Baby Dumping and the Vagaries of Poverty

Imagine you have carried a baby to term, you have started to love it, felt it kick inside you. Yet, a few days after it is born, you leave it in a garbage dump a few miles away from where you make your home in the informal settlement.

This is exactly what happens on a regular basis here in Katutura, a vast, sprawling neighborhood of Windhoek, Namibia’s capitol. Before we jump to conclusions about the mother, let’s explore with compassion the likelihood that she may have felt she had no other options. She was staring the gun of poverty which was pointed straight in her face. Of course it is wrong to dump your baby, but so is poverty. Human rights violations are rampant in the slums of Namibia, and in informal settlements throughout the world. Inadequate sanitation, dangerous streets, under-resourced schools with teachers who may or may not teach, violence against women and children – these are all facts of life for many. What is really apparent as you drive through the slums is the expanse of Namibia’s ‘shebeen,’ or bars. As an outsider, it is so easy to judge, “why do people spend all of their money on beer?” Yet when you feel that the mental escape of an alcohol-induced buzz is all that will numb your pain, the choice seems easy – drink your cares away. Of course, drinking, alcoholism, and drugs make it all worse – tearing apart Namibian families, whittling away at the fabric of the society. Yet, the roots of these ills isn’t people’s ‘poor self-control,’ the alcohol itself, or the young women’s act of desperation as she makes the heartbreaking choice to discard her baby and try to forget. The root of most social ills here and all over the world, is poverty, and the growing gap between rich and poor. Where I am staying now in a nice part of Windhoek, entire houses are looted and cleaned out because people are desperate and angry at always having nothing.

So if poverty is the perpetrator, what can be done? What I see here in Namibia is that a system of political apartheid has been replaced by a system of social and economic apartheid. Patrick Bond has written extensively about global apartheid and makes a compelling case in his book Against Global Apartheid that something must be done to disassemble and drastically rethink the international financial institutions of the World Bank and the IMF, which primarily serve the interests of the global elites, the most-developed nations and the international corporations. Africa and heavily-indebted poor countries have little voice in these very-powerful institutions.

Visionary leadership is needed at all levels – from the grassroots to the middle class to the upper levels of political, economic, policy and legal frameworks. The situation is David vs. Goliath, yet the Davids of the world must unite against and hopefully with the global Goliath, the nebulous and insidious system of global apartheid. President Pohamba of Namibia himself fears violence if there isn’t a quick solution to the unjust system of land distribution in Namibia. And so it is all over the world – the Melian Dialogues states, “The powerful do what they can, and the weak suffer the most.”

Bill Grace writes about this eloquently in his new book, Sharing the Rock. He urges humanity to champion “the common good.” This must happen on a personal level, in our very thoughts, habits and actions, but also in the broader political and policy systems that we collectively create as humans inextricably bound on Earth. We cannot deny how interconnected we all are. Part of Bond’s argument is that we must also not blindly and fatalistically accept our fates before, and the inherent injustice of, global apartheid. We have the capacity to envision and create a more just and equitable world, where perhaps some have to accept just a bit less, but many can inch forward toward a realization of their most basic human rights. Let profit not continue to come before people.

So I am brought back to Katutura, where I was last night. “It is just down that road, where a lot of baby-dumping occurs,” my Namibian friend tells me. I ask how often. Very. We hear of it on the news all of the time here. Later, I ask my friends if they think the citizens here in the informal settlement are OK. They think yes, that they often come from northern Namibia where they also have led very simple lives. Yet when I consider how hard it would be transcend that situation, to rise up out of poverty, when it seems all the odds are stacked against you, when your only role models frequent the shebeens every night, it seems arrogant, naïve, somehow wrong not to acknowledge how extremely difficult it would be to claim an education and a brighter future for yourself. (Consider that Namibia has over 40% unemployment.)

It is possible, but we also need mechanisms for people to help themselves, to get support, to transform the systems that keep people stuck in the cycle of poverty. My friend said it very well. He is a well-off Namibian whose family has a nice home and two cars. For this reason, he doesn’t open his mouth in Katutura, he dresses down and keeps his head down. People can tell, even then, that he is not from there. He doesn’t have the pain of survival etched into his face that most people in Katutura do. You can’t show weakness there, and soon that hardness becomes a part of your face. Yet if you wake up in your own bed, your friends and family love you, you have the luxury of a nice breakfast and your favorite things, this kind of necessary survival, of fight, of hardening, doesn’t finds its way into your face. This is only to acknowledge the many disparate realities that each of us face. It isn’t to diminish one person vs. the other’s experience. No matter what, we all, as humans, face pain.

Perhaps by becoming increasingly aware of this, by advocating for social, economic and political reform, and be experiencing compassion for those who feel confined by their choices, we can together work for a brighter, more just and more fair tomorrow.