Poverty... What is poverty? Just another word in the dictionary with more useless words that meant nothing more to another human being whom set high up in the status quo. What is poverty? For someone who wakes up every morning, left the house with perfume tracing their steps, with a desk at the office, car at the basement and a family to go home to at the end of the day. It is no different from a man waking up every morning, walking to a clear spot on the street with footsteps to trace his every whereabouts, personal belongings beside him where ever he goes, and every where is his place for a home in the cold night.
Poverty means not to have the care of the entire world on his shoulder. Not to care if there would be another world war, or who would be the next minister of the nation or the bills to pay for the previous months. All they have in mind is the remaining debt they have to pay and the filling of their stomach. I remember watching in a documentary on one war corespondent that had previously covered the poverty in Africa. Quoted from James Nachtwey, "Primarily these famines were not natural famines. They were product of war. Its conceivable the oldest weapon of mass extermination known to men. Its very primitive, and yet its very effective."
I agree to what James had said in the documentary. The act of wars affects poverty intensely like a nuclear missile landed on Singapore. Only difference is that human survive the impact of war, only to face the hush hunger of poverty. And this is no hunger game in the movies. The story of their lives and how they landed on the streets were not stories made up by some writers behind their papers and pens. These are real living people that we seldom find time to understand what they face in their daily routine or how they ended up having nothing to sleep on except the hardness of the roadside walkway.
Malaysia is not at war and it hasn't been since the day Malaysia got its own independency in 1957. But we still see poverty in every corner of the streets we turn to. Why is that? The economics in Malaysia is rising and rising as the abled living people struggle to get along with their lives, earning money and paying bills, while the poor continue on poorer than the day before. Often when people laid eyes on these homeless people on the street, the first impression from them was that they were drug addicts, wasting their money on nothing but expensive drugs, or bottle of alcohol to end their nights. It is the first instinct for the human nature to stereotype everything that comes along the way, but never to reason with the possibility of other events that might have taken place in these street wonderer's lives.
A friend of mind told me once of how he came across a man in the middle of the night. With just a quick glimpse, my friend thought it was just an old stray dog, bathing itself. As he stare longer, it turns out that the dog was actually a naked at a drain gutter, cleaning himself with the waters that came out of it. Another time, I witness with my very own eyes, of a mother with two kids, one believe to be a toddler while the other only an infant. I watch as horror and sadness fills me as the mother poured soda water from the can, into the infant's milk bottle and feed the infant of what seems to be milk + soda, just so the infant could get away from having to feel the horrid feeling of hunger-nest. That time I was without my camera, so I could not proof to anyone of what I had seen. Just last week, I found this mother again, sitting at a different spot in Kuala Lumpur. She was playing with her infant child in her arms while her toddler watch as people pass by. This time, there wasn't any milk in the bottle. Instead it was filled with rose syrup water, of what I believe that she bought from a hawker near by that roughly cast about RM1.50 or so. I stayed a little longer to observe and notice how there are some kind folks putting red notes into the cup in front of her.
People see Malaysia as a peaceful beautiful place and that Malaysian are quite lucky to be living in Malaysia because there are no natural disasters like tornado or hurricane and that Malaysian are lucky to be out of war zones. But they haven't seen the dark side of Malaysia. The people there were abundant, got thrown out of their own homes to live on the streets, surviving nothing more than walk pedestrians got to offer them and the cold hard looks as they watch these street wonderer's with disgust. Most people only cared about themselves and their own well being that they have forgotten those that doesn't even have a home to go to. People fight for the rights of freedom and a righteous voting system that they have forgotten about those that hardly even exist in the eyes of the governments. Governments talk about reformation of system, but does that even benefit those that could hardly feed themselves? To ask for benefits of the citizen, it has to be the kind of benefit for all walks of life, for the jobbers and the jobless, for the homies and the homeless, for families and the loners. Benefits for citizen should not be particular to a certain degree of citizenhood.
If you want a better country, start from the lowest of life, not the middle.
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Location: Bed Room
Mood: Thoughtful
Music: Snow Patrol (in my mind)
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