Camp America

Depression USA 1930s Shanty Town

March 2009, Sacramento, USA

Today I was able to see my brother and his wife and their new baby, with my parents in London. The baby was premature and is vulnerable at the moment so please say a prayer for her and the family.  On the way back my mother told me about Sacramento where formerly middle income earners are now living in tents in Sacramento, USA.  When I was at ATD Fourth World in London, it was well known that Fr Joseph Wresinzki was sent to a camp outside of Paris called Noisy-Le-Grand, a camp of dispossessed and poor families born and bred in poverty.  This was post war, France and it looked a bit like the picture above.  These pictures below are pictures of Recession USA...

These are middle income earners and the poor who lost everything in the credit crunch and it is a salutary image indeed.  The idea that this could become widespread is incredible at a time when human technology and the advance of modernism and capitalism was at its height.  The people who live in this tent town in Sacramento, like refugee camps in Africa are without running water and sanitation, much like parts of the developing World.  People in these camps are said to have walked 3 miles to get bottled water. It is both saddening, tragic and strangely bizarre in the 21st century, with all of mankind's 'advances', wealth and technology, that the shanty town is the worrying development on the rise.

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