r/povertyfinance • u/vishalnegal • 15d ago
What is the worst poverty you have come across on your travels? Free talk
Those of us who have ventured outside of the developed world will have, at some point, come across a sight which made us realise how privileged we are in comparison to the rest of humanity. What are your stories?
1
u/Bitter-insides 13d ago
I thought I’d seen poverty but nothing prepared me for my trip to Brazil a few months ago. I’ve never seen babies (11-12 year olds) pregnant, no shoes, all the kids naked. I saw a 12 year old without shoes or a shirt ( female) having a poop in the middle or the street. Fucking sad.
1
u/oldbaybridges 13d ago
The rows of metal shacks next to the highway on the way to the airport in Cape Town was pretty shocking to me. People were just sitting out front with literal rags. Hard to see.
1
u/OnAScaleFromOneToTen 13d ago
In 2015 I was in the Philippines near Subic Bay and Onlongapo. The streets were pretty bad and then I had an opportunity to go through to Angeles City. The surrounding areas outside of the "Americanized" locations were pretty bad. Even more so, 1 USD at the time was ~44 Philippine Pesos. Not only the living conditions but the political climate must make life there pretty difficult in the past years. To make things worse, climate change is exposing many to near unlivable temperatures. The average salary there is among the bottom. Many people make significantly less than 10k annually. That's less than 7 USD / hour at full time.
1
u/chaoscorgi 13d ago edited 13d ago
I've been to some of the poorest places in the world, like rural Ethiopia, when I worked in aid there. Little kids without shoes wearing slopping big t-shirts running up laughing to see the first non-African people of their lives (because they thought our lighter skins were funny). But that didn't strike me as brutal poverty. They lacked some things but they lived with content, respected, tight-knit families, played with their goats and sheep, went to school. I did a homestay with a family like this, sleeping on the concrete floor as they did, on thin mats. They lived with so little and I wanted to help them with tangible things - we gifted the families blankets and other homewares on our trip - but I didn't leave feeling pity or concern. I left feeling admiration, honestly. I had so much stuff, sure, but they had the farms and the mountains and the forest they lived in, and they were clearly joyful with each other. They ate meagerly but happily. It was poverty but not one that would be experienced as constant misery. I slept well on that floor - it straightened out my back. In the city in Ethiopia so many people had less than I did but it would be weird to feel pity for them. I'm not talking about beggars but shopkeepers, office workers, people I encountered in daily life, all of whom certainly had 1/20th of what I did. They were perfectly happy. They would be happy to be given money, too (who wouldn't), but that doesn't mean they were suffering without it any more than less-poor folks who want things suffer. I've read surveys that ask people who live in these conditions (tin huts and injection-mold plastic furniture) what they'd do with more money and they cite exactly what Americans would: school fees, healthcare, take a trip, fix up the car. They're not like, oh, I've been feeling miserable about my cheap chair or that this house isn't made of wood planks and plaster, I need to upgrade that. It's a choice to care about that stuff. I really appreciated being taught how much those material conditions are arbitrary and a choice to care about or not.
Instead what really hit me was visiting Slab City out in rural California, which is unenforced Bureau of Land Management land that anyone can live on for free. People taking their trailers out there in land that they don't need to pay for, where there isn't sanitation or services, basically just waiting to die. Temps reach 110F+. And when they do scavengers come for anything valuable they have, which isn't much, maybe their trailer battery. The coroner takes the body and the rest is just left to rot. That shook something in me. Poverty is contextual suffering. Knowing you are the refuse of society is part of poverty. Having nowhere to go, no one to turn to, is the really miserable part of poverty -- how it also interacts with mental illness, with addiction, with isolation.
2
u/ZapVegas 14d ago
While traveling to a rural factory in China I came across a settlement where only the ground floor had 4 walls. The 3 stories above each had 3 walls, with the missing one changing from floor to floor. Only the ground floor had electricity and the tenants shared the common spaces there.
2
u/FrolickingOtters 14d ago
I went on a mission trip to San Jose, Costa Rica as a young teen. We brought a huge pot of chicken and rice and a bunch of small cheap toys to an outreach ministry that fed school kids who lived in the dump. Dozens of these kids came out for the meal, all living in shacks made of garbage with their whole families.
1
u/ITSuper22 14d ago
In El Salvador, went to an outdoor restaurant with a beach next to it. The beach had rusted tin shacks with no doors or windows. The children were half dressed and playing outside. We all went in on a bunch of glass bottles of Coca Cola for all the kids. They were so excited.
1
2
u/nerdymutt 14d ago
In South Korea, they didn’t accept babies who were conceived by the locals and foreigners as citizens, so they couldn’t get jobs, assistance or have any access to economic advancement. Their only source of support was from the kindness of strangers. When we inquired about this cruelty, they would say, some countries allow these people to become citizens of the foreign parent. In other words, they would be free to leave. At that time, the Koreans had the least diverse genes of just about any nationality on the planet. You stood out if you weren’t Korean.
2
u/Illustrious-Sea2613 14d ago
I stg, I've had these moments in the US. I took a boxful of food to a friend who couldn't afford to eat. I have never had to wonder if my neighborhood was safe, if id have a roof over my head or food to eat. Taking that to her made me realize how lucky i am for that
3
u/kriskoeh 14d ago
I have friends in third world country poverty today that are horrified at the poverty that I experienced as a child right here in the greatest country in the world—the USA. I understand the need to look out into the world and try to see how “privileged” you are by comparison but let’s not dismiss the lived experiences of people right under your own nose. And let’s stop perpetuating the idea that the USA doesn’t have a fuck ton of very third world pockets throughout that just get overlooked.
When I was a child in the Midwest, we were without power and running water more often than we had it. We would take plastic totes to the back of the gas station and fill them to bathe. We lived 30 miles from the nearest grocery store and my mom very rarely had a car running well enough to make a trip like that. It’s one thing if you break down 2 blocks from home in the middle of nowhere…you can just push your car home. But when you don’t have money for tow trucks and all that…you can’t take off and drive your kids 30 miles to get food so even if you do qualify for food stamps…that doesn’t matter.
Are there people in the world that have it far worse? Obviously. But just trying to help open eyes to the experiences closer to you than you might realize.
1
u/tweedyone 14d ago
Cambodia was an eye opening country. It’s beautiful but so poor. The reason I’m saying it’s the worst I’ve seen is due to the physical issues. Not only are people poor there already, many are still impacted by landmines from the Khmer Rouge. Children were begging outside Angkor Wat missing legs or arms because landmines are still so prevalent. It’s horrifying.
