother) was born in 1938 and he remembers being poor growing up.
The difference, for whatever reason, was education and the culture. At least in the States at this time, under mostly protestant religious pressures (where my grandmother and father grew up, at least), education, even for the poor, was considered important, at least amongst themselves. They were taught cleanliness, they were taught morals, they were taught a work ethic as well. Some were more lacking in more liberal education, but some very important basics were covered.
Many didn't graduate from high school, but had some schooling. There was no government-sponsored welfare state in my grandmother's time and they mostly all grew up with the ideals that there were possibilities if you worked hard enough. My father never went to college, but ended up as first an engineer, then later a manager for Western Electric.
As bad as many people paint those "horrible" rich people of the time, they were creating opportunities and jobs with their investments, within a culture that taught a work ethic, and the society itself made people believe that they could do something with their lives.
Of course, it wasn't all rosy - I understand that it wasn't that way for many minorities, but that goes back, in my opinion, to cultural issues similar to feral children - it is how the people of the time were "taught" to be human. Evolution must continue, both physically and mentally.
We learn from others around us, how to be human. In places that are still poor, there is one main reason for it, I believe. The people who run poor countries are more interested in their own pockets and power than they are in creating an environment where people can succeed. In fact, they actively pursue policies which will ensure that their people remain poor, ignorant and basically nearly incapable of any real advancement because of it, and it continues to profit those in power and with money.
The truth is, we as a family might have already moved to Paraguay instead of living here with the rising prices and political uncertainty if it weren't for one thing: my wife. She is proudly Paraguayan, yet is ashamed and hateful of many of her countrymen at the same time. She remembers so many bad experiences growing up dirt poor in Paraguay that the thought of living there, particularly as a "rich" person in a nice house, gives her the heebie-geebies.
She told me a story one time about the attitudes of some (if not many) of the rich people in Asuncion. She worked as a maid there before coming to Buenos Aires to do the same. The patrona for whom she worked was about the worst example of someone who grew up rich and feels an entitlement to superiority as can exist, from what my wife tells me. My wife made the equivalent of about $50 USD a month, working about 15 hours a day, EVERY DAY. She cleaned, she cooked, she took care of the woman's kids, the husband made passes at her at least a couple of times a week. She was treated as a non-human much of the time.
One day there was a fair nearby and my wife wanted to go. It was a Sunday and she was supposed to have a day off (although she rarely got it). When she asked the patrona if she could go, she was told absolutely not, she was needed there at the house and how could she think about leaving at a time like that? When my wife complained and said she was going anyway, the patrona said "oh, how I miss the days of slavery. People like you don't understand how good you have it now. I'm sure one day those times will return."
That was the last straw for my wife, and she quit, and has held a raging hatred for that woman for years now. That experience with those people, and others for whom she worked, clouds her judgement on her own countrymen. They're not all like that, I know, but she can't get past some pretty bad experiences of her own.
I've seen some of the root causes of it and probably didn't make a very clear explanation relating many of the poor I know to feral children, but that is a root cause - the transmission of memes/thought patterns from a parent and other members of society to a child to continue the pattern. It is the most difficult root cause to solve, because it is a heavy factor in how a product of a certain society will think and feel about himself and surroundings, including the possibilities of changing anything in his life for the positive. Despair and resignation.
Sorry about yet another long rambling diatribe, but to return to the original reason I wrote this particular post - I still admire the convictions behind what Tom says he did, and I believe that he really did it. Just because he doesn't tell a good story doesn't mean he's being disingenuous or false.
Much of what he said rings true with me, even down to the not bathing in cold weather because it's COLD and there is no hot water. People who think that, well, you just go and heat the water up and bathe with that are not necessarily conversant with the realities of such extreme poverty. These poor people are so used to living without, that they don't see not having hot water as a lack of luxury, and being dirty because it happens to be cold at the time and not wanting to bath is quite normal.
