The Good Life

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A few nights ago I went out with a friend to celebrate our birthdays, which fall just a few days apart. She is turning 19 years old. She had never visited a mall, or ventured even as far as the popular shopping street that lies just five minutes’ auto rickshaw ride from her house. I had floated the idea of going out for ice cream, and when we asked her older brother for permission (in the absence of her father, her brother is charged with the responsibility of keeping his sister safe and out of shameful situations), he suggested we go to this nearby market. My friend was immediately excited, because the shopping area includes Big Bazaar. She had been seeing commercials about Big Bazaar on TV for months, and it had long been her dream to visit the place herself.Big Bazaar is essentially an Indian version of Wal-Mart: clothing, household utensils and appliances, linens, groceries, and just about everything else you can imagine, all under one roof and available in air-conditioned convenience. Big Bazaar is quite a novel shopping experience if you’re used to bargaining with individual street vendors at a traditional outdoor market, and this Western, streamlined version is marketed as the place where “New India” (read: young, sophisticated, and modern India) shops.

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I can appreciate the peace of mind that comes from fixed prices instead of a haggling process in which you aren’t guaranteed to end up with a fair price. I can also understand the preference for shopping in air-conditioned comfort instead of having to wander around outside. But there’s also something tragic about the idea of India’s traditional outdoor bazaars being replaced by a characterless alternative. Many of my neighbors take pride in their bartering skill; for them, haggling is an enjoyable game and an accomplishment to be proud of rather than a source of stress. At our local vegetable market, A. knows many vendors by name, and is friends with their family members. He sees them every day, and they often throw in a sprig of fresh cilantro or a handful of chili peppers for free, as a token of friendship. We were once invited to a wedding for one of the family members of our veggie supplier. At Big Bazaar, the suppliers are faceless and the check-out people are strangers. Everyone in the store is anonymous. But it’s not just the sentimental value of relationships or the communal feel of a local economy that’s at stake—it’s also local people’s livelihoods. Over half of India’s population is self-employed, and in my city that includes about 10,000 street vendors who sell snacks, clothes, chai cups, buckets, samosas, and everything else that’s available at outdoor markets. Besides those vendors, there are also thousands of small-scale entrepreneurs whose income depends on small shops, restaurants, tea stalls, beauty parlors, and print shops. If Big Bazaar really becomes New India’s main shopping destination, then that will mean thousands of “little people” going out of business in the wake of corporate consolidation… much like the effects of Wal-Mart on small towns in the U.S.

As we walked into the bottom floor of the tall building, my friend squeezed my hand tightly. “I’ve heard that they have those moving staircases here,” she said, “and there’s no way I’ll be able to walk on those!” I laughed. “You’ll have to,” I said, steering her towards the escalator, “because there’s no other staircase!” As we approached the bottom of the escalator, we noticed a middle-aged woman who was also preparing to brave the “moving stairs” for the first time. She stood nervously with her scarf over her head, tentatively stretching one leg out in front of her and pulling it back in a panic each time her foot actually made contact with the steps. “Come on, let’s go together,” I said, grabbing her arm. The two escalator rookies clung to each of my arms and hovered just behind me as I guided them forward onto the steps. Hesitantly, they made a dramatic leap onto the bottom stair and then wobbled precariously back and forth as it began to move, threatening to pull all three of us backward onto the ground. At this point we all burst into laughter: me at the hilarity of the situation; they at the relief of realizing they had survived and we were moving. It was only a few seconds, however, before they both realized that we were gliding inevitably toward an equally terrifying dismount. Anxious concentration gripped them and they in turn gripped my arms; with another awkward leap, they were safely on the terra firma of the second floor. Now we stood together in hysterics, along with the woman’s two younger relatives who appeared to be veterans of the moving staircase and had been awaiting her arrival at the top. Other shoppers cocked their heads in confusion as they passed, probably trying to guess the relationship between the foreigner and the apparent villagers.

