BC relative to Central Africa
The Canadian International Development Agency, which sponsored my time in Cameroon, offers ‘re-entry workshops’ to help people mitigate ‘reverse culture shock’. I neglected to attend, because I figured there could be no more shocking transition then from professional Tokyo Nightlife Agent to interior British Columbian treeplanter, and I thought I navigated that one quite gracefully back in ’03.
The things one notices after transitioning from developing- to developed- world are well known I think: less life on the street, more space, consumption and waste ranging from overt to obscene, reliability, predictability, punctuality, bad weather and the like. These things I expected to notice, and did.
But I’ll tell you what really stood out this time, wandering through downtown Victoria after 6 months in the Congo Basin: Do we ever have a lot of homeless people. No kidding. This is a town that as a Vancouverite I have dutifully mocked for it’s sterile, pleasantville retirement community vibe, lacking the grit of my favorite gentrification-havens on the mainland. And it may well be those things. But for all of the wealth and docility, this town (like the rest of the province, and maybe the whole country, and probably America too) lets a ridiculous number of people through the cracks.
During my time in Limbe, whose population is roughly one half Victoria’s, I was asked for change exactly one time. It seemed so out of context that it actually took me a moment to remember my lines (“Sorry, you want what? Some of my money? ). That first evening stroll through Victoria I was approached a handful of times in 40 minutes or so, which come to think about it is not that unusual in many areas.
This isn’t to underplay poverty in Cameroon; in fact I suspect the people living out of shopping carts in Victoria are better fed then about half of my 9-to-5 colleagues in Limbe. But there is something in-your-face about BC homelessness that I had forgotten about until I saw it with my post-Africa goggles.
A few usual explanations that come to mind: A tighter weave on Cameroonian family structures keeps people in family homes even if they have tendencies that would estrange them in these parts. Also there may be a bigger cultural taboo on vagrancy that keeps Cameroonian homeless people off the street and in the shadows where I don’t see them. The other half of the coin is BC’s housing crisis (I can barely afford to live here), employment crisis (don’t get me started), something about substance abuse which I’m not prepared to get into, and a social services system that seems to fail the people who need it.
It would be interesting to hear the take on poverty of a Cameroonian visiting BC for the first time. Maybe I should go find one.