The poster who suggested that they heat the water is looking at things from our point of view, not theirs.
One last little (hopefully) story, related to everyone of my wife's family members who have come here.
When I built them their bathroom in Paraguay, we had a water heater that heats the water directly as it comes out of the shower head. I used that religiously - it was such a great change to be able to bathe in warm water when there! The biggest problem for me was that it wasn't hot enough.
We brought her oldest brother to BA a little less than 5 years ago. He continued to take showers here in the cold. He didn't even realize that the third knob (one for cold, one for hot and one for turning on the shower) was the hot water. The water took forever to heat up in many cases and he would even turn the hot water on and shower fast enough to never realize it would turn hot. It didn't actually occur to us to show him (my wife had lived a "civilized" existence for some time by that point and it didn't occur to her either). Even after he was shown this, he continued to take cold showers, EVEN IN THE WINTER, because he said that warm water made his skin itch. The difference in the winter was, he wasn't in an outside, breezy situation trying to get clean, he was in a nice, warm apartment and it felt as good as summer to him.
The heater on the shower I bought for the family has failed three times. Every time, we only discover this because we go to visit and I don't have the warm water I consider a luxury. It doesn't really matter to them if they have hot water or not - they're extremely thrilled to have a covered, completely enclosed area to bathe in with running water instead of hauling water from the well and throwing it over them in a rickety shack barely big enough to move around in, with no roof and wind blowing through.
It's amazing what you can learn to live with, particularly if that is the normal way of doing things for all of those around you, and amazingly difficult to change people to think about things in a similar way that you do when trying to change things.
steveinbsas
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Well, I must say that ElQueso has done a good job upstaging Tom (because EQ writes so well), but I also have to say that I believe everything Tom posted in this thread was sincere.
I also believe that Tom made it clear that his motives were self serving and I actually find that admirable.
He wasn't trying to change anything or make a difference (he ain't no CNN reporter babe with a desire to make a difference as opposed to reporting the news).
He just wanted to know what it felt like to live in a "slum" in Argentina for a year , even though he was still able to feed himself well enough not to jeopardize his health, connect to the outside world when desired, and always knew he could walk away at any time, returning to the good (or at least a better) life...compared to those with whom he lived with in the "slum" of (his own) choice.
That doesn't make what he's done good or bad or right or wrong.
I hope it just brings it into context.
He always had a chioce.
Those around him obviously don't.
I also believe that Tom made it clear that his motives were self serving and I actually find that admirable.
He wasn't trying to change anything or make a difference (he ain't no CNN reporter babe with a desire to make a difference as opposed to reporting the news).
He just wanted to know what it felt like to live in a "slum" in Argentina for a year , even though he was still able to feed himself well enough not to jeopardize his health, connect to the outside world when desired, and always knew he could walk away at any time, returning to the good (or at least a better) life...compared to those with whom he lived with in the "slum" of (his own) choice.
That doesn't make what he's done good or bad or right or wrong.
I hope it just brings it into context.
He always had a chioce.
Those around him obviously don't.
steveinbsas
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I've previously posted how I was forced into chapter 7 bankruptcy in Utah the early 1990's.
And lived out of a 1973 Ford van (a disgarded telephone company vehicle).
Is that crude enough?
PS: Living well is the best revenge...even though none of those now dead forever Mormon fuckers know it.
And lived out of a 1973 Ford van (a disgarded telephone company vehicle).
Is that crude enough?
PS: Living well is the best revenge...even though none of those now dead forever Mormon fuckers know it.
Let us get into a dick measuring contest, 
let me see.. Was a street kid before it became trendy, ha ha. Called home a laundromat for a time. Nice and warm eh. Do not think there are too many members on this forum born with a silver spoon up their ass. Interesting thread.
let me see.. Was a street kid before it became trendy, ha ha. Called home a laundromat for a time. Nice and warm eh. Do not think there are too many members on this forum born with a silver spoon up their ass. Interesting thread.- Status
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