Chapter III

My dear friend Q… hey sounds kind a mysterious, doesn’t it Q? well, he saved my ass telling me about the public transportation. Honestly I have been asking around, but I just realized that I haven been asking the wrong people. All of them including the students at the UCL have told me all kinds of things all of them super expensive… nothing that can save me like this.

I feel horribly embarrassed, when i realized how wrong i was about London and its workers... what the hell I was thinking? I honestly thought that the workers lived close by to their jobs, that some of them didn’t have to take the transportation. I honestly thought that the people that used the trains and the tube were regular people. In my poor mind I couldn’t figure things out I thought that maybe salaries were better than in the US and I thought that I was living in a middle class neighborhood. I thought I thought…What kind of anthropologist am I? So naïve…

I was trying to figure my journey by bus, my friend and his boyfriend were fixing the fireplace, I ask them how far is Lewisham, which I pronounced lewis-ham as the last name and the cold meat, they were on the floor laughing, and I was What? What? Apparently is pronounced Lewi-sham duh!!!! I could see their concern in their eyes, they said is rough you will notice you are going to be fine but is rough.

I was prepared to save my money and I did my journey by bus one hour and a half from here to the city, but is much much cheaper like a third of the price I have been paying…I honestly don’t want to move she is a good person to live I like the neighborhood and I like the bunnies even thought they chewed the telephone cable. Ohhh My good what am I going to do? Well so far waking up earlier and sit on the bus.

I did my journey and I could cut with a knife the division from my well off neighborhood to Lewisham... where was I been hanging out? This is life… this is reality… this is it. Interesting thing about poverty is that is its presence is soooo tangible, so loud so obvious and at the same time is hidden and invisible. The bus passed in front of Jamaican, Sudafrican, Middle eastern and a few latin stores, on the bus was only one white person, did this tell you something? Damn world!!!! Everywhere things are the same. The heels and makeup are gone, colorful fabrics and tired faces are ridding the bus. My comfortable Americanized life is over…I am glad! I truly am…

Gandhi is still my reading and I realized that he was such a loser at the beginning of his career, his brother was supporting him until he was close to 30…But he was open and learned from everything. By any means I am trying to say or imply I am going to follow his path, but that gives me a little bit of hope that maybe studying, being poor and have nothing but social capital might someday help this rotten world.

If you figure a way to cash out social capital let me know, I can make a good use of the money.