my conclusion that was also edited (but not as much)

We could have been anywhere. But were at our home stay in Rabat, Morocco sitting in the comfy patio room with our host family of seven and my American companion was showing the three fascinated brothers of the house his Canon PowerShot SD400 digital camera with 5 megapixels and a 3x digital zoom. The brothers, for their part, were asking all the right questions before all four boys turned back to their heated game of FIFA Soccer 2004 on the family’s Playstation 2. The rest of us were sipping Coca Cola with an Arabic label because we had been told not to drink the water, speaking in bits of English, Spanish, French, and Moroccan Arabic to get our points across the language barrier.

Day three in Africa, a country we had long since found did not have much in the way of Western toilets, toilet paper, showers, or forks. Not that these comforts are the only symbols of civilization; Sevilla doesn’t have much in the way of toilet paper or warm water either. But what many of the people I met in Rabat did have was technology — internet, e-mail, a cell phone, and at least a basic knowledge of English — all things quite foreign to even my host señora in her first-world country of Spain.

The Canon PowerShot saw admiration during its three-day stay in Morocco, but it also saw many decrepit dwellings, skinny children, and poverty. Western consumer products like technology, as well as Coca Cola and good old American fast food, seem to have preceded real assistance in this and many other third-world countries. Because though cameras, video games, computers, and even McDonalds are nice comforts of modernity, they don’t help a country or its citizens sustain themselves. Indeed, the outsourcing and cheap labor now popular among many Western manufacturers further accentuates the divisions between rich countries and poor; these workers often make less in substandard conditions than a comparable worker would make anywhere else.
The thousands of Senegali and Western Saharan immigrants who have arrived on the shores of the Canary Islands or perished in the ocean getting there in the past few months didn’t risk their lives for technology. Granted, technology is part of life in most first-world countries, but first these immigrants seek the jobs, money, and basic comforts for themselves and their families that are not so easily obtained or available in their home countries. Sirifo Kouyate Sakiliba, an immigrant from Senegal that I had the pleasure of interviewing for más o menos 6, admits that he has bought a car in his twelve years in Spain. But more importantly, he provides for his family here in Spain and sends money back to his family in Senegal so his brothers can attend school.

Many of the Moroccans I spoke with didn’t dream about leaving their home country except to travel, a dream impossible for most holding a Moroccan passport. Many others, though, save up to pay the exorbitant prices to get a ticket across the straight to Spain or position themselves around the barbed-wire and high fences separating Ceuta, a colony of Spain, from the rest of Morocco, in hopes of making it over. A few immigrants, like those featured in this magazine, make it across the sea or over the fences, but Spain only has so many jobs to give them.

Those of us lucky enough to hold passports from first-world countries have the luxury to move freely around the world, and the goods that our companies produce follow. As seen from the hundreds still dying in the seas each day trying to immigrate to a better life, the undernourished, underpaid people of the world still need more than fast food and technology. As holders of golden passports, we all have a responsibility to help; for the staff of más o menos 6, listening, learning, and observing were the first steps. The stories of the immigrants we have talked to here in Spain, those we talked to in Morocco, and of course the images captured by the Canon PowerShot were crucial to a better understanding. A little bit of understanding can go a long way.