[Comment] Trip Brings Reality Of Poverty Home

from The Hartford Couriant

Hanna Ingber Win

As we stand around the airport, waiting for luggage, our guide gives us bits of advice for our summer in Cape Town. "Don't go to places with funny-sounding names," he says. The townships have Xhosa names like Kyahelitsha, Gugulethu and Langa.

What our guide means is, don't go to black neighborhoods.

It is 13 years since apartheid ended in South Africa, and not surprisingly, there is still much racism. It often comes out in the form of fear of blacks and their communities.

I recently returned from spending two months living in Cape Town and interning at the Cape Times newspaper. I can't count the number of times whites warned me not to go into black or colored neighborhoods, still called townships.

The reason given was always crime. "You'll be a target," they would warn me. If I went wandering around a black community, the theory went, my white skin and innocent demeanor would attract robbers, rapists and murderers.

South Africa does have a serious crime problem. With close to 40 percent unemployment and an overwhelming crystal meth epidemic, rates of petty and violent crimes soar, especially in the poorer areas. South Africa has the second-highest murder rate in the world, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

The crime rate is real, but it has also become an excuse or perhaps a reason for the wealthy people in Cape Town to distance themselves from the poor people, and for the whites to distance themselves from the blacks.

Most white people do not go into poor black neighborhoods or have any idea what living conditions there are like.

One of the articles I wrote for the Cape Times was on waterproof sleeping bags. A community organizer, Jo Maxwell, had noticed that the hundreds of thousands of poor people who live in shacks in townships around Cape Town were freezing cold during winter nights. When it rained, their shacks leaked and their blankets got soaking wet. The shacks have no proper heating, and families couldn't stay warm with wet blankets.

Maxwell started making waterproof sleeping bags. She used recycled plastic, newspaper and duct tape. Each bag cost less than a dollar to make and made a significant difference during winter nights.

It was not a long or sophisticated story, but it resonated with readers. At least 50 people contacted me or the Cape Times to find out how they could help. They wanted to donate money, bags and piles of old newspapers. Here they were, sleeping in their cozy, heated homes, they said, having no idea that there were children in Cape Town freezing cold at night.

The readers' generosity was beautiful. But what shocked me was the level of ignorance among many of them.

There are hundreds of thousands of people living in shanty towns around Cape Town. Everyone knows they are there - you can see the shacks from the highway. You can't get from the airport to downtown Cape Town or the wealthy suburbs without driving past the shacks. They line each side of the road and stretch for miles. They sit so close together they practically - and sometimes literally - pile up on top of each other.

What do these readers think it is like inside a shack? Of course there is no proper heating! Of course they are poorly constructed, with slabs of scrap wood and metal hammered together. Of course they leak! And yet many of these South Africans seemed to be clueless of how the poor lived.

I suppose the disconnect between the rich and the poor in the United States is similar. It is rare for wealthy New Yorkers living on the Upper East Side, for example, to venture out to East New York in Brooklyn.

Our media also tend to ignore the poor. Thirty-seven million Americans live below the poverty line, but the media rarely cover them.

Why then did the disconnect in Cape Town astonish me?

Maybe the difference is that in South Africa, I was an outsider. I saw the poverty with fresh eyes.

Not accustomed to living near shantytowns, I went out of my way to learn about conditions there. I visited informal settlements that were built behind a house, called backyard dwellings, and saw the one room that fit 12 people. I observed the gaps between the floors and doors and understood why a typical rainfall floods the homes. I noticed the human waste buckets sitting next to the doors.

Is it possible that I could see so clearly what is happening in a foreign country, but I miss the homeless people on my street corner?

Hanna Ingber Win, 26, is a student at the graduate school for journalism at the University of Southern California.