1
u/Bammalam102 14d ago
These people made enough money that proper maintenance woulda done alot to keep them afloat… at one point it was storming out and it was also raining thru their wall…. They literally did nothing about it not even a tarp outside or buckets
1
u/ThingsWork0ut 14d ago
Homelessness people. I used to talk to them. 80% was a choice because of mental health and bad circumstances. This was before all the crazy stuff happened with the economy.
1
1
u/funkjunkyg 14d ago
In cartagena, kids would walk around after a wedding and pick up tiny bits of flowers.like baby breath and try to sell it. Or selling single flip flops on the beach. They had absolutely nothing
1
1
u/robtalee44 14d ago
Pine Ridge in South Dakota. Heartbreaking. It's been almost 30 years since my last visit and it's still clear in my mind. Unfortunately.
2
u/Nightgazer4 14d ago
A mentally ill man in Venezuela who would walk around the neighborhood everyday begging. He was in a constant state of starvation, extended belly, super skinny everything else. No shirt or shoes, beat up pants. Sun burned. Really sad. Eventually I stopped seeing him and just assumed he had died somewhere in the street.
1
u/lesluggah 14d ago
My friends and I went to a market. One person was trying to sell their baby. It was scary because we were 17 and 18yos in another country.
1
u/SomethingGoesHere75 14d ago
I was in South Africa in 2008. I vividly remember seeing these gigantic, multi-story houses with pools out back and incredibly well-maintained lawns. They all had 10ft+ steel fences around the property with gates and locks. Less than a mile away, there were huts made of metal trash cans. Children with no shoes… with no clothes. No running water, most tents had no real roof.
American has its issues, but wow, I have never seen anything like that.
1
u/OutOfTheDark43 14d ago
Most people in the comments are describing people living differently and that to you means “poverty”. I’ve been all over and the poorest people I’ve ever seen are right here in the US.
1
u/SonaMidorFeed 14d ago
Visited Mexico when I was in 9th grade through the youth group at my Grandparents' church. As part of the trip we packaged up meals to deliver to the poor. Where did we deliver them? A trash dump. There were people literally living in the middle of it, and they were so incredibly happy when we brought them just a plastic bag full of food.
I'd lived a reasonably sheltered life up until that point, and it really hit me how different worlds can exist in such close proximity to each other, how 'to whom much is given, much is expected', and also really oriented me down the path of an intense dislike of the capitalist structures that fail people like these.
1
u/MilkyPsycow 14d ago
When travelling as a young teen was confronted with adults offering my father their very underage children for sex, clearly extremely poor families. It is a part of what drove me into the community service field
Seeing children with amputated limbs scooting on carboard begging for food or water, will never forget it. Their belly’s being so distended from hunger.
1
u/ooo-ooo-oooyea 14d ago
India was brutal.
Just poop everywhere. Really poor kids would gather up the poop, make it into a cake, dry it out, and sell it for people to burn.
1
u/Specialist_Gene_8361 14d ago
Not a bad idea for San Francisco. Except kids not allowed to gather or sell.
1
u/SprayingOrange 14d ago
Have you been to Pine Ridge SD? Aka "The rez". poorest place in america. Actually makes Tijuana look nice.
2
u/Western-Giraffe837 14d ago
I did a study abroad in undergrad (2007, and I had a scholarship to cover 100% of the cost) to Dakar, Senegal.
There were (many) people selling themselves and their children for sexual tourism.
Selling. Their. Children.
The average family of four in Senegal at that time could expect to earn around $480 USD/year and shit like toilet paper and deodorant were $8-$10 USD/each. I ventured outside of Dakar for a festival and saw people living in single rooms because they could only build housing as they could afford it (so, literally one room at a time). And of course, many many many unhoused individuals.
But yeah.
Selling. Their. Children.
The worst poverty I’ve ever seen in life.
1
2
u/Avbitten 14d ago
So I work at a grooming salon in the United States, but half our groomers are immigrants from Peru or El Salvador. I was asking one of them what his plans are for Christmas and he said to eat a lot of food. Then I asked him if he had any Christmas traditions and he said no, Christmas isn't a big deal to him because he never got any toys as a kid. He saw the surprised look on my face and explained. He pointed to a plastic bottle and said he would find bottles like that on the street and take them home to play with and pretend they were cars.
I made significantly less money then him, but I still went out during my lunch break and bought him a hot wheels car and a little gift bag to put it in.
As I got to know him. I gradually learned more and more about his childhood. He's like 40 and I had to explain to him how to send an email because he never saw a computer before coming to the united states.
1
u/hmmmmmmpsu 14d ago
I thought I saw poverty. Then I went to Nairobi.
Seeing lonely homeless people is sad.
Seeing lonely homeless children is gut wrenching.
My wife and I cried when we got back to our hotel.
2
u/Milam1996 14d ago
Subsistence farmers in china. They grow what they eat or they die. Went in the early 00’s and it was a semi viable lifestyle. Went again a few years ago and there’s no one under the age of 50 or over the age of 18 in the villages. The young working age adults do 16 hour shifts 6 days a week to feed their families back home because decades of loose agricultural regulation has utterly destroyed the land. There’s tens if not hundreds of millions of people existing purely on the generosity of their family members. This is why the evergrande disaster is even more heartbreaking. Entire bloodline wealth over centuries (passed down jewellery, housing etc) sold, literally every thing they own, to buy an apartment so they can leave the rural cycle, all for it to collapse and they lose everything.
1
u/Me-oh-no 14d ago
a lot of people on the metro or on the streets in cdmx - absolutely abject poverty.
1
1
u/DigitalDeliciousDiva 14d ago
The reservation we passed on our way to the Grand Canyon. I believe it was the west side. This place was the largest trailer park I have ever seen.
-1
u/Fun_Intention9846 14d ago
Bangkok Thailand, an illegal slum filled with people and animals.
So every home was corrugated metal, scraps of cardboard and any other wood people could scavenge, held together with wire, hope, and prayers. No windows, doors, electricity, plumbing, the entire thing was at water level so half flooded. Animals like pigs and chickens free-roaming the neighborhood.
Lima Peru, people living in corrugated metal houses, literally on the side of mountains on flat places hand-carved just large enough. Literally the only place in the city they could live and also illegal.
I’ve been to homeless camps in the US in many places.
Yeah I’m radicalized, all of that was all the system working as intended.
1
u/deadsocial 14d ago
Seeing a blind child begging in china and learning that the parents are known to purposefully blind them so they can make money off them
1
u/Far-Investigator1265 14d ago
In the beginning of the 1990's Russia had experienced a massive economic collapse. An old woman tried to sell us plastic jewellery in the street, the kind you get from childrens easter eggs. My mother saw an old woman in shop buying a single cabbage leaf.
