It is staggering and wholly impressive how much of a difference wealth makes. Wealth and fortune is the difference between the family of four hundred on the abandoned lot with neither clean water nor electricity, a hole in the ground serving as a septic tank, and the family of four who live in the large white bungalow with a massive yard and three dogs. On one hand, you have people living in boxes made of scrap metal and plywood, and on the other hand, people living in ornamentally impressive and structurally beautiful works of art.

It has come to the point where living on one side of either wall determines your life. You can work hard and learn, and do your best and struggle to the point of death to escape your own inherited poverty, but if you don’t have the (nearly impossible) odds on your side, you’re doomed from the day you’re born. And exactly the same can be said for the other side, where you’re born entitled and gifted with wealth, with every road and every possibility open to you – perhaps even wasted on you.

And here in the third world, the difference is incredibly drastic and noticeable, while the charity isn’t. We met a family living within a walled lot, without access to even the barest of necessities, while on the other side of that wall stood a grandiose church, which withheld access to sanitary facilities. The family was forced to cross the street and adhere to nature’s calls in a fenced off field.

Families come here seeking refuge from southern conflicts, or were born into a cycle they cannot escape. Without the money necessary to pay for an education or any type of training, the poor relegate themselves to helper and worker positions, working optimally as an office peon or call center agent, or otherwise toiling physically to no foreseeable end. School is low on the list of priorities for people living in these conditions, underneath things like food, water, proper shelter and decent enough jobs to pay for education, and their future is essentially predetermined, despite the illusion of free will.

There is no escape for them. No refuge. They come here from nothing, with nothing, and into nothing. And despite these conditions, there is no chance for a better life. When I first visited people plagued with these circumstances, I felt neither pity, nor shock, nor interest, but humility. Perhaps there is some inherent selfishness within me that caused me to experience a fault in myself rather than in their situation, but nonetheless, if there is one thing such an experience can teach you, it is that nothing matters truly as much as life. Just living – no matter how it is done, no matter how unpleasant and dirty and borderline disgusting it may be – it is worth it. There are true needs, the needs we cannot do without, and then there is everything and anything else.

Life is precious, and our inherent need to strive for it – our instinct towards survival – is admirable, and wholly humbling. In essence, the key to survival is adaptability, and living in such conditions may seem unthinkable to us, but as I visited lot after home after area, one thing became clear to me. People were living. They were coping. Some, especially the younger crowd, even seemed happy.

But that isn’t to say that what they were living in was what they had hoped to live in. Hope sets in early, yet when it leaves; it leaves a large burned hole, which in turn must be filled otherwise. Drugs and alcohol, as expected, are a problem – but they are no more a problem than they would be anywhere else in society, the only difference being the contrast in transparency (it’s quite difficult to hide things in such a small space, to the point where doors simply do not exist on most of the “houses”).

Yet drugs and alcohol aren’t the issue. They are a temporary solution employed by those who see no end, and under the circumstances, it is a cheap and viable solution and a preferred alternative. The alternative is difficult, often impossible – work is scarce, and the work that is available is cheap to the point where, well, the actual point begins to fade. While the refugees move from one place of turmoil into the next of an entirely different nature, the majority of people living in inescapable poverty aren’t simply unfortunate souls or people who lack the conviction to work themselves out of their holes – they are families that moved into abandoned lots with the hopes of slowly crawling out of the mud and into something of more concrete material – to no apparent avail.

In the end, all I ask is help – help for a single purpose. If you have such places nearby, then help them live up to the basic standard of human life. Help them achieve easy access to clean water, help them gain the privilege of taking a crap in something more dignified than an empty field.