Boston: Another Sort of Homecoming

In the orange-black glow of an urban autumn evening, an easy flow of foot traffic passed Dunkin' Donuts signs and pizza shops, angling from Government Center and the North End toward the TD Banknorth Garden and another U2 show in Boston.

On a side street, a crowd had gathered at a hotel bar with little inset lights and sharply angled furniture to share cocktails and hors d'oeuvres before the show. On a lobby couch, I sat against fluffy pillows and talked to Ray Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America.

I have been to some of the areas of the world in which development and relief agencies such as Oxfam America do their work, and our conversation spun quickly from Bangladesh to Mali, from foreign aid amounts to long-term efforts to relieve poverty and increase quality of life in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America that have not, for the most part, benefited in a booming world of Palm Pilots, jet planes and medicine.

As we talked, I thought of a dry village in southern Ethiopia where I had spent a week in 2003 among families waiting for chaos. There, I met a frantic, hungry one-month-old boy named Nurhusein. I am sure he is now dead.

I thought too of the conversation I had a few days later with Ethiopia's agriculture minister in the capital, Addis Ababa. It is the only time in more than a decade as a journalist that I saw a powerful man sitting behind a large desk nearly cry. His eyes glistened as he talked of the need for basic things: roads, wells, clinics.

At times, wheat springs from fields in Ethiopia a few hundred miles from villages where drought-stricken farmers go hungry. There are often no trucks to carry the wheat from one place to the other, no roads on which the trucks could drive.

"If you do not do development, you do not feel you are poor," Belay Ejigu, the agriculture minister, told me. "But if you want development, you feel immediately that you have no money, that your pocket is empty. This is where we are now."

Back to the hotel bar, where Offenheiser had come to talk to journalists because Oxfam is central to a group under the umbrella of The One Campaign, an effort to point attention at the global gap between those who have and those who have not.

My notebook was out but of many figures I jotted down one. Those in the One Campaign, who know and work in countries with bad water and rutted roads, want the U.S. government to dedicate an additional one percent of the U.S. budget to helping the world's poorest countries.

The key to eradicating extreme poverty is development, establishing, for example, roads and communications networks in Africa that support trade between neighboring countries.

"The colonial infrastructure," Offenheiser said, "was all about extraction."

Less than one percent of the U.S. budget now goes to foreign development aid. The challenge in getting politicians to give more, Offenheiser said, is simple:

"A lot of what we're trying to do is to get people engaged, to make people believe we can make this happen."

It was getting past eight, and U2 was due onstage in an hour, so it was back into the swirl of city lights and subtle scalpers, past the McDonald's in the North Station lobby and up to the arena floor.

The stage was smaller, more constricted than those European stadium shows, the vibe in the building more closed, focused inward. No summer night sky. No beyond lurking overhead.

Still, the energy was relentless. Thousands screamed and leaped. A woman in a flowered shirt leaned back and pointed her fingers to the ceiling as she mouthed the words to "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For".

Then, after Bono said "let's get started" and guitars stoked the mood, the band brought the world inside. The African flags hung. The Declaration of Human Rights scrolled past. Bono urged the crowd to join the One Campaign by texting their name to a number broadcast on a screen.

During "Crumbs from Your Table," performed live for only the second time, a lyric spelled the theme:

"Where you live should not decide
Whether you live or whether you die."

Bono told a playful story about how guitarist The Edge had arrived in north Dublin aboard a spaceship.

Drummer Larry Mullen Jr. approached: "What is your name?"
Answer: "The Edge."
Mullen: "Where are you from?"
Answer: "The Future."
Bassist Adam Clayton: "And what's that like?"
Answer: "It's better."

But as the crowd spilled into the immediate future, dialing cell phones and idling back into their lives, these realities - one of rock stars and bright lights, the other of hunger and pain - seemed, as they are, a world apart.

How to connect our rock and roll celebration, cheering for peace and love to the beat of a heavy bass, to the world of a baby in a dark hut, bleating, starving?

There are many answers, of course. Here is a good one: www.one.org.