Just a dream

I had a dream last night that I woke up from in panic.

My family had been evicted from our home and almost all our stuff had to be left behind. Our couches, the blender, my bed, camera, computer, books, ipod, pillows, family photos, all the non-essentials couldn't come along. We had to carry what we could out of the house in bundles; limited necessities for basic survival. Then we left. In my dream I glanced back at the house of my childhood...aching.

We moved into a metal boxcar in a dump. Surrounded by the city's garbage, we decorated the corrugated walls of our boxcar with colorful electrical wire from discarded computers. We slept on the floor, ate what we could find, and we reeked of garbage. But we had each other, we had a few possessions, and we had a roof over our heads. When it rained, we'd watch the brown, contaminated water gush by, but we safely out of it.

We lived in our boxcar in the dump for months. How many, I don't know. But one day, we came back from collecting food and working in the city's outskirts to find a bulldozer ferociously tearing apart our metal home. It's huge claw dug into the side, crumpling the walls like paper and ripping apart the welded seams. As it flattened our boxcar, my little brother, trapped inside, screamed. We had to watch as it leveled our home and after an eternity, the bulldozer rumbled away leaving a pile of ruble. Running over, we found everything destroyed and my brother crushed beneath the heavy metal. My world was gone, my home destroyed, and my brother dead. Everything was lost and all I owned were the clothes I wore. I was terrified.

And then I woke up.

I lay in my safe, San Diego bed, completely anguished and devastated. It took me a couple moments to realize it had been a dream.

It took me even longer to realize: they can't wake up.

It must be possible to quicken rebuilding efforts and lessen their pain. There need to be policies established streamlining reconstruction efforts and relief work. UNHabitat works towards this, yes, but it's tangled in international bureaucracy and politics. There shouldn't be paperwork when peoples' lives have been destroyed. There shouldn't be superfluous regulations delaying aid when people have lost everything. There must be ways to coordinate relief efforts in order to help those in need within hours or days. It shouldn't be months. It shouldn't require thousands of deaths before the media's attention is finally garnered. It shouldn't require disease outbreaks or civil wars over basic resources to get the international community's assistance.

These people can't wake up, but we can. There's got to be a way to narrow that gap.