Comparing situations.

Today I would like to talk about cultural shock. But not in general. I would like to write about a specific shock between my culture and the American culture: the concept of homelessness. But first I consider that it is neccessary to tell you one thing. This post is going to be full of prejudices. And I think that it happens because after traveling around different countries, you become more open-minded. You learn about different contexts, you live in different realities. But it is really difficult to take off your personal and cultural way of thinking. I could say that it is imposible to be totally objective when you compare both cultures, yours and the one in which you are living. So, I would like to warn you about this post. It is MY OPINION. It is not THE TRUTH. It's just the way in which I can see and analize one particular situation. If you want to make your own opinion about it, you have to experiment this by yourself.

When I walk around Austin and see homeless people, I cannot see them like poor people. And I think it happens because my concept of poor people developed because of the context in Argentina. In Argentina, most of the poor people (specially in the North) don’t have anything to eat. They probably eat once a day with a lot of luck. Because of that they are malnourished. But when I see homeless people in Austin, they don’t seem like they don’t eat well. They also are fully dressed. In my home country, most of the poor people that live in the streets don’t have shoes or jackets during the winter. Because of that there are a lot of NGO’s that distributs blankets during this season.

Another thing that catch my attention about homeless people is their relation with the police. And in this point I am going to do a critique to my country. In Austin, cops (most of the times) still treat them like people. If they have to control them, they do it. But If the homeless don’t have anything bad or he/she don’t do anything bad, they can start a normal conversation. For example, 2 days ago I was in the bus stop and there was a homeless sleeping in the middle of the sidewalk. The police arived, woke him up, checked on him, and when the policeman finished, he bent down to lift the homeless belongings. And it was surprising for me, because in Argentina, most of the policemen treat the poor people like animals. They never are decent in this way.

Also I would like to say that, in my point of view, there is one more problem around this topic here. People don’t care about homeless. And I believe this thing happens because there are a lot of institutions that take care of them. A big percentage of this organizations give them some food and clothes. So, common people don’t need to worry whether the homeless eat or don’t. The same happens in Argentina, but I think that argentinians are more solidary in some specific cases.

To conclude I would like to say that I think that poverty is an issue that most of the countries around the world suffer. But the concept of poverty differs between each one. I don’t think that homeless people don’t need help because of my Argentinian concept of poverty. I think that they just have different problems than poor people from my country. And I would like to finish this post with a question: Why is it that in one of the most developed countries of the world there still are poor people? One possible answer would be: because american people believe that the only problem that homeless people have is not having a house (they called them homeless, not poors). I think that they have deepest problems that need to be solved in order to reinsert them into the society.