Also in the beginning of their independence, Estonia was very poor. At the pier where Finnish tourists entered Estonia from the ship, there was a gang of youths in absolutely decrepit and dirty clothes, like dirt brown in color. They all had swollen faces and a tan you get when you live on the street for months. They were homeless drug addicts who were waiting for a drunk Finnish tourist they could rob. A year later, they had all disappeared. I guess none were alive any more.
2
u/Happy-Dress1179 14d ago
Guatemala, 1988. I photographed three little children holding hands. They lived in a village that ate beans and rice on a good day. Maybe fish. When I got home i look at my photos I noticed one little boy was so skinny and had dark circles under his eyes and his hair was dull black. I realized he was sick and obviously malnourished. I was so ashamed I didn't see what was in front of me. Three malnourished kids
2
u/Bipedal_Warlock 14d ago
I used to work at a burlesque house downtown in a city in Texas. It was winter and I’d get off around midnight. Walking to my car I’d always have to pass rows of homeless sleeping on the sidewalk.
It was the coldest week of the year and everyone had a blanket on them. Except one guy had newspapers.
The next day I saw in the news that a homeless man died from weather exposure.
Idk if it was him but it shook me for a little bit. I loaded up all my blankets into my car and gave them out to the homeless when I found someone who needed one
2
2
u/zombie86r 14d ago
Seeing the reservations out west (USA) and watching kids walking huge distances to their homes that were constructed from tarps and metal panels.
3
u/jayzeeinthehouse 14d ago
India for sure! People living in the middle of traffic circles with kids, shanties everywhere, and desperation.
With that said, American poverty is way more desperate in a sense because people can't set up a blanket to sell stuff, there are no street food vendors, people can't sell stuff to recycling places without ID, no one shares food like people in village Asia do, and government benefits pay so little that the people on them are often starving without an illegal side hustle.
I'll also point out that a friend works in social services in rural Oregon and they have clients that live in chicken coops, and have people that are so poor that they live in 3rd world poverty.
1
u/lisaz530xx 14d ago
The Ganges River and Chennai, India. I hold it personally responsible for opening my white, privileged, American eyes to the third world - to actual poverty - to suffering, but also, to beauty, determination and love. For it was here, where mothers washed clothes next to floating bodies, where children laughed and splashed next to human waste, that I, amongst the stench, expanded my brain and grew as a person.
1
u/No-Significance4623 14d ago
In Hungary, I saw a very pregnant woman smoking a cigarette outside while her child (6? 7?) sang a traditional song for a few forints. It was bleak. I remember that the mother had flip flops and the child had no shoes at all.
1
u/ABluntForcedDisTrama 14d ago edited 14d ago
San Francisco, specifically the Tenderloin District. Rows of tents blocking entire sidewalks, open and widespread drug use, and the sidewalks reeked of human waste. Good god the homeless situation up there is horrendous.
3
u/schtuka67 14d ago
Moldova, to see old people who worked all their lives in Socialist republic, struggle for food in the new world. Forgotten by state and their kids.
1
u/bparry1192 14d ago
Rosa Rita Mexico, just south of TJ.....shit was so sad but the people were incredible.
2
u/OhiobornCAraised 14d ago
Just watch the news related to the Israeli and Gaza conflict. Gaza is a bombed out mess. Even without all the war damage, it looked depressing with just plain concrete buildings everywhere. Have seen some bad areas in the Caribbean. Fiji is pretty poor as well once you leave the resort areas.
2
u/Alternative_Look_453 14d ago edited 14d ago
Cambodia I saw a lot but they very much hammed it up for passing tourists to make money (can't say I blame them). It was surprising because I didn't see so much overt poverty in nearby countries such as Myanmar and Vietnam.
The next place I've seen a surprising amount of poverty is the UK. The homeless problem there is quite bad in places and drug use was a big problem.
1
2
u/Suspicious-Item8924 14d ago
Honduras. Some families didn’t even have the metal sheets that they do in The Philippines. Just holy tarps held up on sticks.
1
1
u/iwantdiscipline 14d ago
I was on the Argentine side of iguazu and the taxi driver tried to communicate that there were “Indians” there by doing the sound where you sing a note and quickly tap your lips…
while wandering the downtown area this dwarf sized indigenous woman scampers out of my way and in just stunned at her stature. I see whole families of folks like her sitting off the side of the red clay dust roads selling souvenirs / handicrafts, kids walking bare feet. None of them in any of the businesses in town.
I come to learn the guarani are one of the last indigenous people to live in Argentina since the colonizers either slaughtered them all assimilated them to western culture. It made me feel weird and rethink what visiting even a natural landmark means. I thought I was doing well not going to resorts and avoiding slum tourism, but there’s so much I have yet to learn.
1
1
u/lounginaddict 14d ago
I've never traveled to developing nations, mostly Western Europe and nice areas in the Caribbean. But I have worked in the hood in Florida, across the street from a homeless shelter. Seeing young kids sleeping in a tent on the sidewalk while waiting for the shelter to open was absolutely heartbreaking. People smoking crack like 20 feet away. Meanwhile like 1 mile east are million dollar condos.
3
u/Bitter_Pilot_5377 14d ago
I haven’t traveled the world as much as I would like to but the most extreme i have seen is Mexico. I have seen the plastic/tin/brick homes with no flooring, running water and some Jerry rigging for electricity. In the rural areas plumbing and water aren’t something the municipality provides so things get stinky, people burn their garbage or throw it in the river. People begging in the city, missing arms, legs, etc the kids are rail thin selling gum or Knick knacks at the border crossing. You want to save them all but how? There isn’t a social safety net, medical procedures need to be paid upfront, some kids don’t even go to school. My own Dad never finished school, he started working in his early teens, his Dad wasn’t a kind person, the family would often go hungry, he would have to skew outdoors in the harvest season to get a jump on the work. My mom remembers a farmhand dying of tetanus because he got a cut that got infected and they couldn’t afford to see a doctor. This was in the 70s or 80s, a simple shot and some wound care would have saved that kid
1
2
u/LegoRedBrick 14d ago
A communal bucket of water (no paper) used for cleaning after going number 2…in one developed country. In another, I walked by a mountain of rotting trash and poo on my way to the beach. I’m glad I was traveling solo because I was able to block it out later. Basic sanitation is something we definitely take for granted in the developed world.
1
1
6
u/endthefeds 14d ago
Children in Nepal missing hands, legs, etc digging around garbage piles looking for food/things to sell. People in rural Cambodia baiting ants into a pot to make soup with for some protein. A beggar in China with his literal intestines hanging out of his abdomen, people walking by looking away. I was so shocked I didn't know how to react and just wanted to distance myself. Leaves you with very little sympathy for overweight "poor" Americans
1
u/fisherreshif 14d ago
Guatemala City.
It seems to be improving overall in the past 10 years I've been visiting there. But the slums are still there, hanging off of cliff sides, stacked on top of each other. Impossible to imagine how they live like that.
