The City of Joy

Am currently reading Dominique Lapierre's The City of Joy, borrowed amongst a few others from Uncle Kok Hwee, Isaac's dad.
While I'm only a quarter-way through, I can tell you, its a great read.
Considering that the main characters are probably the most destitute people on the face of this earth, the title is more than a tad ironic.
Described as faction by the author, it caused a serious upset amongst the very people the book described. Despite the author's efforts at donating one half of the book's royalties to one of the slums he described in the book, he was actually criticized and rejected on the grounds that he had exploited them.

The mentality of the people Lapierre writes about is amazing.
Here's an excerpt from the book:

"A slum was not exactly a shantytown. It was more like a sort of poverty-stricken industrial suburb inhabited exclusively by refugees from rural areas. Everything in these slums combined to drive their inhabitants to abjection and despair: shortage of work and chronic unemployment, appallingly low wages, the inevitable child labor, the impossibility of saving, debts that could never be redeemed, the morgaging of personal possessions and their ultimate loss sooner or later.There was also the total nonexistance of any reserve food stocks and the necessity to buy in minute quantities-one cent's worth of salt, two or three cents worth of wood, one match, a spoonful of sugar- and the total absence of privacy with ten or twelve people sharing a single room. Yet the miracle of these concentration camps, was that the accumulation of disastrous elements was counterbalanced by the other factors that allowed their inhabitants not merely to remain fully human but even to transcend their condition and become models of humanity.
In these slums people actually put love and mutual support into practice.They know how to be tolerant of all creeds and castes, how to give respect to a stanger, how to show charity toward beggars, cripples, lepers, and even the insane. Here the weak were helped, not trampled upon.
Orphans were instantly adopted by their neighbours and old people were cared for and revered by their children."

Its always those who have the least that can always find a little extra to share.
Those who are the most afflicted are the same ones who will find a reason to hope, to live.
Why?
Makes you wonder who the 'destitute' really are.
I'm not saying that its fine to be living out on the street, wondering if you'll make it through the night or if there will be anything to feed your children with the next day.
And I still don't understand why God allows one child to die of starvation in one part of the world while another lies sleeping in a thousand dollar nursery.
But why is it, that those with everything find that they can give the least?
And no, its not all about the money.