There’s slum-thing rotten in Buenos Aires

Wandering just a few yards from your flash hotel reveals the real poverty gap in Argentina – and reminds us we have work to do back home, too.

IT seems a bit trivial to write about jetlag when – as Bob Marley said – there’s so much trouble in world... so please bear with me.

This week I’ve been in Buenos Aires where there’s a 16-hour time difference with New Zealand. Even after seven days here, my body clock is running on the rhythm of Aotearoa and I’m all over the place, which makes work a bit challenging.

I have been getting up 4am, hitting the wall at 3pm, having naps at 6pm which then turn into threehour sleeps, then I can’t sleep the rest of the night. Then the whole cycle begins again the next day and I end up feeling like a really healthy zombie.

No doubt, it’s a first-world problem. You only get jetlag if you’re in the lucky position of being able to leave home and travel far and wide. I heard one time that if you can’t sleep you should just get up. Consequently for the first time in my life, I’ve been taking pre-dawn walks.

They’ve been thoughtful experiences. There’s a view of a city you can get in those darkest hours before the sun rises, that offers a unique glimpse into a place.

The greater Buenos Aires area has a population of 15 million, with nearly three million of them congregating in the dense centre where there are more than 13,000 people per square km.

In parts the city looks like it has seen better days but it’s a grand old capital of a country that through the 19th century grew to be the seventh richest country in the world, until Wall Street crashed in the late 1920s.

Subsequent military governments that seized power by coup, played havoc with the economy. In the early 1980s it suffered hyper-inflation before a crippling recession in the early 2000s from which it is only now slowly emerging.

Out of the national population of 43 million, it’s estimated that 32.9 per cent live in poverty.

And we know that only because of trusted private data published in March this year by the Catholic University of Argentina. In 2013 under the previous government and President Cristina Fernandez, officials stopped publishing information about poverty – a decision explained at the time by then minister Axel Kicillof as beingt taken because the figures were ‘‘stigmatising’’.

Buenos Aires is one those big cities where you can have sky-scraping monuments to wealth co-existing right alongside people scraping to get by.

I only had to leave my flash hotel and walk barely a block before I saw people sleeping rough on dirty dusty sidewalks, covered only in a sleeping bag. I discdovered some luckier individuals with small sturdy shelters when I nearly stumbled into a slum when I got lost one morning. It was on the other side of the train tracks, right next to the hotel.

New Zealand is only 30 years younger than Argentina and considerably smaller country, and, yes, we’ve had own upheavals... but probably nothing compared to what’s befallen Argentina.

As a country we’re still so blessed compared to most parts of the world, but, in recent times, stories of people struggling to get by have become way more common.

At the end of this month, the country will have its 40th Prime Minister. I hope that whoever that is, they make a serious commitment to tackling poverty.

Otherwise, people sleeping on the streets will become also become a permanent part of our cityscapes too.

New Zealand is so blessed, but, in recent times, stories of people struggling to get by have become way more common.