An Almost-Kick of Reality

If I was beginning to feel disconnected from the rest of the world, it came to a sharp halt on Tuesday. In fact, I almost tripped over it. There is a particularly lovely and bustling part of an open-air market that I had my eyes fixed upon as I headed down the hill from the institute where I am studying to the hotel where I am staying this week. I was thinking it was strange that I hadn’t read the news or exchanged emails since arriving. I wondered how the rest of the world was doing but I was detachedly reflective, anticipating the entirely foreign surrender that the market still offers my unaccustomed senses. Mildly bemused by the thought of my known, displaced world but excited about the new world I would once again find in the market, I almost stumbled.

I about tripped over the naked half-foot of the napping beggar leaned up against the wall of a store selling grains, which had an open front and cloth awning that faced the alley. As I hopped out of the way to avoid kicking him in step, I looked down. The beggar’s foot ended at the arch and had pieces of both deep red and bright white flesh stretched across it awkwardly, as if the skin itself was trying to imitate a tightly wrapped Ace bandage but changing colors – red to white – at each new layer. Flies hovered to buzz about where the toes should have been; inches above where the abrupt stub was. A film of grayish street grime that was clearly not being absorbed into the wound gave his injury a matured appearance but the vibrancy of the scarlet tissue and the flies gave the conflicting impression that it was recent, or maybe infected. A short strip of what I can only describe (without any medical expertise) as exposed muscle connected his heel to his outstretched, snoozing calf. And then I was four yards ahead, just then actually processing the flash image that I had instinctively reacted to; dodged, as if it had been a cat or a dead squirrel or a tennis ball that had rolled across my path in the street.

As I descended on the market, the vendors calling out in a language I did not understand to purchase a meat I did not recognize by sight or by smell with the dirhams (Moroccan currency) I am still slow to count, I remembered something I might have forgotten: poverty is poverty, everywhere. It has a reductive simplicity.

I don’t want to say that that baseness of poverty is something reassuring but there is certainly something fundamentally human about what it evokes and this feeling necessarily transcends both time and place in its intimate familiarity. For me, when so abject as to be physically flaunted, poverty delivers a punch of intense emptiness to the gut and then the mind, which feels more blank than empty. Then my head gets a little dizzy and my stomach a little nauseous.

It is a feeling of deep grief that has no outlet, perhaps because it cannot cast directed blame for the observed condition that should not be, but this feeling knows that what it is reacting to must be somehow unforgivable. At its essence, it is tragedy. And the feeling snaps me back to a market in Metapan, El Salvador where an old woman with no hands or feet crawls around with a can tied to her wrist for pedestrians to drop change into; to the industrial streets of Xela, Guatemala where orphaned Mayan children extend filthy hands and beg for “un Quetzal, solo un Quetzal;” to the squatter’s village of Hugo II in Puerto Rico where men lie passed out drunk with a cardboard sign and a plastic bag atop their bellies asking for kindness and assuring blessings for it; from Panama City’s coastal sidewalk to the mountain town of Chiapas in Mexico and now in Rabat, Morocco two blocks from where I type, poverty sickens me in the same way. Poverty is poverty, everywhere. Simple as hell.

There is something tragically human about its prevalence but inspiringly human in what it seems to cause inside of those who process it (out of shock or as a conscious choice); that this is how it should NOT be. And because poverty is poverty everywhere, maybe the world and people are the world and people everywhere.

Sliding between the Moroccan market crowd, I saw a local couple in traditional dress link arms. When I inhaled, I noticed that the smoking meat on the market’s fires smelled less like the exotic spices in which it had been marinated and more simply like meat grilling above a charcoal fire.