lives in Bastion

I'm just in from some visits around Bastion this morning. I've been doing quite a bit of visiting in the last few days, spending time with people before I head to Canada next week. And in these visits, sitting and talking, I've had it brought home to me all over again just how tough these peoples' lives are here. Home after home, friend after friend, story after story, each and every one pulling at my heart a little more. Life here in Bastion is not just not easy, it is so difficult, beyond difficult, for many it must feel completely impossible. And it didn't just get hard in the last week or month, a little problem that came along and pretty soon things will get better. These are lives that have been hard for years, and will stay that way, there is no corner to turn and find a marvellous easy life wating.

There are my friends in block 10. Invited me to lunch on Sunday, and pulled out all the stops and served me a wonderful meal, which I enjoyed, all the while feeling so guilty because I know there are days when they can't put 3 basic meals on the table for their family. He's been trying to earn a living collecting recyclables from the garbage that others put out. That involves pushing a big old heavy trike around the city picking through piles of garbage to find the stuff that he can sell for a pittance. Never a great way to try to feed your family. But now he's getting too, umm.....mature (I have to be careful here, he's younger than me and I'm not ready to call myself old!) to be out there doing that all day in the heat. He's been unwell for some months, and I finally got him to a good doctor who told him he just can't do that work anymore. Ok, fine. So now what? His wife is finishing her first year of university, studying to be a teacher, in the hopes of being able to get a job eventually. But that's going to take 4 more years. What happens in the meantime? They have kids in school, there are always costs involved. And how do they eat?

There's a family in block 6. There is no husband or father, hasn't been for many years. There isn't anyone earning any money in that house at all at the moment. 2 of the kids have have been through our Hope of Bastion school, now in high school, and one older daughter with a 2 year old. She sometimes gets work in a shrimp processing plant nearby, but gets laid off frequently. And when she is working she gets paid an absolutely ridiculous pittance for beheading and peeling a pound of shrimp. She could work all day doing that and earn $3 or $4.

Then there's my dear friend, her life has been a never-ending series of griefs. I stopped in there for a few minutes, but we began to talk and then the floodgates opened and she told me part, just part, of the last 10 years' worth. She is a single mother too, 5 kids at home. She has struggled away faithfully doing a fabulous job of rasing her kids alone, finding ways to make ends meet. She has a degenerative kidney disease that we are managing, her meds alone cost over $400 a month. Her latest disaster is that one corner of her bamboo house has rotted and is collapsing. Well, just fix it then. Even if there was lots of money, it's not that simple. There's more to the housing story, that's what came out today. She lives behind her sister's house, with her wall maybe 4 feet away from the back wall of the other house. And her sister has decided that she wants to enlarge her house, build onto the back of it. So, too bad about my friend, the only solution offered is to knock down the front of her place and live in the back part to make way for the addition. Which would reduce her living space by half for her family of 6, including 4 teenage boys. Oh, and the corner that is falling - you have to pass through it to get to the "bathroom". So the kids are skinny so they're doing that with great care. So I asked what my friend is doing about facilities. Oh she's going off up the road to someone's house. Oh, and.... you can hardly make your way along her street right now, it's all dug up, they're putting in sewers and finally fixing things up in Bastion, but at the moment that street is a disaster. As I left she hugged me and thanked me for listening, and apologized for serving me a delicious bowl of soup and rice.

And the red tape and paperwork and level of dificulty in every aspect of life here make for other problems. I was in another home this week (another meal served to me), seems like a nice stable little family. There is a father present, and he has a job. Sometimes. He works in construction which is quite different here to what it is in Canada. Here that usually means getting taken on for little jobs here and there. So he's often out of work. There's a 19 year old son, he's finished high school, but can't get a job because of some long involved delay with getting his papers from his school. And without those he can't work. 

I could go on. And on. I'm absolutely reeling today with it all. Why is it bothering me so much now all of a sudden? I think I must have got used to things to some degree and been floating above it, relatively unaffected. I don't want to think of myself as hardened. I guess so much time in the last few days spent listening and observing has re-opened my eyes. And now I'm getting ready to go home to Canada for a month. To a rather different world. The homes I've been in here are furnished with the most basic of items, sometimes not even those, and what they do have are things that by the standards of the world I'm going to are fit only for the dump. How can I ever reconcile what I will find there with the realities I know here?