As we walked around, my friend was in awe of the bright lights, the cold air emanating from the refrigerated section, the entire aisles filled with endless varieties of hair care products, soap, or laundry detergent. She marveled at the sheer volume of spices, vegetables, packaged snacks, and grains arranged in colorful displays. To her, the store was the picture of luxury, endless options, and prosperity. It was a sort of stepping-through-the-looking-glass experience of walking into the clean, shiny world of TV serials and cosmetic advertisements, but she was still living it vicariously; the jewelry, shampoo, or clothing that caught her eye was always shockingly expensive.

After our tour of Big Bazaar, we stepped into a couple of shops selling expensive wedding clothes so that my friend could look for Eid clothes, but I warned her that they would likely be very expensive. At the end of Ramazan, everyone who can afford it buys fancy new clothes to wear on Eid, similar to the tradition of Easter clothes that I grew up with. She seemed to enjoy holding up the beautiful dresses to herself in the mirror (again, just one step removed from actually wearing them). But after she had checked a couple of price tags I could also see that she was visibly uncomfortable with the attention of shop attendants since she knew herself to be somewhat of an imposter: there was nothing in the store that she could afford or that I would be willing to pay for.

We left the shops and wandered down the street admiring the carts of bangles, earrings, and deep-fried potato snacks. We passed several restaurants and a small table for a mehendi walla, with laminated photo examples of the intricate henna designs he would draw on women’s hands or feet, for a fee. We finally settled on Indian-style “Chinese” food at a small open-air restaurant for dinner, and over the meal I asked her what her favorite thing was that had happened between her last birthday and this one.

She looked at me with conviction. “Eshweety,” she said, in her endearingly stylized pronunciation of my English name, “This day is the best thing that has happened to me all year.”

“You’ve wanted to come here for a long time,” I said. “Is it the way you expected it to be, or is it different.?”

She fixed me with her intense gaze again. “It’s exactly as I imagined,” she said seriously. “It is wonderful.”

After dinner, we headed to an air-conditioned ice cream parlor for dessert. As we stepped through the doorway, a blast of cold air evaporated the sweat on our faces and necks. We sat down on a cushioned bench that ran the length of the back wall, painted with bright colors and studded with narrow windows into the attached restaurant behind. Our table faced the front counter where a rainbow of different ice cream flavors were on display under chilled glass panels. There was music from an old Hindi film playing. “It’s so peaceful in here,” my friend said in wonderment as she ran her eyes over the room. I slid a menu in front of us.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Whatever you want. I don’t know,” she said.

The menu was in English, but even my translated descriptions were difficult for her to conceptualize. She had never heard of an ice cream sundae. I ordered two small sundaes to share, and I have to say, they were beautiful. It had been a long time since I had seen an ice cream sundae, either.

My friend was beaming. “Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for bringing me here! This is so great!” she gushed. “I will never forget this!”

It was 9:30 pm when we paid and stepped back onto the street. “I can’t believe I’m still out right now!” she said. “And by ourselves! I’ve never been out this late in my whole life.”

I laughed. “It feels free, doesn’t it?”

“Exactly,” she replied.

On birthdays, I usually ask people what their plans or hopes are for the next year, but with my friend I didn’t want to take away from the joy of this simple moment by pondering too long on the big picture or bringing up a reminder that there is little for my friend to realistically hope for, much less to plan for. She had wanted to finish high school, but that is an unfulfilled dream, closed forever: she dropped out last year to help care for her mother after her health seriously deteriorated. After being forced to abandon her studies, she joined a six-month tailoring course nearby, but family circumstances had prevented her from completing that, either. Her family is currently trying to arrange her marriage to some boy from a village out in the middle of nowhere. My friend will likely be married off by this time next year.

But that night, my friend was just a teenage girl experiencing the thrill of shopping at a mall for the first time, and she was giddy with excitement. To her, this outing was synonymous with freedom and maturity and the good life. I was happily amused by her enthusiasm, and thoroughly enjoying her big smiles after so many months of heavy conversations about her constricted world in which nothing is under her control and nothing seems to turn out well.

