Bothered

I don't recall feeling in any way genuinely upset when first reading Pico Iyer's Video Night in Kathmandu back in the day. The ways of life of ordinary people in the Far East seemed comically exotic to me, but perhaps I missed out then on reading the essay on his experiences in The Philippines. In this segment, at the mid-point of the work as a whole, the writer openly states how troubled he is by the poverty he encounters in Manila, and it would take the hardest of hearts not to respond to the struggles of those who scrape not so much a living as an existence at the bottom.

Reading it I couldn't help but wonder whether the young people he encountered back then survived into reasonable middle-age. It's frightening that one has to raise the question, but so easy to imagine them simply failing to cope with the extremes they deal with on a daily basis. I don't know much at all about life in that part of the world but am vaguely hopeful that the passing decades have brought some improvement. The problem is that I know full well I might be wrong in that assumption.