Retirement is the luxury of the rich
Talking about 'Work Balance' got me thinking such a concept is a luxury that the poor know nothing about. While we talk of our pensions for retirement and our need for a holiday. Millions of people in the world just struggle to survive a day at a time. In fact the majority of the population will never be able to retire. They will work till they die. I wonder if we have all become too sophistocated too demanding complaining because the retirement age might be increased by a year.
The air was hot and thick with the smell of rotting discarded food containers. The soil beneath my feet was sticky with the seepage of fluid from the dozens of lorries that had made their dumps that day. Another lorry drove past and scores of people appeared from no where, armed with sticks and bags ready to rake over the remains of the dregs the poor themselves had discarded. This is the world in which a group of people try to organise themselves in order to survive on rubbish.
I was standing in the middle of a rubbish dump in Iquitos, Peru. The heat was unbearable, no shade for miles, except for a few make-shift shelters which caught my eye over on the edge of the dump. They looked like flags sticking up out of the piles of refuse. In fact to call them shelters would be an exaggeration. They were no more than a few scraggy sticks covered with bits of torn plastic. Some women sheltered under them from the blistering sun as they sorted plastic bottles into a few bags. Needles, broken glass and vultures all added to the landscape. Lying on a mound of waste, in the middle of this steaming furnace, was a wee thin mangy brown mongrel dog, its eyes were bloodshot, its coat was covered with soars, it looked as though it was about to draw its last breath, as it suffered in silence.
I had come to Interview a man who was in his mid twenties. He was wearing a torn football top and a baseball cap. He wore a pair of gloves as he ploughed his way through mountains of rubbish. He was one of around 150 people who lived off this pile of garbage. He stopped to speak to me. I wanted to know what made him keep going. I asked about himself. I wanted to here how he would described himself. He told me he was a singer. He wrote songs, he had a dream to sing his songs, but it was only a dream.
More and more of us in the rich west are looking to fulfil our dreams we are looking for adventure. People of all ages are prepared to take time out of their working lives to go travelling or to do something that they've always wanted to do. All this is in stark contrast with the people who live on less than a dollar a day. Many of them wish they could take time out of their lives but for them the daily grind of simply finding work for the day is all they can focus on all they can dream about.
The poor can't simply survive on dreams. Food is required for the table today. I thought of that phrase from the Lord's prayer ‘ Give us this day our daily bread" for this man the prayer was relevant and to the point. Adventure that was the things that pre-occupied the rich and the secure. For him he could only dream of being a singer in another life. To ask such people the question what you want to do with your life might get the response what life?
The thing was when you kept on walking the rubbish dump ended abruptly and you were standing on the edge of a kind shear drop. As you looked out across the expanse all you could see was the rich green vegetation of Amazonia. Such a contrast some of the poorest people in the world less than a hundred yards from such rich vegetation scrapping around in the discarded polluted wasteland created by humanity. What was more telling was some of the poorest people in the world were less than a few yards for some of the richest people in the world taking photos with our latest electronic gadgets.
Posted By: Gordon Kennedy On: 16 Aug 2010 At: 1:36pm
Albert,
Thanks for this. So much of our conversation is irrelevant in a world where too many live in abject poverty.
Don’t retire - make poverty history!