It's Problems All The Way Down

Originally written in January 2018.

Two days ago I watched as a motorcycle hit a child. The bike taxi (piki-piki) was driving in the wrong direction on the sidewalk outside Maisha Mart in Kakamega, Kenya; a 10 year old boy was running through busy traffic and didn't see it coming. We stopped our car; I got out, walked up to the crowd of bystanders and handed the man closest to the injured boy some first-aid supplies. I have no medical training; I can't fix broken legs. Our security training is to immediately get out of situations like this- traffic accidents here often end in violence or death by mob justice and there was about a 5% chance that the boy's blood contained HIV. All I could do in that situation was give someone a bandage and walk away. It's not nearly enough, but it's very symbolic of my work in general- the deeper issues are so entrenched that they're almost impossible to solve, so you do what you can. The motorcycle driver wasn't necessarily a bad guy; driving the wrong way on the sidewalk saves him time, which means at the end of the day he has a few more precious shillings to feed his family. The policemen who take bribes and allow this disregard for traffic laws follow essentially the same logic- bribes pay better than enforcing laws and everyone has hungry mouths waiting at home. The root cause of every problem is as simple as it is intractable- there's just not enough money here.

Over the past year I've come to think about America differently- coming from the middle class there makes me upper-class here.There are rich people in Kenya (the richest is president)- they live in gilded cages, surrounded by opulence and security guards. The contrast between their wealth and the country's widespread poverty is no accident. America's upper class doesn't think in these terms, but their unstated goal is to make America more like a third-world country. For Americans, cutting wages, destroying unions and deregulation all help increase shareholder value- at the expense of the rest of society. From now on whenever I hear the phrase "deregulation", my mental image will be of an injured child weeping on a sidewalk because his safety net was dismantled for personal gain.