Downtown Eastside Vancouver

Hold your bag. Keep listening. Don’t stare.

Eastside Vancouver.

The ‘forgotten community’.

That area you’re warned about as a tourist.

I’m in the thick of it. My eyes are twitching, roaming desperately avoiding eye contact. Words, facts, numbers, organisation names are being bundled at me. All I can think is... How do you describe this? Are there words? Is this a ghetto? Is that a politically correct term?

They’re living on the streets. They are living in their minds. They are society.

A quote: ‘They are someone’s son or daughter’

Drugs. Alcohol. Money. Survival.

Apparently we are at Oppenheimer Park now. Protests happen here. Buildings, New England style buildings. Beautifully painted murials. Blankets, bin bags; more blankets. Teeth missing. Skin draping over bones. Illness. No nutrition. Glazed eyes. Beards. Dirt.

People starved of life.

The English Literature student in me wants to call this uncanny. It is familiar and unfamiliar. These are people. This is community. But it is not like anything else I have seen before.

And this is Downtown Eastside, Vancouver. In Canada: the paradise of the world.

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