November 12 (What are the Students going to do? Petty crime and Sugar Daddies)
As Latif was packing up and leaving, we were talking about what was going to happen. He was going to go back to his father’s house for the next few weeks to wait out the strike. He is probably one of the lucky ones though because he had a place nearby to go too. He said this: “We only got the first quarter of our loans and all the students are broke.” I knew that money was tight although I did not realize that there the second disbursement had yet to happen. He said that he would be fine because his parents had money and he would be taken care of, but most of the students did not have anywhere to go. There are no temporary jobs to be had in the city and accommodation is expensive. So what do the students do to live? Many of the men just go hungry. They wear their ties a little tighter to draw attention away from their faces. Some get into petty crime and drug dealing to survive. There are just very few other options. To go home is out of the question for a lot of them because there is not enough money to buy a bus ticket to get home. Even if they managed to get home, the university could open within a few days and then the students would have to come back to resume their studies and they would have to buy another bus ticket with dwindling funds. What about the women? Latif mentioned that the women have it ‘easier’ than the men because many of the women get sugar daddies to take care of them. I was not surprised that this happens; I know that it does already happen as a way for some woman to support their education during the semester, but I was still subdued. I know of a lot of people who support themselves through school in the States as strippers or work in topless bars because the income is high, but just thinking of what the high rates of prostitution must be during this time for many of the female students is almost incomprehensible. I know that this is wrong on some western moral and ethical concept, and I know that I should feel outraged, or at least angered about the choice that the women who were just kicked out off school are given, but I just cannot feel that. The enormity of the problem just causes me to sit back and reflect on my own education and what ‘sacrifices’ I have to make for it. I have never risked my education for a strike, nor have I ever gone hungry. I have never had to prostitute myself out for a lack of funds either. I just do not know if I could ever understand the large sacrifices that the students put up with here; and I do not think that many of the foreign students even comprehend what the closure of the school means for many of the students in the short term and I do not know how to express what Latif and I have talked about to other people. I just do not know.
