"Yo no espero nada del estado."

On Wednesday I made house visits with our social worker Joyce.  When the adolescent is still in review, one of the things we do is pass by their house to get to know the family and their living conditions.  Joyce asks about the parental relationship, educational background of the family, and so on.  I've made house visits before, but these were particularly shocking.

The first home was built of adobe with dirt floors.  There were large gaps between the sugarcane roof and the walls.  Four chickens were wandering around the living room, bobbing their heads and looking around as if it were their first time in the house.  There was an opening in the back wall, and I could see other animals just outside.  As we talked to the adolescent's mother, one of the chickens paused in the middle of the living room and crapped all over the floor.  Several minutes later three more chickens came down from upstairs.  The house, we find out, has electricity (a single wire runs up the wall and across the ceiling to a bare lightbulb), but no water or sewer.  Both parents dropped out of school in the first grade, and the mother can neither read nor write. 

About ten minutes away in taxi there's a Starbucks, where people spend more on a frappuchino than this familiy will make in two days. 

My point isn't to fire up a pity party.  There are people in this world who don't even have adobe houses or a single lightbulb, and we sat around and felt sorry for people who had less than us we wouldn't accomplish much.  These are deeply rooted problems that cannot be solved with a telethon, or sad Christian Children's Network commercials.  Thirty cents a day may help feed a child, which is a more than worthy cause, but what is being done to make sure these problems aren't being perpetuated to the next generation, and the next, and the next . . . ?