I want to go back to Hong Kong,' my 11-year-old daughter complained as we wended our way through the broken streets of Mombasa, the vibrant, Swahili-speaking city on the coast of Kenya. Her mother, although born 800km west of here, has deep roots in this country, and I desperately wanted my daughter to like it. As I proposed lunch at a local restaurant, however, all she could say was: 'Dad, there are too many poor people here. Let's go.'
I was taken aback. Actually, the streets we were negotiating that day were peopled by ordinary folk. True, there was not a whiff of Bulgari or Dior in the air. Indeed, there was no evidence of Hong Kong designer culture at all. These were simply people going about their daily routines of coming and going, buying and selling, eating and drinking. And yet from the perspective of my daughter, born and raised in the bubble of Hong Kong expatriate privilege, we had encountered abject poverty - and she wanted out.
As I am a teacher by profession, my inclination was to correct her - to burst that expat bubble and awaken my child of privilege to the real world. Then, a few days later, I faced my own bubble-breaker.
Curiosity led me to the massive slum of Kibera in the capital city of Nairobi. I had been invited to visit the Little Rock Early Childhood Development Centre, which is located there. The school itself - skimpily funded by donations and crudely appointed by Hong Kong standards - was nevertheless an inspiration in what was otherwise a colossal sea of despair. The school provides 110 undernourished children with at least one meal a day, as well as an education geared to their arduous circumstances in Kibera. It is a 235-hectare tract of land that looks as if some perverse Atlas of a god had gathered up an immense collection of villages and thrown them down together as a malicious experiment in human survival.
There is no official count, but by common reckoning about 800,000 people live in the slum. Twenty-five per cent are HIV-positive, and most have little hope of ever holding a job. My school visit finished, I found myself travelling a road that offered a startling vantage point from which to contemplate the enormous urban catastrophe that I had just left behind. My thoughts returned to my daughter. I was glad I had not brought her along to witness this exercise in human squalor and misery. In fact, I now shared her impulse to flee. We had reached that point at different levels of experience, but it was the same impulse: at some point, we all run away. We run from the poor in Africa - and from the poor in Hong Kong.
We take great pride in being one of the richer cities in the world, while largely ignoring the ugly paradox that a quarter of our children live in poverty.