Complexity.

Yesterday I came into contact with something I've never seen.

Urban poverty. A poverty exacerbated by western culture. A complex beast.

As I walked the streets with a pair from InnerChange through the neigbourhood of St Roch, New Orleans, the sights began to wear me down. Houses with still broken windows after Hurricane Katrina. Houses that had not been gutted or that had been squatted or trashed. Houses half standing. This was just the surface.

As we walked down the social hub of the street we were greeted by a stumbling man, carrying a brown paper bag (most likely containing the stereotypical alcohol) with bloodshot eyes slurring out words barely decipherable. We continued down and met a man previously known by the InnerChange folk. We began with the token conversation of where we were from but things progressed very quickly. He began to recount how he was woken by rising flood waters during Hurricane Katrina and his 81 year old mother is living in a wreck of a house in which he has tried to repair, but doesn't have the funds for a contractor. We were interrupted by another man, who brought beer from the corner store for him and another man sitting by.

10 feet down the sidewalk a young girl runs up to another group of men, sitting, having a jolly male time to collect a man - 'din't yo' hear you is getting called'. She takes him by the hand and bossily strolls down the street. We depart from our current conversation and continue walking down the street.

One of the beautiful things about the city of New Orleans is that you can strike up a conversation with anyone about anything. As we walk past a stoop, with an older woman, a roughly mid 20's women, with two toddlers and an infant we say 'how ya'll doing?' Being the 4th of July we talk about how they are celebrating etc. As we talk to the older lady, her daughter holds her own infant and feeds her a lollipop. A teething infant, being fed a lollipop. Her two younger children play on the stoop as the younger lady's partner rides his bike past and she cuss' up a storm at him. We farewell these folk and continue on. Around the corner the partner is hanging out with crew, having a good time.

The scene weighs so heavily upon me. The complexity began to unfold.

Things that I have so taken for granted: education and health care. You would think, that these people living in America would have these things. Take the 3 generations on their steps. The mother giving her infant a lollipop. My jaw drops, it seems common sense to me to give infants the right foods - high sugar foods on baby teeth? The western culture contains so much, excess. Westerners that have grown into excess, have an amount of knowledge on how to handle it. But when these things, such as alcohol and sugar are thrust upon a culture without the provision of education and health services, how can you expect them to adjust?

In another neighborhood of New Orleans, a few months ago now, a young man gets bullied at school. He comes home and alerts his mother to the situation, she hands him a gun and says 'kill those -expletive-'. The young man then kills two others.

When I sit here reflecting on that family on the steps, the young man, it pains me to think, that without intervention those kids will be in the same situation that their parents are in. There is poverty and culture. They are not together. Any solution to poverty that doesn't seek to understand the culture quashes the unique, beautiful culture that exists.

The complex question, how do you execute any solution to poverty that respects and upholds a culture, once poverty has been defined in that culture?