Slums of Buenos Aires [Bryan]

Ellie and I watched Slumdog Millionaire last night. A fine film, if very difficult to watch. Much of the action takes place within the brutal slums, garbage dumps, and crushing poverty of urban India. It was hard for me to watch partly because it transported me back to Buenos Aires, where I served as a Mormon missionary for two years.

Buenos Aires, while a great and beautiful city, is dotted with slum areas, or "villas" ("villas miserias" -- villages of misery) as they were called. These areas were considered open game for missionaries, and it was not uncommon to see us, suits and all, working the alleys of the worst of these villa areas. Hairless, diseased dogs and shoeless children were running everywhere.

I can still remember the smells: sewage mixed with alcohol. I can still remember the sights: a dirty 4-year-old child coughing up a 6-inch worm from her throat. I can still remember the feelings: a punch to my nose as we were being robbed one afternoon in broad daylight. I can still remember the judgments I made: pity and compassion, sometimes, heartless contempt, at other times, and a bit of fear. Sometimes, these places seemed quite ordinary, with children playing, mothers cleaning, milenesa cooking. These friendly but destitute villa dwellers, I came to understand, were not so different from you and me.

One place stands out in my memory, though, an abandoned wine factory filled with indigent squatters, a high-rise slum, basically, surrounded by filth and garbage, with dark and gloomy hallways, hallways that would have echoed with a million tales of woe and suffering. The place was called the the Vino Toro building. It was a "casa tomada" or "taken house," an old building filled with squatters. The police, we whispered, didn't even dare go into the Vino Toro. And yet we did.

The Vino Toro was a strange place. I remember going inside one Friday night, later than we should have. We entered a large room, what once appeared to be a factory floor, a place where people had constructed dozens of shanty homes, almost like cubicles stretching out all around us. The Friday night drinking was just underway, and the air smelled of cheap beer. I could hear bottles smashing, men laughing. It was quite dim inside, but I could feel the eyes of the slum were looking at me, sizing me up, wondering why I had entered their world. For a kid from suburban Utah, this was almost like going to the moon. I had never been anywhere even remotely comparable and I have never been since.

One time, we were visiting a family who had set up their home in what might have been an abandoned office suit. A whole family (maybe 6-8 people) lived in this office. They had a few chairs, a table, and an old mattress spread out in the corner, nothing more. The father who we were speaking with was guarded and somewhat hostile; if I recall, he was involved in some sort of criminal activity. The children were very dirty, and I doubt they had ever seen the inside of a school. I remember hearing what sounded like running water, turning around, and seeing one of the children urinating in the corner of the room. By the smell of things, this was not uncommon.

In such children, I was confronted face-to-face with what I refer to now, in a very sanitized way, as "inequality of opportunity." That kid peeing in the corner of this slum high rise, why did he have so little, while I had so much? As a boy, I was surrounded by toys, he was surrounded by garbage; I went to schools to learn, he went to the streets to beg; I wondered how I would pay for college, he wondered what he would eat for breakfast; I had hope, he had misery; I had everything, he had nothing. The villas of Buenos Aires taught me I have little to boast of, little to feel proud of, and little to feel like I have earned. I had a head start in life that the peeing kid could never overcome. These slums were schools in humility: they changed me forever. I went to Buenos Aires to teach people, and they ended up teaching me.