Horrible Living Conditions

[Lilitu]

Oh god I just found out about this


What a horrible way to live. It's a claustrophobic nightmare, it looks like something straight out of a horror movie. If you watch the movie 'Re-cycle' you'll see the resemblance.

[monk]

It's utterly appaling that these conditions should exist in the 21st century. :mad:

[Bowyn Aerrow]

You are 16, I suspect you have been sheltered from many of the horrors of the world - which is a good thing and right and proper. So just finding out about this now is about normal for learning about the real world.

In Las Vegas Nevada (USA) people live in the storm sewage pipes. http://www.mothertrip.com/life-in-las-ve...nd-tunels/ While it got attention in the late 00's, the reality is that people have been living this way for a long period of time in Las Vegas.

Yes its is hard to imagine that a big city, full of lights and in the Westernized world in the 2st century would have near abject poverty and be on the same level as the shack dwellings of a third world nation, however these 'fringe people' have been around for a very long time.

Here in the USA there are also tent and card-board box 'towns': http://www.google.com/search?q=USA+tent+...97&bih=859

While a lot of those are caused by the recent major recession, the reality is that there have been tent towns and villages in every minor and major city.

Even the town closest to me with a population of only 200K, people live under the street over passes, live in river flood plain in tents and boxes.

It is part of the whole screwed up economic system of capitalism. That tied into a Private Bank (Federal Reserve is a private interest) holding control over money and the whole generation of money through debt - it always is going to create abject poverty in first world places.

[Blue]

It's amazing how many in this country are either homeless or one paycheck from it. For all our "American Dream" rhetoric, that's a far fetched dream for a lot of Americans. I know harsh wake up at 16 but, that's life in this country, and any first world country.

[Pix]

IIRC, I first read about this in NatGeo many years ago (and it itself was old), and I read of other living conditions in HK as well. I'm not watching the video yet, I'll try to remember to see it later but I can't stay long enough right now to get through it but maybe later I'll comment on the vid itself.

And if I had more time I could tell you what life is like for I think over a million kids (that are known of) each year in the USA who exist on the streets (and that's not counting those with their parents or other guardians, nor foster homes, etc). Actually I could share horror stories about our foster care, too (not from personal experience but as a runaway I met plenty fleeing them and abuses like that and worse are documented).

But Thailand is worse. I read of one where even though Thailand officially condemned child sex tourism they winked at it (much like American cops tend to do and even depend on it financially, though in the USA that's more from fines/pimping). Then some children (many of them not even teens) learned about date rape drugs and started spiking the drinks of the johns and just taking their money (and other goods) without the sex. Occasionally, as happens with those drugs, one would get too much (easy to do when mixed with alcohol) and die, or come to very disoriented and thus fall easy prey to predators trying to get back to his ship in time. It became common enough that it affected child sex tourism until the cops went in and busted heads to remind kids of their place.

I saw something similar on a US episode of COPS btw, I was amazed no one seemed to catch it (it was about cops trying to stop robberies in Houston but they did it by pretending to be johns trying to pick up male prostitutes). Of course that wasn't as bad as Thailand, but then they did have cameras on them at the time (they're much worse when those cams aren't there).

One Central American country simply shot homeless youth, but I don't recall which one (and I'm not sure they do that today, I read about it in an out of date magazine about 12 years ago, either NatGeo or Reader's Digest, I forget but pretty sure it was one or the other).

But the worst that takes the prize is Vladivostok. To survive the cruel Siberian winter (so cold that at its worst Russians have to keep hard liquor under their armpit or it gets so cold that it's below freezing--remember, alcohol doesn't freeze--and thus deadly to drink) the kids who flee barbaric orphanages and often abusive criminals who try to forcibly recruit them (even little kids can prove useful and they have both child prostitution and child panhandling scams, some of the scams also mark rich tourists, that is if someone gives money to a poor child then others who are working the kids mark them for robbing) hide in the sewers where they sleep on heated pipes to keep from freezing to death. I'm sure adults do the same and probably don't hesitate to throw a kid off if the kid is in the way.

And so on, but I gotta go. At least my dreams which I just woke up from were fairly pleasant.

[Bowyn Aerrow]

Pix brings up some very interesting points.

Way back when I was doing outreach programs for homeless and more specifically the homeless kids (kids around your age, Lilitu) it was shocking how many managed to "survive" day to day and what they did in order to 'survive'.

One would think that it was 1880's Victorian England and a chapter taken right of of Oliver Twist instead of a century later.

I saw things like something on the order of a dozen teens (15-19) all living in a flea bag hotel room. Kids living in cardboard boxes between/behind dumpsters. I knew two teens who lived in the trees of Golden Gate Park, they made their own hammocks and strung those between branches in the trees by the 'woodland' area on the west side of the park where at night they could do 'favors' for those men walking around in the park at night (for a small price of course).

I don't know about the land of Oz, but here in the US we have a fairly large chunk of the population who slipped between the cracks into poverty and despair. No one likes to talk about it, but we had and still have kids 14-18 (legal minors) living on and in the streets turning tricks in order to come up with money for food. Some of those kids are drug dealers, many of which are their own very best customer (meaning they use the drugs).

There were too many times where we (Brothers from the Friary, myself and a few others) would go out and check on 'our kids' to find that one was missing, only to discover that they had become yet one more 'crime statistic' - beaten, murdered, over-dose, or just got too sick and was too terrified to go to hospital out of fear that s/he would be sent back to their home which for many of these kids was a terrible/abusive situation.

During the 1970's and early 1980's many of the mental health hospitals closed their doors. The mentally ill were basically put on the side of the street to be collected by trash collectors. Thing is no one informed the trash collectors. Through the decades it has become fairly popular to dump ones emotionally/mentally ill on the street.

In L.A., sick people are treated minimally at the county hospital and after a very short period of time the hospital drives them to the nearby homeless shelter where the patient is dropped off on the street, more often than not in hospital gown and slippers and left to fend for themselves. Sometimes the staff doesn't even bother to place the patient at a homeless shelter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeless_dumping

While you think people living in cages are bad, I have seen worse. Much worse.

[Blue]

Good points Pix and Bowyn. Bing on the road, I occasionally picked up a homeless hitchhiker (usually women)

Every one of them expected my partner or I, or both of us to want sex in exchange for a meal and a ride. And they expected we'd make them clean the truck if they spent the night on board. About half of them asked for drugs and, not a one of them had a real destination, they lived in whatever truck picked them up until that one got tired of them, or had to go someplace extra riders weren't allowed (it's technically illegal to have a passengers in a truck without a rider permission slip and a hold harmless waiver signed by your company and the passenger.)

I tried to get them to shelters at least, but that wasn't always possible with the truck - those rigs just don't fit and aren't allowed to dive everywhere in every city.

[pellaz]

only use what you need. Keep in mind where that new iPhone came from.

[kai1211]

That's sad

[Pix]

I wanted to add what someone told me about his brother. His brother was in the navy when his ship stopped in the Philippines and right after getting on shore a little boy (about 8, IIRC) picked his pocket and ran off with his wallet (he felt it happen but too late to stop him). He ran to a Filipino guard or whatever and pointed at the boy wanting his wallet back when to his horror the guard simply shot the boy as he was running away, and while he was still in shock the guard (or whatever) retrieved his wallet and gave it back to him with a friendly smile. He said that memory scarred his brother a lot, and the amazing thing was apparently it was no big deal to think about shooting a little boy (and the little boy probably did it to avoid being beaten by adults who "took care" of him).