“You must have been terrified,” Norah said.
“Yes, terrified. And confused. I wondered who had replaced my happy wife with this unhappy person. This unrecognizable, suicidal person. It made no sense. I asked her what had gotten into her. She said she was watching television before work that day and saw a story about the worst slums in the world. They were in Kenya, South Africa, Mexico, Pakistan, India, Egypt, the Philippines. The slums were the size of big cities. But without clean drinking water or enough food. Families were living in cardboard shacks or tents between piles of garbage—the piles of garbage had decomposing corpses in them. Everyday thousands of slumdwellers died of malnutrition or disease. The people she was helping in Toronto weren’t the people who needed her help. They c