And yet… I was aware of a sadness, too, under my momentary enjoyment; a premonition of the dead-end of discontent in which this would all end. I want my friend to have more control over her own life, and more opportunity for new and interesting experiences. But I don’t want her to equate happiness with access to all of the shiny, expensive products we saw in the stores, and to feel that she will never be happy or important or beautiful without them. That was the underlying contradiction throughout the whole night: ambivalence about exposing my friend to more of this world when I knew that it would reinforce the idea of a “modern,” Western, consumer lifestyle being the pinnacle of experience; when I knew that it would encourage her to emulate the culture of higher-ups in society whose whiter skin and stylish clothes seem to make them “superior.” I didn’t want her to see the mall as a paradisaical antithesis to the slum, because that’s what all the ads and the daytime TV are trying to say, and it isn’t true.

How do I explain that I grew up with malls and movies and ice cream, but that the things I hold most precious in life have only begun to develop in the years since all of those things started to lose their sheen for me? The truth is that all the accoutrements that money can buy can’t fill an empty life with meaning or love, and I knew that many of the well-dressed women who brushed shoulders with us in the aisles of Big Bazaar probably didn’t lead lives that were much more free or fulfilling than my friend’s.

Trust Issues

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I was grieved when I saw the news: four children and their parents, murdered in front of each other in their own home, not far from where I grew up. A fifth child, narrowly surviving, witness to the destruction of her entire family. I fought back tears as I made my morning coffee, feeling a rush of emotions, but surprise was not among them. The tragedy is disturbing, of course, but not shocking. If anything this kind of tragedy has become disturbingly and shockingly commonplace.

I know that for many of you this will be a hard word, but please hear me out. I live in a violent neighborhood. People often get kicked, punched, beaten with pieces of metal, knocked unconscious, and even cut with knives during domestic disputes, fights between neighbors, and the self-harm that sometimes results. In the approximately two years that A. and I have lived here, we’ve seen a lot of that violence firsthand, but the death toll from this violence over that same period of time is zero. I would like to say that I can’t imagine how high it would be if people in our neighborhood had access to guns, but the truth is that I can imagine. I imagine that if guns were involved in these interpersonal conflicts, then our neighborhood would more likely resemble the violent slums of Guatemala, or the American inner city where we attended church during university, where gun violence claimed the lives of people in the neighborhood virtually every week. I remember that we once took up a collection at the end of the morning service to pay for the funeral of a young teenager whose grandmother couldn’t afford to bury his body. Another Sunday, we prayed with a man whose younger brother was in the ICU after being hit in a drive-by shooting targeting their apartment complex the night before.

That neighborhood was a lot like the one where we live now: it was a vibrant, complex community which included many wonderful people and networks of relationships, but it was also a place where poverty, addiction, psychological trauma, personal dysfunction, and broken relationships often led to violence. But because the violence in the inner city was usually perpetrated with efficient, lethal weapons that could be used from a distance, rather than with hands or dull peeling knives at close range, it was frequently fatal. Both of these neighborhoods are violent, but the difference between them in terms of loss of life is hard to overstate.

I believe in wholistic approaches to problems, and I have no illusions about a simple change in government policy bringing about wholeness in society. But neither do I have any illusions about the relationship between the prevalence of guns in the United States and the prevalence of gun-related deaths in the United States. Well-reputed scientific studies from Oxford and elsewhere have demonstrated that rather than making a family safer, the presence of a gun in the home increases the risk of violent death in that home. That increased risk has also been proven to exist regardless of what type of gun you own, how many you keep in your house, or how you store them. Americans often keep guns in their homes for the express purpose of making themselves safer, but these guns are statistically used far more often in homicides, suicides, or unintentional shootings than in self-defense. Research also shows that across the country, states with the lowest rates of gun ownership and the strongest gun control legislation have the lowest rates of gun-related deaths in the country while states with the highest rates of gun ownership and the loosest gun control laws have the highest rates of gun-related deaths.

All of this evidence points us to the question: are guns actually making us safer? The evidence also points us to an answer: No.

As a society we need to take a good, hard look at how we have integrated violence into our culture. We accept it as normal and necessary when it comes to “domestic security” in the form of warfare, torture, and executive kill lists, or when it comes to “justice” in terms of the death penalty. We celebrate violence as heroic when it’s sanctioned by the state and committed against people whom we fear and with whom we have nothing in common. But when the violence is turned inward on ourselves—and it is the nature of violence to eventually destroy those who use it is as well as those against whom it is used—we mourn, we are shocked, and our reactionary fear leads us to fortify our defenses against further violence… with more violence.