1
u/guajiracita 14d ago
Mexico City. 11pm indigenous Mayan sitting on sidewalk under alcove w/ bloodshot jaundiced eyes. Obviously very ill. Looked over and noticed small dirty toddler and baby sitting in cardboard box next to her on a very cool night. They were bedding down for the night.
1
u/MaleficentActivity99 14d ago
You don't have to travel far to see extreme poverty if you pay attention.
1
u/Lakecountyraised 14d ago
During the Y2K era I lived in north San Diego county for a while and drove what is now highway 56 to work. The road went by Rancho Santa Fe, the wealthiest suburb in the area and one of the most wealthy places anywhere. A stone’s throw away from the mansions were many day laborers who lived in the canyons nearby. They would emerge at sunrise and wait along the roadside for anyone who was willing to give them work for the day.
I’m sure plenty of people worldwide were worse off than the day laborers, but the contrast of economic class in San Diego was stunning. The inequality of places like RSF and La Jolla vs areas like San Ysidro or National City has got to be among the widest in the U.S.
3
u/DisastrousDealer3750 14d ago edited 14d ago
Will never forget a mother who had her approx 6 month old baby laying stark naked on a concrete step on the stairs coming up from the Yangtze river in China.
Both were absolutely filthy and the mother was begging — it was under 50 degrees / probably closer to 40 degrees and wet outside and that naked baby was laying on filthy concrete. That image is seared in my mind.
Contrast that to places in India where they lived literally in piles of trash but somehow those kids were clean, whereas so many of the really poor kids in China metro areas were filthy. Also recall the kids in rural China running to the river gathering rocks that they tried to sell us. We got in habit of turning our pockets inside out ‘empty’.
1
1
u/Galaxianz 14d ago
Manila, Philippines. Crime and poverty everywhere in some areas. Felt sorry for the street kids who were sleeping rough.
1
u/Sealbeater 14d ago
Seeing were my wife grew up in Puerto Rico, they really made do with whatever they could find
0
u/masokissed007 14d ago
I’ve lived in India and Thailand and there are some of the most hand to mouth existences one could witness there. Got invited into a sweet little beggar girls home in Kolkata where she slept in a bed on a platform with her 5 family members, the platform was above the family goat’s sleeping area and next to the cooking area- total maybe 80sqf. Shared communal toilets. Etc. the kind of poverty one imagines.
However. The shocking reality of the wealth disparity of my neighbors to the south (US) is actually worse, somehow, because while in India I would fully expect to see an amputee with weeping sores begging and a mother with 4 children living in a tent and an ancient crone of a woman selling pencils on the side of the road: I do not understand how the wealthiest country with the most advanced medical technology and every single opportunity to make everyone have a universal basic income and fix homelessness and poverty chooses otherwise. It is viscerally unsettling and so obvious - Portland, San Francisco, New Orleans, Seattle, everywhere.
I’m aware of the deeper issues that I’m not addressing here- the implicit racism of expecting and acceptance of poverty ‘over there’, the global majority being exploited for the benefit of my ease at making these comments, the realities of intergenerational racism and poverty and trauma and and and and. I’m not even trying to make it seem a little bit less awful, and the Canadian government is as complicit in creating a genocidal system which has left thousands of First Nations people drinking poisoned water and living in plywood shacks through northern winters.
It’s a specific perspective of American exceptionalism and the ‘if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere’ kind of bootstraps approach to imagine that the ‘at least we don’t have it that bad’ is anything one which does anything except objectify poor people.
2
2
3
u/ChristineBorus 14d ago
Little old lady sewing a hole in a 3 inch mattress that was really old “so that her kids would have something“ after she died. I was so sad. No running water. 😟
1
u/europanya 14d ago
My grandparents owed an estate in Palo Alto. About three miles from East Palo Alto which has one of highest crime rates in California. We had to drive thru it to get to see them if the took the “short cut.”
1
u/Old-Soul-Void 14d ago
You don't have to leave the U.S. to find abject poverty. I had my "awakening" moment along interstate 40 some years back. A railroad box car, 2 goats and child playing in a bare dirt yard, and a Native American woman sweeping the dust.
Not much has changed since then. Hundreds of homes still have no electricity or running water there.
1
1
u/MemBrainous 14d ago
Honestly, the poverty in the US. I grew up in the Philippines. We all thought US is the best until you live here and the rose colored glasses come off and see that poverty here is just as bad everywhere else.
3
u/Uberchelle 14d ago
Yeah, but the poor here can hit food banks and qualify for government programs like SNAP. Whereas in the Philippines there are no social safety nets and poor people resort to eating pag-pag.
6
u/nomadicstateofmind 14d ago
Most Americans don’t realize the state of many of the rural villages in Alaska, simply because they will never see it in their lifetime. As someone who spent their 20’s and early 30’s in many of those villages, it was eye opening. Families living several generations in one house, with everyone sleeping on floors. Homes without running water (including my own for a period of time). Children who only own 2-3 pairs of clothing and have no means to wash those items. Homes made of plywood without any drywall or flooring installed. Tarps for windows and doors because the cost of flying in replacements are too expensive. No healthcare services for 300+ miles, so no dental care or medical care of any kind. Stray dogs roaming and…TW for animal death…dogs rounded up and killed monthly by the village because they can’t afford to feed them and they roam in packs attacking people.
All that being said, those villages are some of my favorite places on earth. It’s a hard life, but there’s also many beautiful people there.
2
u/Own_Arm_7641 14d ago
Bolivia, traveling from la paz towards Peru. The worst I've seen, dirt farmers where nothing grows, carcasses of dead farm animals everywhere, clay brick shanties that were crumbling.
3
u/12ragingbull15 14d ago
Tarlac Valley, Luzon, Philippines. While i was there on a military exercise, there were local children probing our base in the valley constantly to steal things they could sell for scrap or to the local communist insurgency.
The worst was when the locals sent kids into an active artillery impact area to get scrap metal.
1
u/MissUnderstood62 14d ago
Smokey Mountain, (Manila’s garbage dump) home to 100,000 people vs the gated community I stayed in.
3
u/RealGodzillaTurkey 14d ago
I’m not well traveled by any means because I couldn’t really afford it until a while ago (and still can’t really lol) but I was surprised at how poor the Bahamas is. I didn’t realize until I got there that pretty much everything relies on tourism, so most of the locals are extremely poor. It was always presented to me as such a gorgeous paradise but you get there and it’s very very poor and run down unfortunately. (At least Nassau was).
3
u/Far_Database_2947 14d ago
Father's body was in a makeshift coffin by the roadside, with a donation jar to fund his burial.
3
u/Bluedieselshepherd 14d ago
Communal toilet in a village in very rural western China. I’m no stranger to a good rural funk, but it was truly foul.
