Pulling up outside the slum, we were still a part of the busy traffic and city life of Vientiane, but upon entering it, I discovered a different world. Walking though grime, through blackened mud, sewerage, awful smells and shanty shacks, we finally reached the family we were meant to be visiting after walking almost 100m into the slum.

The family consisted of the two parents and three young children, but the father and oldest son were out selling and cutting down coconuts to earn money. We sat down opposite the young mother who was holding a sick baby wearing barely anything and I came away at the end of the conversation feeling numb, shocked and helpless.

Their house was no bigger than my bed at home, and because they weren’t a part of a village community, they were struggling on their own. There was barely any food, no hope of education for the children as there was no money, not enough money to pay for proper healthcare, no room to grow vegetables…..the despair and desperation of this family was truly heartbreaking. The oldest son must go out and work with his father everyday and comes home too exhausted to eat dinner. Yet the oldest son is only six years old. So what were you doing when you were six?

The mother had given birth to her children inside the house. But she had given birth alone, devoid of any human or medical help. One of the most challenging moments of the study tour was to sit there knowing how charmed my life is back in Australia and to sit there and compare my hopes for the future and this mother’s hope for the future. All she wanted was for her family’s life to improve and for her children to have an education. The gap of wealth and opportunity between the Western World and the Developing World became very real for me then.

Yet this family’s story of poverty and despair was still to continue. As we walked back to the car, we were informed that they, and 40 other slum dwelling families, were being evicted from the slum by a developer and being given a plot of land out in the country. But they had no money to build anything! After hearing this we were completely and utterly numb with shock- how could life possibly become more difficult and challenging for this family?

It’s incredibly difficult to process the thought that this family is only one of hundreds living in that slum, one of thousands living in Lao, and one of millions living in these circumstances throughout the World.
To think that this family had done nothing to deserve living in this situation, but instead had been born into and subsequently subjected to a life of hardships and desperation, put into perspective the unfairness and the injustice of poverty!