As a human being, I understand the way that fear triggers irrational, self-protective instincts. But as a Christian, it saddens me that we as a society would rather take our chances in the mode of kill-or-be-killed instead of venturing down the path of enemy love that Jesus blazed for us. We could argue for a long time about which specific legislation or action plans or public policies are needed to make our country safer, and those conversations certainly have their place. But that is not the conversation that I want to have here. I am more interested in the heart of the issue, and the heart issue, as I see it, is our religious faith in violence.

Jesus says, “Do not fear those who kill the body…”

…but we trust more in our capacity for violence than we do in God for our protection.

Jesus says, “Seek first the Kingdom…”

…but we seek first our own physical safety, and the safety of our material possessions.

Jesus says, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…”

…but we wait for intruders with deadly weapons under our pillows.

Jesus says, “All who draw the sword will die by the sword…”

…but we are more willing to take that risk than the risk of following our Teacher.

I’m not questioning anyone’s legal right to own a gun. That right is most certainly laid out in the law. What I’m asking is, why is this right to own weapons so important to us? We have the legal right to bear arms, yes, but I believe we also have the freedom to choose to live beyond the condition of violence that results from putting so much trust in arms in the first place. How do we actually want to live?

And ultimately, in whom or what do we put our trust?

Source: New feed

Photos to fill the silence

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You may have noticed that it’s been quiet around here lately. Actually, “stillness” is the opposite of what’s been going on, but what can I write on the blog when life is so eventful and so private and nothing I write is fit to be posted in a short blast online? There are heartbreaking stories and triumphs that aren’t mine to tell, threads of my own story that I’m still trying to untangle. I don’t want to share the bad things, the angering things, the disappointing interactions with you, because you don’t know my neighbors and I’m afraid that through the narrow window of my writing you will come to see them in a distorted way, as in a fun house mirror. You will see the dramatic incident but not the richly textured people who make up the scene, and the complex layers that compose their lives. None of the people I know are heroes or villains or victims or perpetrators, but I don’t trust my ability to be able to construct a narrative that is nuanced enough to keep from casting them in those oversimplified roles, because perhaps I will only be able to relate a single moment in which someone played one role or another.My neighbors are funny and smart and brave and clueless and vulnerable and dangerous, just like all of us—because they are people. And I feel that I can’t capture them in the frame of my essays and stories without doing violence to them in a way, because the focus of my snapshots will necessarily emphasize some details while excluding others, and inevitably these editing and formatting decisions will be mine, and not the decisions of the people themselves. My writing is filtered through the lens of my emotions, experiences, and assumptions. What I am able to present to you is not so much a representation of my neighbors, but a representation of my experience of my neighbors—which is quite a different thing, and which changes constantly based on my own shifting vantage point and perspective.

After all this time, I am still a foreigner, and my work is that of an interpreter. I interpret dialogues from Hindi into English, but I also translate life here into something that will be understandable and somewhat relatable for Westerners in a Christian culture, with all the assumptions and habits and instincts that have been inculcated into us over centuries of particular historical experience. Arguably, there is always some violence involved in translation; some remaking of the subject in our own image.

I will continue to try. I feel that the task of connecting your world with theirs, and with mine, is important, however imperfectly it is accomplished. But I am achingly aware that I may be your only window into the Muslim world, or India, or the lives of the poor. I am afraid that particular stories or individuals may take on the flavor of stereotypes, or global representatives of the Whole instead of just the people and circumstances that they are. This dangerous possibility burdens me as a writer; as a neighbor and a friend. I am not a voice for the voiceless, because everyone has a voice—they just can’t type in English.

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For now, I’ll take time to let the dust of the past few weeks settle, take a break from translation, and just share some photos with you from the time that we spent recently in the mountains of Northern Bengal and Sikkim.

After our stay in Darjeeling, we headed north into the Indian state of Sikkim, a fascinating little peninsula of mountainous terrain sandwiched between Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet. Sikkim was an independent Buddhist kingdom until 1971 when it was annexed by India, and even today it’s quite distinct from the rest of the country in terms of food, language, culture, and religion–it’s also the only place in India where we’ve seen functioning traffic rules and even enforcement of parking regulations! Sikkim is home to various tribal people, Nepalis, and Tibetan refugees who fled over the mountains after the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950. While we were there, we had some great views of the surrounding mountains and got to visit several large Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, like the one on the left.

