Heavy rains compound the poor's problems

Heavy rains compound the poor's problems
By Editor
Saturday January 05, 2008 [03:00]

The heavy rains of the last few days have brought upon the poor who live in our shanty compounds additional health problems to bear. The sanitary situation in our compounds poses serious health risks to all those who live in these areas. Most people in our shanty compounds use poorly built, unimproved pit latrines and receive no official assistance to empty them.

And in most of these compounds, there's completely no household refuse collection. In these compounds, hygiene promotion usually only takes place when there's an outbreak of cholera or other infectious diseases. Diarrhoea is endemic. It kills many people every year and costs our country a lot in lost productivity.

Unless the authorities learn to be more responsive to the needs, demands and interests of the poor communities, our urban environments are likely to become ever more unsanitary. But how can we do more to provide the most marginalised of the urban poor with adequate sanitation services?

We can't continue to be unaffected by the situation in our compounds. We can't continue to see pit latrines overflowing with human waste that is emptied into the wells from which our people draw water for their household needs. We can't continue to watch children play in such filthy environments.

A lot of things have improved in most of our rich neighbourhoods - roads have been tarred, drainage systems have been cleared. But the situation has not improved much in our poor neighbourhoods where the amount of money needed to improve things is much smaller.

Every human being of goodwill should be moved with indignation at the unsanitary conditions we are seeing in the compounds. Every human being of goodwill should be committed to changing the social order that is clearly cruelly unjust - that allows billions of kwacha to be spent on a tiny fraction of the population while the majority of our people live in such unhygienic conditions.

To refuse such a commitment would be to make oneself an accomplice to injustice. If we don't commit ourselves to changing a system that prevents most persons from living a life fit for a human being and achieving personal fulfilment, then we are not helping our people to live out their vocation. In short, we are betraying our mission to serve the progress of our people.

The poverty situation, we feel, is the product of unjust socio-economic structures. Faced with this intolerable situation, we feel that we must do something to change things. We are products of a society that has taught us to look coldly on the impoverished plight of our fellow citizens. We must try to draw nearer to the poor.

We cannot just dedicate a small portion of our time to the poor; we must dedicate more of our thoughts and feelings to the cause of the poor, for only then will we be able to change the situation radically. The limits of self-sacrifice must be set by real life, not by the standards of a society that tends to look coldly on the plight of our impoverished brothers and sisters.
Only close experience will teach us the great magnitude of the problems that afflict the majority of our people who live in shanty compounds.

We must therefore reform the structures of our society so that such contact really takes place. So long as we do not actually share the problems of these people, the poor - lack of basic necessities, insecurity, unemployment, and so on and so forth - we will not really identify with the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the great majority of our people.

The experience lived by our people leads us to reject the current order, in its economic expression as well as in its ideological basis, which favours individualism, profit, and the exploitation of humanity by humanity. We should therefore aim at the creation of a qualitatively different society.

By this, we understand a society wherein the willingness of justice, of solidarity and equality reigns, one that will respond to generous aspirations and the search for a more just society and where values, particularly freedom, responsibility, and an openness to things spiritual, which will guarantee the integral development of every one of our people will be realised.

In order that this kind of society be developed, it is necessary that the education of all the people include the social and communal meaning of human life, in the total context which includes culture, economics, politics, and the whole society.

Education thus concealed will lead to the creation of a new human being and a new society - social human kind and a communal society, where democracy is real through the effective political participation of all our people, through the human concept and realisation of work, through the submission of capital to the needs of the whole society.

Of course, those who benefit from the current order, and wish to keep doing this, will oppose and denounce what we are saying.

But we know from the basics of our Christian teachings that the diagnosis is not enough. By his example, Christ taught us to live what he preached. Christ preached human solidarity and proclaimed that love should configure all our social structures. Even more importantly, he lived out his message of liberation to its ultimate consequences.

He was condemned to death. The power brokers in his nation saw his message of liberation, and the real-life love to which he bore witness, as a serious threat to their economic, social, religious and political interests.

Today, as always, the Spirit of Christ is actively giving impetus to history. It shows up in solidarity, in the unselfish commitment to those who struggle for liberty and evince authentic love for their poor brothers and sisters.

The structures of our society must be transformed from the roots up. The task is more necessary today than ever before because those who benefit from the unjust order in which we live are defending their interests in an aggressive way.

They use all the means at their disposal - propaganda, subtle ways of dominating popular consciousness, and dictatorship if necessary - to prevent a revolutionary transformation from taking place.

Only by gaining economic and political power will the poor be able to construct a society of the humble and the poor, by the humble and the poor, for the humble and the poor that is qualitatively different from the existing one and in which everyone will have the same possibilities for human fulfilment.

Of course authentic charity cannot gloss over the struggle unleashed by those who exploit the people and who seek to defend or increase their own privileges.

These are our own reflections on what is going on in our country, on the plight of the poor and the shanty compound dwellers.

We publicise our reflections because we believe that they can help to inspire other citizens and persons of goodwill to reflect along with us and to set out in the quest for some way to radically transform the structures that now prevail in our country.

We say this because we sincerely believe that the poverty situation in our country today is the product of unjust socio-economic structures.