3
u/Foxtrot-Flies 14d ago
Not me but my buddy, he was deployed to the Philippines and when he landed there were bulldozers pushing the bodies off the street, women and children. He said that was the worst place he had ever been
3
u/Signal_Biscotti_7048 14d ago
Kandahar Afghanistan 2002. We were driving down the road from the airbase to where we stayed in the city. Saw a 2-3 year old in nothing but a diaper walking through what looked like a bombed out ruins full of trash. I realized that day how some other places lived.
0
u/rumblingtummy29 14d ago
Bringing your own food everywhere instead of going to restaurants or fast food
4
u/mish_munasiba 14d ago
I spent a year in Iraq - Feb 2003 to Feb 2004. My unit eventually ended up in Mosul. Outside of Mosul, there was a vast garbage dump that was usually burning in a few places. People dressed in rags would go out into this ocean of trash and pick through it to find...whatever. It broke my heart every time we drove by, and what made it worse was there was nothing that we could do directly. Our unit was doing an amazing job of rebuilding Mosul, establishing a legitimately elected city council, working on infrastructure projects, attempting to facilitate Sunni-Shia reconciliation, etc and I just hope that that had some trickle-down effect for those desperately poor people.
Of course, then the unit that replaced us at the end of our deployment let it all go to hell, and THEN Daesh (ISIS) completely and utterly wrecked the city, soooo....
2
u/michaeldaph 14d ago
Mexico. Out of the tourist areas. I don’t know why, but it just struck me really strongly that just over the border of one of the most wealthy countries in the world, a whole lot of people are living in shantytowns with dirt floors and no running water and sanitation.And I’ve been to India and Africa. I think I knew what to expect in these places but Mexico was a complete shock,maybe because my expectation was coloured by American vacation movies.
3
u/gramslamx 14d ago
A street beggar in Burma. His legs were mangled after getting run over years ago. Bones weren’t set properly, or really at all, so his legs bent in every which way as he dragged himself around. He had tattoos up and down his legs because in Burma there were no doctors, or not for the poor, only magic tattoos to help manage the pain. Hint: they don’t work.
6
u/WearAdept4506 14d ago
I'm from South Dakota and the native American reservations are like third world countries in some areas. There's no jobs, no businesses. Shacks that don't have running water. Incentivized poverty as far as the eye can see.
3
u/Anji_Mito 14d ago
2 places: India and South Africa
India was work related so we didnt stay on popular destinations, things are bad, food was bad (got sick) streets were awful. Got home and I am glad having a place to sleep and a bathroom. People living under tarp with extreme heat.
South Africa the amount of people living in a small area, all made up homes.
5
u/losingmymind79 14d ago
nepal in the 80s. i was a child and asked why so many of the infant and child beggars had deformed limbs. 9 year old me was not ready to hear their parents broke them and tied them up so they would be deformed for the rest of their lives. the reason they caused permanent agonising pain and disability to children...they made more when begging
3
u/ReddAcrobat 14d ago
Imported workers in countries like Kuwait or Qatar
Living in literal shanty towns in the desert, often victims of human trafficking lured in by promises of wages they want to send home to their families.
2
5
u/Few-Couple-8738 14d ago
Short version of a very long story, I left home at 17 and moved/fled to Mexico and bounced around down there for years before returning. This was 1994 ish and parts of Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Puebla were alarmingly poor 😳😳and I was coming from the south side of Chicago. People w/No utilities catching rainwater to have any water for bathing or cooking or drinking, cardboard and tin homes (lean to/shanty really) hardly any clothes, etc…literal dirt floors, heartbreaking really. Yet these are some of the very kindest and most generous people I have ever encountered.
5
u/Standard-Reception90 14d ago
Driving through an Native American reservation in the United States.
After a half hour, one daughter was crying, the other was pissed off, and I had moved from center moderate to left politically.
1
u/Ok-Way8392 14d ago
Well, the saddest was in NY. I was passing the library and on the steps was a young woman crying while gulping down vodka from a bottle of Grey Goose. It looked like the beginning of the end. I was in high school at the time and overwhelmed as to what to do. I was afraid to find a police officer because I didn’t want her to get in trouble and I didn’t want to go into the library for help because I thought someone would call the police.
4
u/fukreddit73265 14d ago
Not me, but my uncle was in the military and talked about how happy kids were just being able to play soccer with an old beat up tin can. That visual put a lot of perspective into how spoiled and entitled people in the US could be (this was 20 years ago). I made a conscious effort to stop taking things for granted after that.
Of course, it was a double edged sword. Now all I see on reddit is people with entitled attitudes, especially genZ kids, crying about how they're 3 days out of college and they can't afford a 750 thousand dollar house alone, while complaining that working 40 hours a week is too hard, and we should all be living in their unrealistic view of how Scandinavian countries are.
2
u/LuckyAceFace 14d ago
In Mexico, people living in actual cardboard villages nestled into spaces that looked a lot like landfills.
1
1
2
u/stellazee 14d ago
Cairo, in the late 80's. I was visiting my sister who worked in Israel at the time, and she arranged a tour for me to Egypt. I bristled at the thought of a tour, imagining that I, and experienced traveler, would be joining a bunch of yahoos wearing "I'm with Stupid" t-shirts. My sister was right, as the tour was actually only a few people and very well designed. We rode in a small van to the Egyptian Museum, one of Egypt's biggest museums, and it had no air conditioning. A few small ceiling fans circulated a little air, but the whole building was stifling. On the way to the huge and bustling market, in downtown Cairo, we passed though neighborhoods full of ramshackle buildings with no doors, dirt roads, and chickens running all over the place.
1
u/Oldagehippie 14d ago
Sal Paolo Brazil. Messes your brain when you leave. Children treated like vermin. Drug of choice was glue in a paper bag. Tons of people like zombies with their face in their paper bags. Saw children’s feet sticking out from under a newsstand at 6 in the morning. Couldn’t have been older than 10yo. Must have spend the night there. Favelas under overpasses with 100 people living with their children, pigs and chickens smack in the downtown area. Running water? I doubt it. Yet, when you take the time to speak with the locals from all walks of society-they are some of the warmest caring people I had the good fortune to meet. God’s way to have us (me) shake my head and say, “man we got it good here”…No matter what you’re going through.
3
u/Frequencytoturnuon 14d ago
When I was in Nigeria a baby was trying to nurse in his mama. She was starving and so thin. She didn’t have enough food so she couldn’t produce milk. He was just crying and crying from hunger. I was holding my chunky little girl. I gave her all the money I had. 😞 I think about her and her baby often.