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Intricate wood carving and paintings around the entrance to a monastery’s temple.
Tibetan prayer wheels: each one is filled with scrolls of paper on which several short “mantras” or prayers are written. Buddhists spin the wheels to release the prayers to heaven. Prayer flags (left) are printed with these same mantras.
This is the view from our hotel room in Gangtok, the capital of the Indian state of Sikkim. On a good day, you can see the world’s third highest peak, along with several other snow-capped Himalayas, from this balcony. We had a good day, but our camera was malfunctioning at the time so we weren’t able to capture it!

PictureDramatic scenery in Northern Bengal on our way back to the railway station for the journey home.

Source: New feed

Economy is ecology is community

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This has been the hottest week so far this year in our city. Fortunately, we aren’t there—we’re in Darjeeling, one of India’s colonial-era hill stations perched on a steep slope in West Bengal, within sight of the snow-capped Himalayas. Our room has a view of the third largest peak in the world, if there aren’t clouds in the way. Unfortunately, since we arrived there have been clouds in the way. Or to be more precise, we’ve been inside a cloud much of the time: a thick, mysterious soup of white that smudges the hills as it rolls in, gently drains their color, and eventually obliterates them from view.Still, the vivid green of the nearby hillsides, the majestic trees lifting into the clouds, and the cool weather have been beautiful. Arriving in the temperate calm after sweating for more than 24 hours on a loud, crowded train across the burning, desolate plains right up to the foot of the hills felt like a fever finally breaking. We’re enjoying the simple pleasures of wandering down Darjeeling’s narrow, sloped alleyways in our sweaters(!), and searching among the tall, stacked buildings for cafes to enjoy baked goods, American breakfast, Tibetan dumplings, real coffee, and local Darjeeling tea.

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photo credit: google images. This is what we saw but we didn’t have our camera in hand!
The tea is what made Darjeeling famous. If you’ve ever had English breakfast tea, then you’ve likely tasted it; it’s exported around the world. Darjeeling was founded in the nineteenth century as a strategic outpost for the British, who created large tea estates on the surrounding hillsides. These plantations were extremely profitable—for the owners, that is. The local Nepali and tribal people who actually produce the tea, plucking it leaf by leaf in the fields, don’t see much of the money that consumers around the world pay for this luxury good. The British occupation is now a thing of the past, but the tea plantations continue, and most are still owned by wealthy foreigners or at least by outsiders to the region.

As we sip our steaming brews, we’ve been reading essays by Wendell Berry, mulling over our trip to a small village in Uttar Pradesh, our daily life in an urban slum, and now visiting this heartland of Indian tea production. The words of this 79-year-old Kentucky farmer have given us pause for reflection:

“Common sense tells us—and our experience shows us—that economy and ecology are ultimately the same, just as economy and community are ultimately the same; ultimately, people cannot expect to prosper by doing damage to the land and to human communities.” (p. 82, Citizenship Papers by Wendell Berry)

We visited a tea estate one morning, following a winding dirt path down through waves of green bushes spreading away into the morning mist, to the small factory building in the middle. The whole wood-paneled building smells like a tea chest, having soaked in years of fragrant tea leaves—four harvests per year, each one different in flavor and quality based on the unique conditions in which it grew. In fact, our tour guide told us, no two days of picked tea leaves will produce exactly the same tea; they have been plucked and dried and processed in different temperatures and humidity, and they have come from different sections of the tea garden, each with slightly different soil and elevation. What we realized as we toured the small factory, is that producing tea is not a man-made process. It is a collaborative effort between humans and nature in which even human expertise can only influence the natural growth and oxidation process that is already in motion. Producing high quality tea is an art form in which you can’t completely control the outcome, because your partners are the rain, the soil, the weather, and the enzymes in the leaves.

We learned that this particular estate, Happy Valley, has recently gone organic, adhering to “biodynamic” approaches to modern agriculture which use natural processes and materials in a scientific way to ensure that soil stays fertile, water is conserved, and yields are high. This seems like a positive long-term investment in this beautiful and profitable landscape, and in the livelihood of the people who depend on it. Economy is ecology is community.

