Worst place to be...

[MrsCosmopilite]

Shocking, enlightening, uplifting, and incredible. Much kudos to Wilbur and Nicky for fundraising.
Shame on the corrupt officials/government who have kept Iman and his family in abject poverty.

Totally agree MrsC. As Wilbur points out, without people like him and Iman, our cities would be covered in piles of crap. It's programmes like this that make me sort of angry about people banging on about poverty over here. What is considered poverty in the UK would be unimaginable luxury to people like Iman and his family.

Exactly! I get so angry when I see people on facebook banging on about poverty in the UK. Yes, there is an inequal distribution of wealth, but we don't live in abject poverty like Iman. And from some of the programmes I watched earlier this year, people in parts of India (there was a documentary following different families - one where the young guy basically scraped out drains and put his health at risk with chemicals to get gold to sell to a merchant, because that was the only living he knew), and other regions.
What was particularly galling about the programme tonight is that Indonesia is a reasonably wealthy nation.

I saw that documentary about India too. Unimaginably shocking. It did seem all the more difficult to watch this episode of The Worst Place when affluence was literally the other side of a wall.

I just don't think some people over here realise what true poverty can involve. It's tough when kids need free school meals, but that is a long long way from kids in Cambodia who have to go out after dark and hunt for crickets which they put in bags and take to school the next morning. Fried up, these constitute the main part of their lunch.

I had a (playful) argument with one of my uni tutors a week or so ago over this sort of thing. He was saying something about people in Britain being poor, buying junk food because it was cheap, and smoking/taking drugs as a relief/escape from poverty.
I said that if they could afford drugs and/or cigarettes then they were not poor. Perhaps saying 'bananas only work out at 10p each in Waitrose, and they're healthier than a Big Mac' was not such a structured argument, but my point was that fruit and veg is cheaper than stodge, and if you have a TV, own a PC, and have cigarettes/alcohol on a regular basis then this is not poverty.