We have just taken off from Dubai for St Petersburg. My son is marvelling at the immensity of Dubai’s airport—now officially the busiest in the world. We have stood on a bus—stifling, cramped—and boarded our air-conditioned connecting flight with a deep sense of relief. We have watched the planes lining up behind ours on the shimmering tarmac, and have noted the outside temperature flashing on the screen: 44 degrees Celsius. Thank God we’re getting out of here.
But all I can think of as our plane speeds along the runway and takes off for cooler climes is the labourers constructing this oven of a city. I don’t have the figures at my fingertips, but I tell my son about the migrants I’ve read about from poorer countries who flock here in search of (comparatively) well-paid work, and who send their remittances to their impoverished families back home. Many of them work in inhumane, slave-like conditions. Some are held hostage and forced to work for their fare home
Earlier, we’d bought roubles at a currency exchange kiosk managed by a man from Bangalore. We’d walked up staircases whose bannisters and tiles were being polished by Indians and Bangladeshis, and had been admitted into the business lounge by a man from Indonesia.
A Chinese woman at the breakfast bar pointed the way to our gate. All smiling, polite and professional. All migrants a long, long way from home, working for the benefit of those with the means to travel.
I was reminded of the Filipino woman who sat beside me once on a flight from Manila to Hong Kong, plastic shopping bag filled with possessions on her lap, head flopped into her hands. I asked if I could help her, but she couldn’t even lift her weeping eyes to look at me. When we landed, she rushed to the bathroom and vomited into the basin. She was a nanny, leaving behind her own children to look after those of a wealthy family instead.
This is the problem with travel: you discover a world whose majesty exceeds your wildest dreams, but which is cruel beyond imagining. You adventure into heartbreakingly beautiful landscapes, but find (if you care to look) heartbreak underpinning them all: cultures eradicated, people suppressed, religions exterminated. Almost everywhere you go you find people and corporations and governments exploiting the weakest and most disadvantaged for their own benefit.
And you understand, if you have a conscience, that you are the beneficiary of such a system. As Australian Jesuit Tony Herbert SJ says in his new book, Disturbing the Dust, ‘the existence of the marginalised poor in our world is not an unfortunate act of fate, an unlucky fall of the dice. Their very existence is not an economic factor that is politically neutral, nor innocent of ethical judgement’.
Indeed, if such misfortune was random—if no-one was set to benefit from the diminution of another at his or her expense—then such a system would surely have become redundant. Why exploit someone (or something) if there is nothing to gain?
"The existence of the marginalised poor in our world is not an unfortunate act of fate, an unlucky fall of the dice."
In Fr Herbert’s case, he writes poignantly about the Dalit communities of Hazaribag, among whom he has worked during more than 50 years as a missionary in India. These people - otherwise known as ‘Untouchables’ - have endured crippling marginalisation at the hands of people who considered themselves superior to them.
Yet the Dalits, much like the labourers in Dubai, are people whose lack of choice and stature leads them to do the work we wouldn't dream of doing ourselves. And, compassionate though we think we are, says Fr Herbert, we all depend on a world order in which some people exist on the lower rungs. If not for the Bangladeshi cleaners and Chinese bar staff at Dubai Airport, who would ensure a pleasant transit experience for me? If not for the Filipino nannies, who would care for the expats’ children in Hong Kong and Singapore and Qatar?
What is the solution to such socio-economic imbalance? How to transform a thoroughly capitalist world in which greed advances the prosperity of those who already have much and entrenches the disadvantage of those who have little (money, education, a stable upbringing, a chance to further themselves)? Such change requires socialist policies and a sharing of the spoils—a transformation to which those who possess the world’s wealth are not willing to capitulate.
For those who care, there are small, albeit seemingly inconsequential, steps to be taken. To begin with, says Fr Herbert, ‘we need to go beyond merely identifying with the victims of poverty to examining the social and economic structures that cause poverty. The poor want this of us.’
Once we have educated ourselves as to the true reasons for the unequal spread of the world’s wealth, it is important to advocate for the poor. Identify with these people and speak in their favour, Fr Herbert says, for solidarity with the poor helps transform lives.
‘Such solidarity … demands a change in our usual way of thinking, which is generally moulded by structures proper to the middle class rather than to those on the margins,’ he writes.
‘It means seeing reality from their point of view, of getting an inkling of their world of existence, of understanding the pain they experience.’
My own observations over the years haven’t changed the lives of the poor. But they have informed how I treat people, and how I vote. And these things, when enacted en masse among the advantaged, can bring about transformational change.
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Catherine Marshall is a Sydney-based journalist and travel writer. Fr Tony Herbert’s new book, Disturbing the Dust, is published by Jesuit Mission and can be ordered online at www.jestuitmission.org. The book will be officially launched on 22 August in Sydney.