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About This Poem
The Slum dwellers
There exists a world where the traffic lights don’t work….
Welcome to the Slums
We the slum dwellers…
The ones condemned at birth by virtue of our parents biting poverty
The ones with no prospects, no options, no apologies
This is our story….
Morning light ushers in a crude awakening to realities
better left in nightmares.
The dash to the community bathroom - for those brave enough to risk
tainting by the oozing, bubbling faeces (provided of course that
they have the cash to pay for the toilet)
The rest of us make use of polythene flying toilets –woe unto
anyone passing nearby.
Forget about breakfast – meals are a luxury
Next stop: Trek to the industrial area
Goal: To find any work needing muscle and employees too poor to
care about meager wages and industrial law.
Sweat, sweat, and more sweat. Work overtime, without protective gear, without lunch break, without job security. And for what – peanuts.
Hand-to-mouth: Live for the day.
The wheel of poverty rotates at superhuman speed. Alighting
equals death – death in the form of the way out -
Boy child: Criminal gang
Girl child: Sea of prostitution
The only reprise comes from the misfortune of others.
Siphoning fuel from a tanker, death is death is death, be it from petrol burns or starvation.
Tapping electricity from faulty lines – it’s not as if the council will
willingly connect us with the commodity.
Being used as mercenaries by greedy businessmen and powerful politicians – work is work, right?
Free primary education –don’t make me laugh.
Rapes, murders, theft –just another day gone by.
In a world where people are a rule to themselves, only one rule remains:
Do what you have to do to survive another day.
Period.
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