“This may not be the community that I desire, but it’s a community. “Look at this trash,” said Shorty, one of nearly 60,000 people experiencing homelessness in LA.
Three thousand miles from the mountains of El Salvador, people like Shorty persist through strikingly similar conditions - a phenomenon that has reached new depths amid a global pandemic. I was in Skid Row in the center of downtown Los Angeles - one of the richest cities in the richest country in the world. Only I was no longer in a remote, hilltop village of the rural developing world. She relieves herself in a pot, and throws her waste into the gutter.Īfter spending the last nine months in El Salvador, and the last several weeks traveling to impoverished areas to deliver aid in the coronavirus era, I was familiar with this kind of landscape. There is no electricity here, no plumbing. Shorty’s floor is nothing more than a slip of fabric over concrete her roof, a patchwork of tarps, wooden boards and discarded umbrellas. Speeds rise as storefronts and suits taper off - at the point where the asphalt begins to crack.įrom her perch on 6th Street, one of the invisible watches the cars pass by homes that, like hers, were assembled from found objects. As the signposts we call civilization decrease in frequency, cars accelerate.
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