We also learned that the estate produces “fair trade” tea, but were surprised to learn what that meant. The people who pick the tea are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the laborers who originally picked tea for the British when the estates were established. These hillsides are their ancestral homeland, and they have depended on this land for their survival for more than a hundred years, yet they do not own the land or the factory. They receive lower wages than the day laborers in our city who line up on the side of the road each day waiting to be hired for manual jobs like construction: 90-110 rupees ($1.50-$2 USD) compared with the 200-250 rupees ($3.50-$4.25 USD) that a day laborer would make. Our tour guide told us that they have the power to strike and stop production in order to force out a boss who breaks his promises and pays them less than previously agreed, but that when that owner sells out and leaves he is always replaced by another wealthy boss from outside who assumes ownership of the whole operation again. The current owner is a foreigner, and Happy Valley is only one of eleven tea estates owned by this man (there are only 84 tea estates in the Darjeeling area).

Most of the tea estates in the Darjeeling area are neither organic nor fair trade, but all of the tea is either exported or sold domestically at a lucrative price. The price of tea from this particular estate is made even higher by the fair trade label, but these profits are not reflected directly in the tea pickers’ wages. What the “fair trade” label does ensure is that out of those profits, a certain percentage is given back to the workers in the form of benefits like medical care, school fees for the workers’ children, and houses on the edge of the tea estate which they own outright, instead of renting. We haven’t had the chance to talk with the tea pickers directly, so we have no firsthand insight into how they feel about this arrangement—perhaps it works well. Undeniably, education, housing, and medical care are a good thing. But we couldn’t help wondering whether workers might prefer to have the option of cash in hand to spend their wages however they decide is best instead of having so much of it converted into benefits for them after tea is sold? And is it fair that the bulk of the profit from this famous, local product should go to a wealthy outsider who has no hand in the growing, harvesting, or production process instead of to the local people who live and work on the land?

We couldn’t help but wonder whether getting paid in welfare benefits rather than cash makes the workers more dependent on the tea estate. Could it be that people with cash in hand might use their increased range of options to opt for something other than a life of picking tea? Or that they might even opt to buy the land and the factory themselves, taking control of their own natural resources and economy? Maybe. Maybe not. We’re just outsiders passing through, so we don’t have enough pieces of the puzzle to say one way or the other.

Even with our limited insight, however, visiting this tea estate felt significant because gave us the rare opportunity to visit the place of origin of a product we usually consume without any sense of that product’s history; with complete ignorance of the positive and negative ways that people and places have been impacted by the process of bringing it into being. We, like most people in the world, are “living on the far side of a broken connection… fed, clothed, and sheltered from sources, in nature and in the work of other people, toward which [we] feel no gratitude and exercise no responsibility” (p. 48, Citizenship Papers). Visiting the estate reminded us that we are connected to those people and places, for better or worse, and that there are complex realities we don’t usually think about when we brew a pot of tea. The same is true for putting on a shirt, or buying a bag of chips, or eating a piece of fruit that has come to us from halfway around the world.

Wendell Berry points out that we often think about economic activity only in terms of “profitability and utility”, which means that we go about our work and our consumption in this global economy without asking the basic questions which are crucial to understanding what is really going on: “Is the worker diminished or in any way abused by this work? What is the effect of the work upon the place, its ecosystem, its watershed, its atmosphere, its community? What is the effect of the product upon its user, and upon the place whee it is used?” (p.38) The answers to these questions tell us more about what is really helpful or productive than a strictly financial analysis ever could.

As that wise old Kentuckian would say, you can’t ensure the health of an economy without taking care of the people and the land it depends on. Seeing behind the grocery store aisle to the tea garden has, in this case, reminded us of the land and people we depend on, and made us interested in learning more about this vast web of connections so that we can respect the people and places with which we are linked.

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A tea plucker at Happy Valley (photo credit: google images)

 

Back to the Land

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A baby water buffalo with full-grown ears!