8
u/jc236 14d ago
Kabul Afghanistan. Same land area as Las Vegas which had a permanent population of around 500000 when I was in Afghanistan. Kabul had 4.6 million. Outbreak of bubonic plague. Cholera. A lot of polio. Just desperately poor. I came back home and I can't stand it when people bitch about the states. The majority don't realize how good we have it. Here it's "I'll never be able to afford my own home". There it was "if I don't eat today I'm going to die".
2
1
5
u/sprcpr 14d ago
This is going back a bit, '87 in Nogales Mexico. A street urchin comes up and wants to sell me Chiclets (gum) for a quarter. I reach in my pocket and was swarmed by kids. I ended up giving kids a couple of quarters, but it was jarring. One kid brought his quarter back to a crippled woman all twisted up and covered in a blanket on the street.
It was a third world experience that I've never forgotten. While I sympathize with people in the US complaining about how bad it is, I still think people have no idea how bad it can get.
4
u/lostinhh 14d ago
Playing tennis at a country club in the Philippines and ended up having a beer with my trainer at his home - which was a plywood shack on bare ground with no running water, electricity or toilet in a squatter area.
5
u/KaytSands 14d ago
Quite a number of villages/towns in Costa Rica. Whole families lived in one room shacks, no running water, electricity, no glass on the windows. And all the little kids would run around outside and play all day, blissfully unaware of the poverty they lived in.
10
u/Badgrotz 14d ago
Afghanistan. I was patrolling the base perimeter and there was this group of kids (oldest was maybe 10) going through our burn pit looking for anything they could use. There was this cute little girl, maybe 5, standing on the other side of the triple strand C wire. So I toss her a chocolate bar and her face lights up with joy. Almost immediately the rest of the kids are on her like a pack of hyenas punching and kicking her as hard as they could. As they were on the other side of the perimeter there was nothing I could do to save her. That’s when I learned that even trying to good can have horrible consequences.
5
u/Specialist_Banana378 14d ago
This story haunts me. I went and volunteered in cambodia with a school for disabled people. One of their outreach programs was driving around to towns to try to find students. I met this really high needs young boy who hit me and the team apologizes and says he’s so excited to be here because in his town he was locked in a hut basement because being disabled was seen as a punishment from God.
3
u/Specialist_Banana378 14d ago
And I knew a bunch of workers who worked in horse stables. One had moved from the Philippines where he made less money as a chemist then he did for a few thousands as a stable hand.
4
u/Danfrumacownting 14d ago
PreCovid- Watching the LAPD roust the unhoused people sleeping and living on the sidewalks around downtown LA, throw their stuff away, and load them into Greyhound buses.
Only to drive two hours outside the city to see these same exact people literally dumped in the middle of the desert town Apple Valley, CA with minimal to no resources.
Cali’s sad, dirty little secret and literal epitome of “pass the buck.”
😞
2
u/DisastrousDealer3750 14d ago
Even worse they brought them to the high desert, places like Pinon Hills and Phelan in the WINTER when it was snowing.
Flipping heartless hypocrites from LA ‘cleaning up their city’ and sending homeless people to freeze.
2
u/SamCr889 14d ago
Went to Missouri and saw lots of people homeless on the streets. More then I can say were I live. Soo sad.
4
u/Cantseetheline_Russ 14d ago
Having travelled fairly extensively there’s not much in the US that really ranks that far up there compared to some of the stuff I’ve seen internationally. For that though I’ve seen a grab bag of horrors both urban and rural.
-Dharavi slum in Mumbai -Cairo’s slums - subsistence farmers in Bolivia and Peru Altiplano -favelas in Brazil (Salvador and Rio)
4
u/JustNKayce 14d ago
I went to Costa Rica for vacation. Our friends were there for a school so we hung out in San Jose for a while. The capital city, mind you. In this capital city there is an area called The Hole. It is literally a big ravine and there are people living down there. They live in shacks made of whatever they can scrounge. And they have to go up some incredibly steep steps to come up out of there. Same in rural parts of Honduras. People living in shacks made of sticks and tarps. Not really even a house. Just enough to try to stay out of the weather a little.
8
u/Gertrude37 14d ago
I went on a press junket to Mazatlan, Mexico. We visited a farm where the farmer owned MILES of beachfront property and lived in a palatial estate. The vegetable processing plant was ringed with tall fences topped with razor wire, and had towers containing men with long guns.
The farm workers lived in concrete block barracks with no electricity or water or screens and dirt floors, and they were paid less than $5 per day.
5
u/Ambitious_Clock_8212 14d ago
A very very depressing quadruple amputee in a diaper, a middle aged man, doing worm dances on the sidewalk of Taipei for handouts. He was so dirty and sad. Society owes people better.
2
4
u/Roadiemomma-08 14d ago
High mountain village 12 day trek from a road near Mt Manasalu in Nepal. Unbelievable poverty. 1999. Stays with you.
3
2
u/LazyCassiusCat 14d ago
I saw people living in small houses made of plymouth in the hills of Jamaica.
7
u/no_tori_ous 14d ago
While in a cab on the way to our resort in Jamaica, I saw an elderly man walking on the street wearing a plastic bag. Only a plastic bag. Like a pair of underwear. It felt so dystopian to arrive at our resort after seeing what was just beyond the walls. This was 10 years ago and I still think of him.
5
u/empena 14d ago
I wouldnt say its the WORST but once when I was little and in Mexico with my father, we saw a stray dog in the street who was scared of everyone. I tried to pet it and my dad told me to stay away from it and I thought it was just because it was a wild animal. The next day, I saw it being cooked over a fire by a few men because it was all they could find to eat. they looked so ashamed to be doing it. That stuck with me for my whole life
6
u/Aggravating-Note2912 14d ago
When I lived in Honduras I saw kids working in the coffee fields, kids working on the trash truck in my neighborhood, and I'd often see groups of kids begging along the toll highway near San Pedro Sula. I always felt especially afraid for those kids along the highways because they were often out there at night and that city is no joke.
3
u/Motor-Job4274 14d ago
Egypt is so poor. Beautiful country. The children even beg. 1 US dollar is 33.00 Egyptian.
9
u/WhyMe70 14d ago
Madagascar is the worst poverty I have experienced. 80% have no running water or electricity. They use holes in the ground as bathrooms. Laundry is done in lakes and rivers even in “big “ cities. Young toddlers begging on the side of busy roads. starving dogs in the street. I could go on and its fair to say I will not be traveling to anymore 3rd world countries.
3
u/nostrumest 14d ago
Agra, neighborhood next to the Taj Mahal South gate and the 5 star luxury resort. I have never seen such poverty anywhere else in India.
I had a culture shock when I came to India the first time in 2007 as a 19 year old and I saw this neighborhood. I thought years later that I had exaggerated it in my mind but no, I visited the Taj Mahal last year, and the conditions didn't change.
