postcolonial angst

There's a native family that lives on the ground floor of my building. It's hard to tell exactly how many of them live in the one bedroom apartment as there seems to be a constant stream coming and going through the broken living room window. Yesterday, as I was putting the girl into the car, I counted five adults and seven children getting out of a purple minivan with an Ed Hardy steering wheel cover. The youngest, who couldn't have been more than three was wearing only a diaper, no shoes. I noted this mass exodus from the van with mild amusement. Sure it's not safe, but it's not really the end of the world, and I'm educated. I've read Frans Fanon. I have a lot of postcolonial guilt that I don't know where to put, so when I'm presented with situations like this I try to blame myself, not them.
Later that evening, Tom and I were getting ready to go out, putting the car seat in the car. Our building's parking lot is at the back by the dumpster, and the aforementioned family's window backs onto the parking lot.  There were three little boys belonging to the family playing on some discarded (and probably bedbug ridden) mattresses by the dumpster. They were four or five years old, none of them were wearing shoes, their faces were streaked with dirt and snot and they kept finding these huge rocks to hurl at each other. Eventually, one of them went flying off the mattress and crashed on the pavement and burst into hysterical tears. After what seemed like an eternity, some adult emerged through the broken window and picked him up, but not before Tom had had the chance to lean over to Leila and say, "you're not allowed to play with those boys." 

I couldn't say that I disagreed. Almost all of my wanted to pick them up and throw them into a hot bath and hug them, but at the same time, I don't advocate taking children away from their families. Their culture. The only thing I've really learned about babies in my three months of being a mother is that kids need a lot of love, an infinite, seemingly insatiable amount of love, and from what I could see, those kids weren't getting it. As we were pulling out of the parking lot I was reminded of the line from Ezra Pound's "The Garden" where he talks about, "the filthy, study, unkillable infants of the very poor. / They shall inherit the earth."