Enduring one hour in a slum

What a world I live in — I wake up in my apartment in Central, Hong Kong, take the bus down to school and if I miss it, I can even take a taxi. My difficulties include making sure my homework is in on time and balancing my social life with my studies; but overall, I live a life of luxury. I have, of course (like so many others), often given immense thought to what it is like to live even further up the end of the spectrum; to wake up in a mansion rather than an apartment and to have my limousine drop me to school rather than having to take the bus.But whilst I have devoted my imagination to wondering how the wealthiest live, I have given far less thought to how the less-privileged go about their everyday lives.
A week ago, my school — Island School — invited a guest speaker (David Begbie) from Crossroads Foundation to raise our awareness of one of the most devastating enemies this world faces — poverty. Poverty is a very tangible enemy who has rampaged across the world and has set up a home in India. Mr Begbie knew that we teenagers would find it extraordinarily unattractive to sit through another talk and decided to have us go through a far more effective activity which I can confidently say changed my perspective of the world. Our challenge: endure one hour in the slums.
The activity involved us splitting into “families” who would live on a 2x2m square, which was our home. Using a combination of “glue” (which was really just flour and water) as well as our own skill, we had to make as many paper bags from newspapers as possible, before selling them to the shop owners in the market. However, our microcosmic activity was as realistic as possible — we would be lucky if the shop owners simply said no, rather than tear up our bags. Whilst all of this was going on, each family would have to survive a different secondary problem: sickness. With the money generated from our bags, we would be able to buy medicine, but at the same time we had to pay for the ever increasing costs of food, water and rent. God forbid you couldn’t pay your rent, because then you were sent to the loan shark, who would often ask your family to give up the youngest girl to him as a wife. The families running low on money would often “sell an organ” so that they could avoid the loan shark’s snapping teeth. The ultimate goal for your family was to simply survive, and the true winner was the family that managed to pay for all of the above as well as have enough money to send one child to school.
To have truly appreciated the magnitude of such an activity required one to extract themselves from where they were. For that hour, I wasn’t in Hong Kong. I wasn’t waking up in my apartment in Central and going to school to make my future. I was trying to make enough money for my family to survive and to simply have a future. The statistics Mr Begbie told us were horrifyingly true — almost three billion people live on less than $2.50 per day. But that wasn’t what the activity taught me. It showed me how the world is constantly against you; the loan shark, the increasing prices, the struggle for survival and to keep one’s dignity. I had an epiphany: I live in a bubble- even when I go to visit India (there are many slums in India, all of which I have never seen). An invisible bubble had made it difficult for me to see the problems that others are facing and what I can do to try and help stop those problems. But Mr Begbie has switched on my windshield wipers and now the glass is clean — I can now see clearer than ever before.