It’s early morning, but already 40 degrees and the wind makes it feel as though I’m inside a giant hairdryer. I am surrounded by children — there are 300,000 of them here, none of whom has even the basic means to wash themselves or owns a pair of underpants. These children, when they have the strength, use twigs to clean their teeth.
One tiny, filthy tot, like something out of a Dickens novel, is scraping at her teeth in front of me. I ask how old she is, thinking she is maybe four or five. She tells me she’s 13.
As she scrapes, making herself pretty for me, she dislodges a tooth and calmly takes it out of her mouth. The poor girl is disintegrating before my eyes; at once impossibly young and improbably old.
Her very existence mocks the world that I have come from.
 |
| Photo: David Parker for The Daily Mail; Liz Jones with Dahiro and her sick daughter at Dadaab Refugee Camp |
Here I am worrying about Monarch Programming which is something even the Vatican was involved in after World War Two and the rest of the world hasn't enough to grow its own food anymore. Since Monarch Programming is a technique to stay on top as it were, maybe they are related, since the West and its competitors are busy trying to be dominant in a world of too many people and too few resources, and as long as that battle can be won
ReplyDeletethe incentive to remedy this inequality seems as distant as this story is from the usual National Geographic treatment...of poverty as a spectacle.