Worth Reading

Over at TOS On Tour my former boss and a damn good editor and journalist is posting a must-read diary about his trip to South America. He’s in southern Peru now, amid stunning poverty and the physical destruction wrought by a magnitude 7.9 earthquake on Aug. 15, 2007.

Peru is one on a long list of commodity-rich countries that have a hard time maintaining consistent economic growth due to the gyrations of global demand for the kinds of things it has to sell: minerals, steel, textiles and energy commodities like natural gas and crude oil. Even when times are good, as they have been in recent years, countries like Peru have a hard time spreading their modest transitory prosperity among their own people. The percentage of Peru’s population living below the poverty rate in 2007 was 45%, according to the CIA Factbook. Its 2007 per capita gross domestic product of $7,800 was higher than Columbia, the Dominican Republic and many African nations facing similar economic realities. Not surprisingly, the poverty rates among those nations are similar. For reference, the United States’ poverty rate was 12% and its per capita GDP in 2007 was $45,800.

TOS makes the point that, “Different doesn't do justice to the void between life in Peru and in the U.S. Alien would be much more like it, and damned if the commenters on newspaper sites wouldn't approve of the usage upgrade…. Flat out destitution -- and worse, less hope for improvement than any poor folk in America.”

I believe him when he writes that because he has seen both places. I have to say, though, that it is hard for me to fathom when I think about places like New Orleans, or Appalachia, or even parts of Chicago’s own West and South sides. Breathtaking poverty exists here as it does there, and in some places I imagine the outlook isn’t much less bleak than in a place like Pisco.

Perspective is key. It’s hard to hide a reality like 45% of your population living below the poverty line. When the figure is 12% one must look harder, along Lower Wacker Drive, for example, or in building vestibules early in the morning; on the ventilation grates along E. South Water Street, just off Michigan Avenue, or in the stairwells leading down to the Randolph Street commuter rail station; in the nooks of the city’s railroad bridge underpasses, and in the vacant lots along the Orange Line southwest of downtown, where blue tarpaulin tents and little islands of trash appear, disappear and then reappear, depending on the day.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t see this as a competition. Poverty is poverty, no matter where it is or how well it is hidden. TOS’s descriptions of the conditions in parts of Peru got me thinking about some of the things I’ve seen here, that’s all.

I’m looking forward to reading more as his trip progresses.