Selfishness

The house next door is blaring loud music in Khmer. It is Saturday, and this morning I visited the Russian Market with a former student (in town for the weekend), walked along the riverfront, and ate at a pretty Western café with a view of the water. A fairly typical weekend day, even by American standards. Shopping, lunch, and time with friends. Except for the part where street children begged the last of the uneaten fruit from our plates, and asked for the half a Coke that was left on the table. There was nothing typical about that.

I think about poverty a lot. It’s not a confession designed to elicit any response, it’s just a fact. I have to think about it. Every day, it’s right in front of my face. Across the street from where I’m living is a house under construction. This is no ordinary house. It’s a palace, by any standard of the word. Tall, ornate, modern, beautiful, it’s the kind of house fit for a king. Or, in this case, fit for a military higher-up who can afford to add on to his pre-existing palace. I’m not one to begrudge someone a home, even a nice, comfortable one, and certainly if you have the money and want to build a four-story monstrosity in a developing nation, I won’t stand in your way.

The thing is, the workers who have built this “house” live right outside the gate. They live on the sidewalk, in hastily constructed houses of sheet metal. Each is maybe 10’ x 10’, with a single door, and a window (but that’s only if the sheet metal doesn’t reach the roof). Families live in these structures, children emerge to yell “hello” as I walk by in the morning and the evening. They cook over fires lit in the street, and hang their laundry against the front door to dry. For the most part, the inside consists of a raised platform that goes halfway across the length of the structure, used for sleeping, sitting, and whatever else one can do in so small of a space. Every day, twice a day, I walk by these families, a total of maybe 40 people who live in these homes.

Yesterday, on the way home through flooded streets and a torrential downpour, I noticed another group of homes like these, a few blocks away. They had at least six inches of water in them. Only one was built up on stilts. There are no zoning laws in Cambodia. No way to ensure that those with the palaces and those with the shacks are kept apart. So every day when I lock the gate and turn toward the street, I see poverty leaning up against extreme wealth. Every day I wonder, How can this be?

It makes me think about selfish decisions in my life. Because 40 people living on a sidewalk could easily take up residence inside the mansion they are building. Yet the selfishness of one man’s desire for more space, more room, keeps them living on the street. I know it’s the wages he pays them that keeps a roof over their head at all. I understand the economics of the situation. But I still have to wonder… if he had donated the money, had them build a different facility, even rented out the building at affordable prices, would these 40 lives be different? Then I think, what decisions do I make every day that affect the lives of 40 other people?

We met a girl today selling bottles of water in front of the King’s Palace. She is 13 years old. She speaks English well. She does not go to school. At $20 a month for tuition, it’s simply too expensive. We fed a little boy leftover papaya and pineapple off our lunch plates. He shared it with his siblings, or friends waiting on the other side of the bushes. At 9 years old, he is begging for lunch. I’m not sure what kind of hope these kids have for a future. What kind of dreams can you have of being grown up without education, without a home, without lunch?

These circumstances are sad. They break my heart. But they touch something else, my sense of fairness, of justice. Because I’m not certain that it has to be this way, that this extreme disparity has to exist. I don’t know how to fix it, I don’t know where to start. In a few weeks, when this mansion is complete, these construction workers and their families will move on, to another small house somewhere else. I won’t smell their cooking fires as I eat my dinner. I won’t hear these kids as I walk to work. The sidewalk will be clear, and I will be free to forget that scarcity and wealth can coexist so… peacefully. In the meantime, I suppose I have to trust that at least two things ensure that in the eyes of God, my privilege and their poverty mean nothing. The first is that we are both in need of grace and mercy. The second is that we have all had to endure the same loud Khmer music all day long.

Vanessa and the little guy who is hopefully a little less hungry tonight.