Poor and poor

If there's poor and there's poor, I walked into the last kind last summer in Uganda.

While on a boat trip on Lake Victoria in Jinja, the boat was moored on Kikondo. Isolation has put the island in a position where it is strongly dependent on it's own capabilities. The sparse and thus almost unpayable medical help that is available, even led in 2009 to a situation where almost all inhabitants were critically sick. Children clamping to our arms, all eyes on us: it felt like we were tourists looking at a disaster.

The village meant a direct confrontation with the waste problem, which is the main reason for my stay in Africa. Plastic acting like earth layers and smouldering fires which were lightened by waste: reality stroke me again.

Processing the situation was not on the agenda. A couple of minutes later we arrive at a nice maintained piece of lawn. Welcome at a luxe resort. The shock almost couldn't be bigger and it felt very unpleasant to  after all we just saw, walk in between the well organised garden en the exotic pool.

Thinking I had seen it all back then, the portion of malaise on my birthday wasn't complete yet. Arriving back at the very little haven, the difference between poor and rich was once again confirmed. A wall ànd barbed wire seemed necessary to protect all the rich inhabitant from the poor, wild plebs of the fisher's village. 

Us people, we can be so blunt and thoughtless.

Is it fear?