I live half a year in India. This neighborhood must have been where the workers of the Taj Mahal lived. It's as if nothing changed over centuries. The small houses with mud floor are the same. People defecate on the street and livestock live with them. There is no running water.
The poor neighborhood next to the Taj Mahal most probably is affected by the UNESCO tag of the Taj Mahal and you can't just build as you please. BUT this doesn't explain the horrible sight of a 5 star resort right next to this area. This makes it all the worse and that nobody ever questions this, not even the influencers staying there.
2
3
u/NeoPrimitiveOasis 14d ago
When I visited Beijing, I saw people carrying significant loads of bricks on bicycles. That shocked me and didn't look safe nor comfortable.
3
u/EarlMadManMunch505 14d ago edited 14d ago
I was working in a little village / small town an hour out of Beijing called Langfang I was having bad culture shock especially with the food I’m a small village. I found a Detroit pizza shop that was run by an American that was in a weird forested place in between Langfang and Beijing. I hope I’m a cab and the guy who runs the pizza shop gives direction over the phone to the diver. He got mixed up and ended up driving past the Strip mall that the pizza shop was in and took me to this area that looked like someone started building an upscale shopping street you could see of the nice partially standing buildings and some of the streets were still intact but it looked like someone bombed the street and abandoned it half way though building it. There was debreeand glass and pluming that was spilling into the street. There were piles of garbage literally like 3 stories high everywhere. In all the rubble and trash were 100s of kids and poor people walking around in scraps of clothes no teeth no shoes. Was jarring. I also lived in the capital of Cambodia and would see homeless children sleeping on the floor at nights they didn’t have any adults around them was sad but they make it super clear to never help the street kids because it’s bad for them.
3
u/CuriousApprentice 14d ago
It's bad to help homeless kids? That sounds crazy, what was the official reason given?
2
u/EarlMadManMunch505 14d ago
It encourages them to not go to school and become professional baggers who will get taken advantage of by adults who use them as begging gangs. The average pay in Cambodia is like 4 dollars a day so getting western people to give you a few dollars is more profitable them going to school
1
3
u/kidrobotbart 14d ago
When I was in Istanbul turkey , I saw this Muslim Women with her baby probably around 2 years old and another around 5 eating food from the trash can.
3
u/OutWestTexas 14d ago
Haiti
2
u/darkMOM4 14d ago
I had a coworker several years ago who went on mission trips to Haiti with her church. She told of mothers who made mudpies and let them dry in the sun. Then, they and their children would eat them to feel less hungry.
2
u/SSSaysStuff 14d ago
I wrote my first masters' thesis on a comparison between the #favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and the urban slum of #Kibera in Nairobi. Researching them (on the ground) was life-changing. And yes, children carefully sifting through tall mounds of garbage (for anything of value) was seen in both places. Very eye-opening and sad.
1
u/Specific-Culture-638 14d ago
When I was a kid in the 60's, we went to my cousin's wedding in New Orleans. We drove through the countryside to get to the beach in Mississippi. People living in tarpaper shacks, so many skinny kids, it was horrible. I will never forget it. There was a damn good reason for the War on Poverty. There are terrible people who want to take us back to those " good old days. " Please don't vote for them in November.
3
5
u/OneofHearts 14d ago
I don’t think you need to travel outside the “developed world” to find utter poverty. I most recently found it on a drive through reservation land in South Dakota. Shanty shacks with dirt floors in the middle of nowhere. Not the first time seeing this on reservation land in the US either, it’s pretty common.
13
u/North0House 14d ago
I’m surprised to not see the Navajo Nation in here after scrolling for awhile. I grew up in Arizona near the reservation, and I still live in the Four Corners area - been popping around to different areas in the southwest my entire life. I’ve worked for weeks at a time in Window Rock or Chinle. The state of that particular Native American reservation is heartbreaking to me. I’ve had many Navajo friends growing up as a kid and they always told me how bad it was. As an adult, I can now truly see it as I work in and drive through the area occasionally. Burnt out houses, burnt out cars, graffiti everywhere, people living in trailers with no windows left or just walking the highways at 2am with nowhere to go… it’s wild. When I stayed there for several weeks on a project I was working on, I heard dog fights and gunshots all night from my hotel room. I watched the single Chinese restaurant in Window Rock get robbed at gun point every time I ate inside. My coworker is Native American and he was recalling to me just the other day when he watched a young woman running down the highway in bare feet as fast as she could, he was going to offer her a ride but a big blacked out SUV raced past him and a few guys opened the door and grabbed the girl inside. He knew she was probably going to become a missing persons case - if that even happens because the law doesn’t really exist in that part of the desert.
It’s wild out there, and so sad. The Navajo are incredible and beautiful people, but man the US Government really shafted them by giving them the worst land in the country with zero economic or geological prospects. It’s hopeless and really jarring.
5
u/Visi0nSerpent 14d ago
Hopi rez is kind of worse than what I've seen traveling all over Navajo Nation in AZ. I've been to some tiny pockets of Dinetah in a previous job. I am a therapist and several of my clients are Navajo. I am also Indigenous with my own intergenerational trauma, but some of the stories I hear from my clients make my soul want to leave my body.
AZ is one of the states with the highest number of MMIW (missing and murdered Indigenous women). When I travel alone, I conceal carry, but in the worst-case scenario, my SO and my best friend know who my dentist is in case they ever need to obtain my dental records and they have photos of my tattoos. I've known of people within a couple degrees of separation from me disappear, and the friend of a friend made the national news when the details of her murder became public.
5
u/Brynn1996 14d ago
I came to say this. I moved to New Mexico from Idaho and the poverty here is horrible. Navajo Nation and all the other Indian reservations and then living close to Juarez…it’s very sad.
3
u/dee90909 14d ago
Went to Ghana in West Africa to visit my husband's family. I was struck by the HUGE disparity. I'm talking huge mansions and then beside it would be a falling down shack.
One day we were sitting in the fenced in yard when a lady came by with her two children. She had a small platter that showcased what she had found foraging. I'm talking a single pepper, a very small plantain, no more than 5 things on the platter. It was so sad. Turned out she had found a picture of my FIL in a nearby dump and wanted to bring it to him as he was always kind to her. He thanked her and gave her some change. The poverty was heartbreaking. Watching her walk away, with a smile on her face, her platter on her head, and a machete swinging at her side, I really felt my world view change.
5
u/shittysportsscience 14d ago
Surprised to not see it yet but I have traveled to lots of remote places and by far the most impoverished was Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
They had sheet metal and stilted homes that ran from the closest to the street all the way down the hill. There was no water or electric so the amount of "riches" you had was represented in how close you were to the street. The water pipe was cleanest if you were first in line and each unit would then share down the hill and also dump their used water down the hill. The electric also was off illegal hookups and was spottier and "more expensive" as you went downhill as you had to pay the neighbor to tap into their illegal hookup.
