I know three children (well, okay, one is now 18 and another is 22) who live in Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, right across the border from El Paso.

The last time I went to visit them, I got shot at as we were walking to the grocery store.  I don't go there anymore.  The best we can do is to talk on the phone.

These kids live in a colonia of about 5,000 people crammed into maybe a 20-acre square on the east side of the city.  Many of the kids who live there have only two or three sets of clothes.  A lot of them have skin rashes and other health problems due to their poor nutrition -- a lot of them get maybe two or three small portions of meat a month.  Protein is a valuable commodity, as are fresh fruits and vegetables. Their mothers have to fill their bellies with flour tortillas, rice, and beans.

It keeps them from starving.

And forget about hygene.  When you're that poor, you just don't have time to think about it very much.  Besides, you don't want to bathe very often in the winter anyway because there isn't any hot water.  Hell, you're lucky if there's any heat in your apartment -- although it wouldn't matter much if there was, because the house leaks air like a sieve.  Any gas you have (you have to buy it in tanks) you have to save for cooking.

But it wouldn't help if you could bathe all the time anyway because (A) the water is polluted, and (B), so is everything else.

Most of the adults there can read most of the newspaper, and whenever someone gets one, it's well taken care of, because it gets passed around a lot.  Surprisingly, a lot of folks have televisions, and most of them work.  And maybe one in four families have access to a car of some sort that should have been in the junk yard years ago, but somehow they manage to keep it going.

It's a very tight-nit community.  There are the usual public soap operas that can be witnessed in any group of people that size, but people try to get along.  They know that they have to help each other, otherwise they'll all starve.

These are very good people who are victimized by a crime wave that we Americans cannot imagine, and by an economic system dominated by the United States that exploits them as if they were cattle or slaves.

So as we're worried about how big a health care package we can get, if we find that we're dissatisfied with the results, you can think about those people just a stone's throw to the south of us, who are cold, and hungry, and hoping they don't get hurt.

Because if they do, they will be doomed to utter misery and begging in the streets with the children for the rest of their lives.

To them, I'm the richest bastard in the world, and I know I'm damned lucky.

by EveningStarNM on 12/17/2009 06:39:44 AM EST