Slum
Slum – The ecosystem of the future or Blame it on the witchcraft

A baby was born! One more! That baby means that there’s one more individual who joined the too many people living in cities. Mind you, cities are the most populated places on earth. Unfortunately, cities cannot support everybody who leaves the countryside in search for a better life. That is why the poor have to handle it by themselves and build cities on their own. Their houses look like country huts but they are made of urban materials, plastic, cloth, and board. The poor are of no use nowadays. They are marginalised, thrown into the slums so that they won’t disturb the good urban people. In the next thirty years the number of inhabitants in slums will reach 2 billions. Mother Nature doesn’t like it. It is far from sure that such concentration of poverty will be biologically acceptable. More and more mutant children are being born. Soon, the inhabitants of slums could genetically depart from the ‘Homo Sapiens’ species. Slums have no infrastructure, canalisation, or drinking water. They are built on locations of former dumps, cemeteries, and marshes. We can easily imagine how contagious diseases spread. The structure of slum population is changing so rapidly that any administrative control – that could decrease the disaster – is impossible. In short, slums have a very bad feng shui.
In Kinshasa (Congo) the blame for this situation was put on children sorcerers. They were also accused for all the diseases. These children are threatened with death penalty. They must escape. They are organized in gangs. They try to survive in the streets of the slums, sometimes by killing, not for money but for food. In the parallel universe where they live, all parts of human body are extremely useful. Blood is red wine, meat is food, hair a bed, urine drinking water, spine an antenna.
The children however will have to hide only until the authorities decide to make the city more beautiful, like in Harare (Zimbabwe), where in 2005 around 750.000 people have lost their homes destroyed by the bulldozers of the Operation Murambasvina (Away with trash). In Manila they were even more cunning and they saved the gasolline. Simple method. For 'hot extinction' you need a cat or a rat. You cover it with petrol, light it up and let it go between the slum board houses. What happens is quite obvious. Firemen do not come, and their excuse is that nobody has a telephone to call them.

(Alberto Salza, Slum, La Repubblica delle Donne, Anno 12, N. 558 del 21 luglio 2007, pp. 26-36, photo Cecilia Garroni Parisi - Bambini di strada a Kinshasa)