Challenges to my Expectations

Dispossessed is divided into sections, each centered around a different city and focused around a slightly different topic. I have read the section on Manila, Philippines and I am pretty far into the one on Nairobi, Kenya. In each section there is a blend of personal stories and interviews from residents of slums – “informal settlements” as Kramer prefers to name them – and discussion of the history, economics, and statistics that give context and scope to these situations. I feel like I’m getting a really good picture of what these communities are like and what affects them, and some of what I see is not what I expected.

The fact that people in these situations are poor and struggle to find income was not surprising, but what struck me is that many of them have a decent education. This stood out especially in the part on Manila, where the author went into detail about how highly Filipino families prize education. There are even people with Bachelor’s degrees from local universities that live and work in Manila’s squatter settlements! My surprise reveals my underlying assumption that such residents are largely uneducated, which is probably much less true than I would guess.

Densely packed houses made of makeshift materials is a picture I would expect in an informal settlement, but what Kramer describes on his walk through a settlement in Nairobi goes beyond my expectations: He describes walking by barber shops, blacksmiths, vendors selling all kinds of food, informal cinemas, and so on. These are all things that I would find in any normal, productive western community! As I think this, I immediately realize that I had pictured slums as places where people sat around and slept all jammed up with not enough room, but I had not pictured them as places where people live. The fact is, though, that people go about their whole lives there, and they are just as industrious and productive as anyone.

Near the core of my flawed perception is my tendency to pooh-pooh the situation of the poor and to assume that they are at least partly responsible for the dilemmas they face. Even if I deny this with my words, that is the tendency of my emotional response to these things. The more I read, the more I see that this is so far from the truth. The factors that have caused and are perpetuating these horrible conditions are the result of the ways that the powerful elite have hoarded wealth and resources while completely neglecting and even robbing from the poor. By “powerful elite” I am referring to everyone from colonial powers in the past to corporations and governments in the present. Maybe I’ll post again later to discuss this more fully.

These thoughts have reminded me of the beginning of James chapter 5. As I reflect on the role my ancestors and my culture have had in the shaping of this reality, I can’t help but ask myself how much responsibility I bear as someone who has taken too much for granted or cared for the destitute too little. “Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you.” They might not be mowing fields today, but there are many people who do not receive just compensation or legal recognition for the work that they diligently do. If I were to stand before the God of justice today, would he say to me, “Weep and wail because of the misery that is coming upon you. … You have hoarded wealth in the last days”?