S.L.U.M. (because the children are children everywhere and maybe, here, more)

Yesterday, I tried a Dhaka slum. I am here for this reason, not for food and restaurants (even if I am a great gourmet -and Regina and I could write a best-seller-food-guide-book). I spent all the morning in Geneva Camp, Shymoli, in a day-visit with SafeSave. Next time, I will speak about this funny microfinance experiment (64 collectors that with their smart-phone visit every day slum’s poor looking for their savings). But, now I cannot stop my mind that thinks and re-thinks to the children of the slums. I think that I have never seen more people than Mumbai, I am almost sure that I have never seen more children than Bangladesh, and –anyway- never so many children in so small space.
Technically, a slum is a urban area overcrowded where the houses are 4x4 metres block of cement (if you are lucky) or plate and bamboo huts (if you are very poor –but if you are very poor but lucky, you have also a tin roof), in every house there is a huge family or more than one, the streets are so narrow that you can see the TV shows of your neighbors (I know, it’s a paradox but often there is the TV inside the cement or bamboo), there is no privacy, your kitchen is a fire spot in the narrow street because you cannot cook where you live, sleep and work but you have to cook where the people walk, the rain falls and the children play, your bathroom is a common bathroom that you have to share with your hundred neighbors (I cannot guess a ratio N°Toilet:People, it is better to not know).

This disaster is a slum. I don’t know the meaning of the word, I prefer imagine that S.L.U.M. is S for Smiles, L for Lights, U for Under the same sky , M for Morning.
Smiles, because before I had to start to remember the structure of the streets and the houses but the very only thing that I fixed in my mind is every single smile, maybe it was a subconscious strategy that my brain used to survive during the visit, maybe it is their strategy to survive in that hell or –simply- they smile, better than us.
Light, because “Where is the light?”, during the day the streets are so narrow that only a little slice of sun could penetrate inside, okkey there is electricity (usually it is free, it is the government that pays), but in a place where the sun doesn’t work properly because of the smog and the electricity works yet less: where is the light? I cannot imagine the night in a slum. Their no-lights day is our dark night, so for our standard there is no color or definition for a “night in a slum”.
Under the same sky, under different stars, because billions of people are under the same sky, there is also one sky, the same one, but different stars or better same stars that look like different. We live under the same sky with the lucky stars, we use to look the stars when we are in love, in trouble or drunken on the beach. We don’t need to ask more, but we love ask for a better future. They live under the same sky with other stars, they don’t care about the sky and they don’t ask stupid things to the moon. They should ask more for their future, but they work more, eat less and smile however, under the same sky with the same stars that for them are different because –maybe- if you work, eat and smile, you could stop to believe in the stars (especially, because the stars had been really with your destiny if you live in a slum).
Morning, because it is the most important part of the day. They don’t use to look the stars, but they need to hope that every morning is a good morning to get a daily job, to look for a buyer, to sell the rice or finding food. Their destiny is a daily destiny that every day takes a different way, and your way is good or bad according to your lucky morning, it is not because of the stars.

Children, I started to write this post about the children, and now I lost in the labyrinth of things to write, as the real slum, where you cannot go alone without getting lost. I have an idea, because I cannot tell you the experience, writing, especially writing in English, thus I try to make a list of “things that children can do in a slum”, according to the snapshots of yesterday that mind could not forget.
- The little boy with the red t-shirt, the withe smile and the green kite (that it cannot fly in the slum, but –for him- it sounded good) who was running across the streets singing “Sheila Ki Jawani” (a Bollywood’s hit parade song);
- The little girl with the pink dress and the white smile, the little girl with the blue tshirt and the white smile and the little boy with the pink tshirt, the white smile and the blue ball, who were following the little boy with the kite;
- The very little girl with a grey dress sleeping in the arms of a mother who was attached hundred little golden paillettes to a red scarf.
- The very little girl with the big black eyes who was playing with an air balloon listening the sound of the fingers –of her elder sister- scratching the air balloon.