The not so nice side of living in the developing world

So this afternoon on my way home from class I witnessed something that really made me stop and think. Since arriving in Chile I have seen many things that have made me open my eyes, but I have been genuinely surprised by the lack of glaringly obvious poverty. To be fair, I live and work in the nice part of town, and do not venture into the other parts (because I have no reason to and my friends have warned me that it isn't particularly safe). I see homeless people on the street, but you see them in Melbourne too, and they are much less aggressive here than in Melbourne. However, everyday for the last three weeks I have been walking past this protest camp down by the river Mapochu. It is to protest the poverty of the poorest people, and has been steadily growing for the last few weeks. There are maybe 70 people living there - its quite big. It is a bit of a novelty, and while I suspected it would be very cold, I didn't really think very hard about the true implications. There is always a cordon of police supervising their activities and apart from banners and the like it all seemed quite orderly. Until today.

Today it started to rain. And it has been raining fairly solidly all day. Again I didn't really think about this on my way to class, though there were definitely more police around and more barriers. When I left class and was attempting to come back across the bridge the roads were all closed, the riot police were out and two water canons had arrived. This isn't really much to get alarmed about either. However, upon standing a bit longer I realised that they were evacuating all the people because the river was flooding. This in itself is a good thing, but the people they were bringing up to the road were clearly extremely distressed. At this point one women went running across the road and tried to jump over the wall back down to the river - its a fair drop of probably 6-7 m. A policeman managed to grab her but we watched as a tent with shoes and clothes tied to the roof went hurtling down the river. I guess that was almost everything she owned. She collapsed in the policeman's arms and was loaded into an ambulance. Other people were burning everything, I guess as a last sign of protest before it all got washed away, and were generally fighting with the riot police and refusing to come up from the river. The people looked cold, wet, and defeated. I just felt so sorry for them.

The whole situation was a real eye opener for me, especially as I have been walking past these people for weeks without sparing them a thought. I guess the reason there are so many protests and they do get so heated is because the conditions are worth getting upset about. It became clear to me today that this is about more than just water canons and tear gas.
K