About a month has passed again, and I have yet to blog. I think the craziness that is always around me is starting to become a normal reality and things aren't really seeming out of the ordinary anymore, thus I can't really think of anything to blog about. The horns, the heat, the dirtiness, the smells are just apart of every day life. To say that I am completely comfortable with my surroundings all the time would pretty much be a joke, but it is becoming much easier to live here. Just the other night, my partner and I were having dinner with a sweet Indian lady and even she was acknowledging how hard it is to live in India. So, for her to say that as a national means it's been a bit of a stretch for me to come here as an 'international'.
Something that I have been dealing with since I've gotten here is the enormous amount of poverty. Even if people are able to put food on the table and have a roof over their head, the lifestyle of so many seems to be very harsh, meager and demanding. I don't mean to put down their lifestyle, I'm am just trying to find words for how I am seeing things. I keep on thinking, "WHY was I born into an American middle class family where I could go to school and have food on the table without thinking about where it came from?? Why me?" I was skyping with my sister the other day, talking about this, and I said something like, "... yeah, world poverty-- it's like a huge problem..." I know that sounds so dumb, but it's just me trying to wrap my mind around it, which I have not been able to do.
I was reading a book about the Maoist warfare that is going on here, and it attributed the causes of the movement mostly to poverty, oppression and corrupt government. It gave me some figures to help me grasp the situation more clearly. India has about 1.2 billion people, a mere 250 million of which comprise the middle class. That leaves a pretty staggering rural population, a third of whom survive on less than 12 rupees a day! Even more, 10% live on less than 9 rupees a day. (For all you Americans, 12 rups = 25 cents and 9 rups = 19 cents. That's less than 100$ a year.) The UN Development Program says about half of the kids here are malnourished and about 1/5 of them go hungry, and 3/4 of all Indians don't have access to safe drinking water. If I'm out and about in the city, I don't think a day has passed where women or children have not come up to me asking for money or food. Some choose to beg, some probably do it because they have no other options. Regardless of the reasons, no one should have to beg for food for a living.
So, this is what I live among day in and day out. Do I have a solution? An answer? Nope. I just want to share with you a bit of the tension that has been playing out in my mind these days. I even hesitate to post this because these thoughts feel so undeveloped. But I do know that as a part of my work here, I want to do something that makes a difference. I heard someone once say, "You can't do everything, but you can do something." And I really believe that. I would ask you to consider how you can contribute. What can you do to make a difference? Because you can do something.
I hope to develop more thoughts on this later, but for now I'll try to end on a more positive note. I will say that when I've observed kids in the slums or on the streets, for the most part, there are always smiles on their faces. Kids will be kids. They play in the dirt, sand or trash around them and some how seem to be content with life. Maybe it's just because they don't know about what could be. Nonetheless, Jesus once talked about a rich man who couldn't enter the Kingdom of Heaven because of all the things he had.
Here's a few pics I've taken during my time here.
