It's a terrible curse to be poor

I went for a run this afternoon to my usual place - Pointe Final. The street vendors at Pointe Final are gone. Their faces were becoming familiar to me. "Bom Dia" (Good Morning) or "Boa Tarde" (Good Afternoon) - I would say. They would reciprocate the same way. I was a familiar alien to them. They have been evicted, I guess to clean up the place without first thinking about their livelihoods. Who cares? They are supposedly the trash of the society. Bull dozer has levelled off the place. They were just trying to make a living without begging, stealing or robbing by selling a coke or a beer or a fried chicken leg. What are they to do? Is the society (or the government of the people) pushing them to be criminals? Yet there are people here stashing away hundreds of ill-gotten millions in a Swiss bank. There is never enough for the rich or the powerful or the corrupt. I wonder who the real criminals are. Angola is not alone.

Wander Lust - Reminiscing a dream

As I travel around the globe like a modern day nomad from Johannesburg through Buenos Aires, Houston, Tokyo, Hong Kong back to Johannesburg again only to return to Luanda where I had started, my biological clock is messed up; I am deprived of sleep. I eat at odd hours in the airplane as they serve food in keeping with the local time or at fast food places as I hop from airport to airport. I travel through many time zones. As I wake up in a hotel room in Narita, Japan at 1:00 AM and as the New Year sneaks in I hear what I believe to be the beating of drums at the Shinshoji Temple honoring the God of Fire and welcoming the New Year. I am sleepless in Tokyo and I have miles to go towards my final destination. I wonder if there was a purpose for me by an invisible puppeteer or I am just aimlessly floating around in random direction like a straw in the ocean.

Just a few days ago I had taken a detour during this journey to the southern continent of Antarctica from Buenos Aires via Ushuaia – a continent where summer brings 22 to 24 hours of daylight, yet thousands of years of snow cover defies that summer heat keeping it colder than Tokyo winter. Long nightly darkness rules over daylight in Tokyo. In Antarctica many time zones generally known to humanity converge and collapse into almost a single time zone – either night or day all around.

My passport has been stamped in many countries in all the continents that many would dream to visit. Now I am back to reality. Glittering city malls, slums dwellers & street vendors, traffic noise, stinking trash piles and human encroachment pushing other living beings to slow demise is certainly the real world. Antarctica now seems like a distant sweet dream. Life goes on even for a restless Bedouin.