[The faces behind the numbers...]

Scenes around Mission Hill taken by A. A. Babar

Every time I see someone digging through our trash, I am struck with a mixture of shame, awkwardness, empathy, and perplexity. A mixture dissolved in irony.

There are homeless people all over the world—people whose survival is a daily struggle, people who do not have food nor water, people whose lives are vulnerable to all sorts of physical and mental harm. But here, in Roxbury—just a hop, skip, and a jump from some of the world’s greatest educational institutions, hospitals, developments—it seems to be such a contradiction to witness such immediate poverty in the midst of such wealth.

I witnessed this semi-collision of worlds a few days ago, when dignitaries—namely the Presidents of the United States—sat together to commemorate the legacy left by Ted Kennedy in the Basilica just a few blocks down. Although I have lived in Roxbury for only a year, I was struck for one of the first times with a certain sense of pride to be a part of a community where something seemingly quick and powerful happened within such diversity. Diversity of power, skin-shades, wealth, and experience.

It reminds me why I’m here in the first place, burying my head in numbers, formulas, words I can not/nor care to pronounce. I guess you could say that I am one of those “social epi” people out to “bridge the gaps”. While the books guilt-trip me into reading just one more page, I am obligated to also take my head out of the sand, and to open my eyes to see the life that is happening all around me.

To ignore the faces behind these numbers drowning in statistical vacuums would be fatal. We owe it to those who have fought before us--some silently, some loudly--proclaiming the need to address the disparities between rich and poor. Between black and white. And between the powerful and powerless.

Amenah A. Babar, MPH
SD Student
Society, Human Development, and Health
Co-Editor in Chief