Slum City 2013

As a youth leader, slum city was something I wanted my young people to get involved it, I thought it would be a great experience and something they could share with their non-Christian mates. I didn't expect to be so challenged for me personally and to come away with an experience that has profoundly changed and shaped my thinking.

Slum City is a 24 hour simulation that occurred in Civic Park over the 40 Hour Famine weekend (17-18^th August). Participants gathered from local churches and the age range varied from year 9's to the Mayor of Tea Tree Gully Miriam Smith.  About 30 people were a part of the slum and Ross, Dan, Bradley, Josiah, Georgia and myself represented Hope Valley.  During the 24 hour period our phones were taken away from us, we were fed a basis meal of rice for dinner and a piece of bread at breakfast, and there was nothing like sports equipment, access to the playground or playing cards to keep ourselves occupied and we had to participate in a range of activities such as collecting our water, making stretchers to take people to hospital and work out the fair distribution of 8 pieces of Lindt chocolate.

We began our slum experience by building our slums in an approximately 2m by 1m space with wooden pallets on a few of the sides. We were given a large piece of plastic, a tarp, 4 pieces of string and 2 cardboard boxes to construct our homes for the evening. Georgia and I decided to pool our resources together in order to create a slum which would better protect us from the storm which was coming through.  As we built our slum I was very aware that I would only need to sleep in this for one night however for others it was reality for their whole lives.  I was also aware that as an educated young adult I probably had a better understanding of ways to construct my slum to better protect myself from the weather, for example how to hang my tarp so the rain would run away from my slum rather than into it or collecting on the roof collapsing it.

In order to be able to buy things we had to harvest crops (collect pop sticks) and make them into boomerangs.  It cost 30 boomerangs to buy an extra blanket.  Georgia and I really wanted to have an extra blanket for the night rather then just one sleeping bag  each.  We collected pop sticks and made boomerangs and when we when to trade them for a blanket we were outrages to find that the shop had closed and we would be unable to get anything until the morning.  I was so mad, we hadn't been warned that the shop would be closing, there hadn't been many opportunities to get enough crops and it took forever to make the boomerangs.  We tried begging, we tried offering more boomerangs and nothing seemed to work. I was told this was a situation was something which probably happened regularly in slums but it just seemed so unfair, we had worked so hard and a blanket wasn't going to help us in the morning we needed it for the night.  Georgia used her bartering skills and eventually we traded 50 boomerangs for one blanket.

  I woke up cold, I woke up hungry and I woke up really sore from sleeping on cardboard boxes and participating in many physical activities but I woke up with a new appreciation of the life I have.  Without the technology and things to entertain us, I was shown simplicity of life, the fun that could be had by throwing sticks into a bucket, using my imagination and creativity to write songs or make games up and the value of friendship.