*This article has been translated and published in the Estonian newspaper Postman I have been collaborating with for a little over a year.
I am Spanish and half Italian. Nine years ago I left my comfortable life in Madrid and became an international correspondent. I have lived two years in South Africa, three in Mozambique and four in Mexico. From each of these countries I have been lucky enough to travel around their surroundings and get to know in depth the south and east of the African continent, Caribbean, Central, southeast asia…
And 2014, I drove from Madrid to the border of Turkey and Syria, where the bombs prevented us from passing and forced us to upload the vehicle to a freighter in the city of Iskenderum, to disembark on the Egyptian Damietta, and from there cross the entire African continent to its southernmost point, Cape Agulhas, South Africa. That trip is possibly the greatest lesson I have ever learned in my life. I watched the world degrade at every mile. I started traveling through a place where passports did not have to be shown at the borders and I ended the trip crossing some borders where the guards had to be bribed to be able to pass despite having all the papers in order. But I also started that trip in Spain, a country where everyone was sad and angry because the economic crisis was hitting hard, what was true, but where hospitals functioned perfectly, schools, police stations or public transport, and I finished the trip in a place where people were happy despite having nothing.
In Africa most of the people could not even dream of the living standards of all those millions of depressed men who were, and they are, the Europeans. At the cost of a psychologist session that cures the depressions of so many Europeans afflicted by their bad luck, an African or Central American family eats a week. Sorry for the demagoguery that sometimes has the disadvantage of being real and cruel.
With the cost of a session of the psychologist who cures the depressions of so many Europeans afflicted by their bad luck, an African or Central American family eats a week
As european, poverty, I mean the truth, the one that has metastasis in society, I met her ago 17 years in Lima, Peru. He showed it to me suddenly Juan, a boy not yet three years old who worked in the town of Ladrilleras. He worked in the middle of a dry dusty desert turning the hundreds of bricks his parents made every day. They spread them out on the ground and he, for its weight, I was the only one who could step on them without breaking them and turning them over to dry in the sun. I assure you that since then I have not stopped traveling and have seen scenes like those, and much worse, in many parts of the world. Do you know that in many countries they do not register children in rural areas until they are four or five years old because they do not waste time going to the city to do a useless procedure because many die in their first years of life? They call them the nameless, and they bury them in the field without even a record that says they were born.
In a few days I'll change the country I live in again. I move to live in Rome. Almost a decade later, therefore, back to europe. In these nine years I have become an immigrant who returns home and contemplates reality from angles that I did not have before.. I see the rise of nationalisms, the arrival of Brexit, of the extreme right and the extreme left, the feeling that there is a growing current throughout Europe to believe that the continent is a failure and that the fault of everything lies with the European Union. Local politicians found an excuse for their mistakes in a superior administration to which they can point without being responsible. Fears arrived in European society, the selfishness of the rich who seek to separate themselves from the poor, the feeling that you have to shield yourself from everything so as not to lose anything.
And I am surprised that Europeans do not know that they live on a small island of well-being and human rights within the globe.. That, eg, education standards, justice or health of the majority of the European population are simply unattainable for the 75% of the rest of the world population. In El Salvador, eg, being lucky is that the gangs don't make you work for them or they don't kill you. And Nepal, that your mother's inheritance is not working with 14 years of prostitute like her to support the family. And in the United States not end up living on the street. I did a report on 2016 on a huge number of homeless people in California and according to data from the California Government itself, 40% of its population lived in poverty or on the edge of poverty. Miami, New York, Chicago… in all there are hordes of homeless sleeping on the sidewalks. A census of an NGO done two years ago showed that 3.000 people who lived on the street in Paris, in New York the figure is 60.000.
A census of an NGO done two years ago showed that 3.000 people who lived on the street in Paris, in New York the figure is 60.000
Do not think that I do not understand that of course in Europe there are challenges and inequalities to fix, but it strikes me that the answer is to demolish everything and surrender depressed to extremes. Once in Madrid, a woman told me that the operation of the buses now was a shame because they passed less frequently than before. We were waiting at a stop where a screen said the exact time remaining for the next bus to arrive, we would get on a new bus that had air conditioning and wifi and whose price was subsidized by the institutions. I did not know what to say, I had just traveled in Mozambique for twelve hours in a van with chickens, where is there space for 12 people and we were going 22, and whose brakes were without pads and had to stop three times to put water in the engine. This is how you travel in Africa, America and much of Asia, in old and polluting vans with no guarantees of safety.
Those were times when he returned to Europe heard people complain about everything. Some told me that they could only play the lottery and I thought they did not know that the most important lottery had already touched: born in Europe.
