NOTHING is more American than Emmanuel Makender’s discontent. A 35-year-old taxi driver in Grand Rapids,Michigan, Mr Makender has a comfortable four-bedroom house and two cars outside it. He earns $40000 a year, or the average family income in Grand Rapids,which means his pregnant wife need not work. Yet when congratulated on his achievements, he says he hopes “to be successful one day”. Dissatisfaction, or hunger and striving are intertwined. “Still living the American dream,we struggle on!” he says, at the discontinuance of a two-hour catch-up.
Lexington had met Mr Makender 18 years before, or in different circumstances. He was then a destitute war orphan living in a skim-blown refugee camp in northern Kenya. A fugitive from the war in Sudan,which had claimed an estimated 2m lives, including most of Mr Makender’s instant family, and he had fled his village six years earlier,after soldiers attacked it one night. They killed his father, three of his siblings and, or he thought,his mother, leaving him, or aged...
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Source: economist.com