GateHold
Oct 16, 08, 7:58 pm
Something a little different and sobering this week over in Salon.com's ASK THE PILOT.
It starts off with a story about the litter-strewn airport in Dakar, Senegal, then shifts into a personal story about a visit to a Senegalese slum, and the rescue of an injured animal. Some riveting pictures.
Of Airports, Travel, Hedgehogs and Poverty. Meditations from an African Slum
Was it the right thing to do, or the wrong thing? Or was it simply no thing – just a tic of human nature, irrelevant to any greater context? Somehow it all seems connected: the airport; the slum; our feelings of guilt and ambivalence; the fallacy of good intentions. And one more African death, however small.
“… Exploring other parts of the world is beneficial in all the ways it is typically given credit for, and I remain appalled by the average American's geographical know-nothingness and disinterest in visiting foreign countries. But traveling can also burn you out, suck away your faith in humanity. Right there in front of you, the world is falling to pieces. The planet has been ravaged, life is cheap, and there is little that you, as the western observer, with or without your good conscience, are going to do about it. Most of the world’s population now exists in some form of what we in the developed west would describe as squalor. For the first time in human history, more people now live in cities than in the countryside, and over a billion of them are packed into slums. India alone has close to fifty cities each with a population exceeding one million. How many Americans, I wonder, can name even three cities in India?
…Take a drive some time along the Route de Rufisque, a badly potholed stretch running southbound out of Dakar. A half-hour's excursion along the Rufisque is a full-immersion tour of everything that is wrong in the world. What makes the area uniquely awful is the brutal mix of both organic and industrial squalor, some of it piled so high that it's a wonder citizens do not routinely die beneath avalanches of waste. There is excrement and animals and rotting garbage, yes. And there are mountains of old tires; three-story towers of discarded axles; the smashed, rusted hulks of automobiles set amidst knee-deep pools of oil and grease. There is one particular spot, where the Rufisque curves to the right and merges with the larger southbound road. Here, http://www.flickr.com/photos/globetrodden/2888206160/ the view opens up and presents a scene that is straight out of Dante: a slum so horrifying that it is impossible to tell where the refuse ends and the people and their homes begin. Rising out of this hell are a pair of gnarled old trees, long ago denuded and stripped of their bark, their trunks stained black by fumes and cooking fires. Ragged, leaf-less branches claw toward the sky…
.... There at my feet was a small spiny clump about the size of a grapefruit, covered in sand and miserably entangled by the wire. It was an African pygmy hedgehog, exactly like the one I had as a pet several years ago. I spent a good twenty minutes extricating the hedgehog from the wire. I had Mustafa shatter a beer bottle, and used the shards of glass as a knife. First I got the leg out, then severed the wire around its neck. It was messy and horrible and I cut myself to boot. You could not have intentionally bound an object as tightly as this poor creature had managed to bind itself. The knots were so thick and tight that I wondered if maybe a person had done the tying….”
For the full story, click here:
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2008/10/17/askthepilot294/
Entry to Salon is free and instant. To skip the gateway ad, watch for the “Enter Salon” link in the upper right corner.
It starts off with a story about the litter-strewn airport in Dakar, Senegal, then shifts into a personal story about a visit to a Senegalese slum, and the rescue of an injured animal. Some riveting pictures.
Of Airports, Travel, Hedgehogs and Poverty. Meditations from an African Slum
Was it the right thing to do, or the wrong thing? Or was it simply no thing – just a tic of human nature, irrelevant to any greater context? Somehow it all seems connected: the airport; the slum; our feelings of guilt and ambivalence; the fallacy of good intentions. And one more African death, however small.
“… Exploring other parts of the world is beneficial in all the ways it is typically given credit for, and I remain appalled by the average American's geographical know-nothingness and disinterest in visiting foreign countries. But traveling can also burn you out, suck away your faith in humanity. Right there in front of you, the world is falling to pieces. The planet has been ravaged, life is cheap, and there is little that you, as the western observer, with or without your good conscience, are going to do about it. Most of the world’s population now exists in some form of what we in the developed west would describe as squalor. For the first time in human history, more people now live in cities than in the countryside, and over a billion of them are packed into slums. India alone has close to fifty cities each with a population exceeding one million. How many Americans, I wonder, can name even three cities in India?
…Take a drive some time along the Route de Rufisque, a badly potholed stretch running southbound out of Dakar. A half-hour's excursion along the Rufisque is a full-immersion tour of everything that is wrong in the world. What makes the area uniquely awful is the brutal mix of both organic and industrial squalor, some of it piled so high that it's a wonder citizens do not routinely die beneath avalanches of waste. There is excrement and animals and rotting garbage, yes. And there are mountains of old tires; three-story towers of discarded axles; the smashed, rusted hulks of automobiles set amidst knee-deep pools of oil and grease. There is one particular spot, where the Rufisque curves to the right and merges with the larger southbound road. Here, http://www.flickr.com/photos/globetrodden/2888206160/ the view opens up and presents a scene that is straight out of Dante: a slum so horrifying that it is impossible to tell where the refuse ends and the people and their homes begin. Rising out of this hell are a pair of gnarled old trees, long ago denuded and stripped of their bark, their trunks stained black by fumes and cooking fires. Ragged, leaf-less branches claw toward the sky…
.... There at my feet was a small spiny clump about the size of a grapefruit, covered in sand and miserably entangled by the wire. It was an African pygmy hedgehog, exactly like the one I had as a pet several years ago. I spent a good twenty minutes extricating the hedgehog from the wire. I had Mustafa shatter a beer bottle, and used the shards of glass as a knife. First I got the leg out, then severed the wire around its neck. It was messy and horrible and I cut myself to boot. You could not have intentionally bound an object as tightly as this poor creature had managed to bind itself. The knots were so thick and tight that I wondered if maybe a person had done the tying….”
For the full story, click here:
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2008/10/17/askthepilot294/
Entry to Salon is free and instant. To skip the gateway ad, watch for the “Enter Salon” link in the upper right corner.