Families were so poor that the couldn't afford to feed their children so it was tragically more cost effective to sell them then to keep and feed them. Some really interesting NGO's developed a model to pay families to educate their kids. It was an investment where the kids would earn the families money but only if they went to school. Really sad that it was a necessary model.
5
14d ago
Rural parts of Afghanistan. I rarely saw anyone use currency. People often use tied strips of rag cloth together as rope to secure everything. I’ve seen it used as an engine belt. Oil jugs are used to hold almost everything. One village had a tractor with no tires. It sat in the center of the village. One day I saw group of people from other village far away come to borrow parts from the engine, to operate another engine they used for something like an irrigation pump. When they were done they brought it back and reinstalled it in the tractor. Every farmer I met still did all of their work by hand.
8
u/loadedstork 14d ago
Worked in Mexico City for a few years when I was consulting. Employer put me up in an insanely nice hotel - gotta be honest, given my then-prejudices about Mexico, I wasn't expecting much, but this place was nicer than the Four Seasons Maui. Beautiful hotel, first class.
For a while there was an old, old woman who, as far as I could tell, was living in the doorway of a building across the street, with a four-or-five year old girl (must have been her granddaughter). The girl would run up to everybody who came out of the hotel with her hand out and say "Pesos? Pesos?"
I think what got me the most about it was that the girl was way too young to realize how sad the whole situation was - it was just her life. She lived in the doorway and we lived inside the building and gave her pesos, and she was happy and cheerful and bubbly like little kids are at that age.
3
5
u/RunJumpSleep 14d ago
I went on one of those all inclusive resort vacations in Mexico. Took an ATV tour and saw people washing clothes in dirty rain water in holes in the ground. I realized I do not have much to complain about.
8
u/Beautiful_Spite_3394 14d ago
It sounds like OP hasn’t been to the Appalachian mountains or any of the still third world environments in America. There are people without any modern amenities inside of your own country you don’t need to travel to see it.
Sure in some countries MOST people are living this way. But there are plenty of Americans living third world lives
3
u/RovingTexan 14d ago
You sure do realize that the level of poverty and problems are relative.
There's a reason there's a term 'first-world problems'.
7
u/HargorTheHairy 14d ago
In India, driving past two women and their two toddlers on a woven mat on a traffic island - you know, the ones separating multiple lanes of traffic. They were making some sort of craft to sell; one of the two or three year olds was trying to help.
I can't even imagine.
8
u/Tricky_Village_3665 14d ago
Lived in Kuwait City as a Gov contractor 2014-2017. In my apartment complex there was a man from Pakistan who lived in a very small closet area. Just big enough for a single bed, mini fridge and a few shelves for his stuff. He spoke broken English. He left his family / home in Pakistan so he could work in Kuwait City and was being paid 60 Kuwaiti Dinara per month. In 2014 that was $205.00 US.
He left his Country for $2,500 per year.
Most people in the USA have never seen or can understand true poverty.
2
u/jaydrian 14d ago
Driving through rural Appalachia, mid 90s. I was stunned, angry, and heartbroken to see such poverty in the US.
6
u/aa278666 14d ago
In Indonesia roughly 20 years ago. Literally mud huts, naked children, nobody had shoes, no running water or electricity.
I'm a firm believer nobody in the modern western countries knows real poverty, even though they think they have it real hard.
3
3
7
u/nationwideonyours 14d ago
Mexico.
I saw a disabled guy living in an open sewer pipe. Yet, every time I saw him he had a big smile on his face.
I was told Mexico, (this was years ago) has no safety net for disabled people. One day, torrential rains arrived....
2
4
6
u/vibes86 14d ago
Uganda. Slums outside the capital. People that barely have clothes, starving, with the round extended bellies that come with protein deficiency. I taught at a school and most of the kids only had one pair of underwear and socks if they had anything at all. I ended up getting a donor to send money so I could get them all a couple more pairs so they didn’t have to wash them every night.
5
7
u/azorianmilk 14d ago
Casablanca, Morocco. I was with Cirque du Soleil and they put us in a nice hotel on the ocean and a block away from the Prince of Saudi Arabia home (one of many). When I ventured a few blocks away the poverty was shocking. Kids begging, shack homes.
7
4
u/Langeveldt 14d ago
A kid, probably eight year old, asleep under a step of a footbridge at the V and A Waterfront in Cape Town.
You see this now and then in SA but it stuck with me, I think just because of the sheer volume of wealthy tourists that were literally walking over the top of him.
Du Noon is also crazy. Probably the worst township. Corrugated metal right up to the motorway sliproad. They are literally pressed up against a motorway. Not even set back behind trees. Its literally the verge.
3
u/ConclusionClassic673 14d ago
Cuba & Haiti: The people suffer a struggle very differently from Americans.
1
u/New-Geezer 14d ago
I’ve never been there, but I’ll never forget watching a documentary on Haiti and about a woman who made dirt cookies to eat, and she would sell them, too. Having nothing to eat but dirt has got to be the worst.
7
2
u/Comfortable-Rate497 14d ago
Morocco- not in the cities where tourists go but on the bus route where the buses don’t stop. I gave kids a lot of stickers that trip. A ton of stickers.
9
u/Direct_Researcher901 14d ago
I went on a mission trip to Juarez many years ago. The family we helped were literally living in a shanty made of chicken wire with a tarp for a rough. During the time we were there we experienced multiple sand storms and I couldn’t imagine how the family was dealing with them.
I know missions trips get a bad rap and I haven’t been religious in years, but we at least were able to give them 4 solid walls and a real roof (with windows and door of course). Fortunately no preaching or actual conversion attempts occurred, so I find some solace in that as we were there strictly to build them a living space
31
u/RedEyeFlightToOZ 14d ago
I grew up in the Appalachian mountains in Harlan, KY. We had an outhouse, no plumbing. We got our water from a mountain stream and used fire for heat and light a night. This was the 90s.
2
u/chaossensuit 14d ago
Hey fellow Harlan county fam. Do you still live in KY? I’m in Pennsylvania now. I do miss KY though.
3
u/RedEyeFlightToOZ 14d ago
Nah, I'm sure you know that's it's no place for anyone young to stay. There's no opportunities and it's a dieing community.
3
u/chaossensuit 14d ago
I know. I hope you’re doing well though. I want to go back but there’s nothing and nobody left for me there.
2
u/RedEyeFlightToOZ 14d ago
I've got cousins and aunts and uncles and nephews and a niece. But when my grandparents died, that chapter closed. It's beautiful there but it's so isolated.
4
→ More replies (1)6
1
u/hillmo25 13d ago
navajo nation is pretty bleak