 

This past week we had the privilege of visiting A.’s Indian colleague and his family in their village. This colleague is a very thoughtful community worker with a heart for the poor and a knack for building relationships and disarming people with his gentle demeanor. It’s not unusual for him to begin his workday in the wee hours of the morning helping his father to harvest a field of their crops before commuting into the city to meet up with A. for work, so our friend’s life is still very much rooted in the village and it was nice to see more of that side of his life. It was nice to get away from the noise and the crowds of the city and reconnect with nature again. We slept on the roof under the stars, enjoyed seeing lots of beautiful birds (and even a wild fox!), and explored the fields and dirt roads with our friend.

It was amazing to see how in tune the villagers are to nature, and how knowledgeable and creative they are about making use of the natural world. Our first morning there, he taught us how to harvest our toothbrushes and toothpaste directly from the tree: we broke off small twigs from a neem tree and used the frayed ends to scrub our teeth, just like the locals. We have seen neighbors doing this before, even in the city, but had never tried it ourselves. Surprisingly, this neem stick method really seemed to get the job done! But there’s a reason you’ve never seen neem-flavored toothpaste in stores—it’s incredibly bitter.

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Our ideal homestead.

 

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The ornately carved wooden doorway of our friend’s ancestral home. The house is over one hundred years old!

 

People were very laid-back and friendly. Our host addressed everyone we met as “Uncle” or “Grandma” or some other relative. Many of them are his blood relatives, but even the ones who aren’t have grown up alongside him or parented him nearly as much as they have their own children. When we visited his ancestral house, three of his uncles had tea with us and showed us around the inside courtyard. We were pleasantly surprised by how normally everyone treated us during our stay, because as foreigners we often attract a lot of attention. We eventually realized that most of the people we met didn’t know that we were foreigners!
These beautiful homes are made from mud, bamboo, and the dried branches of lentil bushes. They belong to families of so-called Dalits, or “Untouchables.” In the past, this part of the village probably would have been quite segregated from the rest of the community, and our host told us that even today the Dalits in his village remain landless and therefore earn their income by working in other people’s fields.

The injustice rooted in traditional customs around caste and gender makes up the shadow side of this otherwise peaceful, agrarian community. Our host says he knows of several “honor killings” that have been carried out in the village– murders of either young women or couples who have violated the sexual norms of the community or have chosen a relationship which their families disapproved of.

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A field of sunflowers being grown to sell.

 

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Wells and hand pumps like this one supply water to the village.

 

Our friend says that over the past 10-15 years, the climate of the area has been slowly changing. Right now, the fields are already unusually dry and he fears that monsoon may come late this year. Such fluctuations in weather can be disastrous for subsistence farmers like our friend’s family and neighbors who depend completely on the seasons and the land for their survival. Those who can no longer make ends meet on the farm will eventually end up living in slums in the city, so the problems of rural and urban India are deeply interconnected.
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The puri-making circle: these aunties are busily working away to make enough fried bread for the dozens of guests who are about to descend on the house!

 

The main events of our visit were related to the upcoming wedding of our friend’s younger brother: a puja, or worship ceremony, followed by the Tilak, another ritual (between the groom and the brother of the bride) during which the bride’s family brings gifts to the groom’s family, who then hosts them for a feast in which both extended families celebrate the impending marriage.
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The Brahmin priest, or Pandit, presides over the puja for the groom.

 

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The groom’s parents (foreground) and the pandit (center) make preparations before the Tilak.

 

The ceremonies were interesting to watch, but having the house crowded with more than two-hundred guests made the second day significantly less restful than the first! In the villages, there is only electricity for a few hours each day–much worse than the power cuts we get in the slum. In this case, those hours were approximately 9 p.m.-6 a.m., with a few sporadic moments throughout the day. Temperatures were well above 100 degrees fahrenheit, but body heat certainly pushed them even higher inside the house!

It was fascinating to experience a slice of rural Indian life. The village is really the heart of the city, since nearly everyone is a recent migrant from the countryside. Seeing the rhythms of family and work life in the village sheds light on our neighbors’ approach to life in the slum, and gives us a greater appreciation for their previous life experiences. However, meeting so many people and having no control over when we eat, sleep, or do anything else over an extended period of time can also be a stressful experience, so we were just as thankful to return to the familiarity of the city afterward!

We don’t trust the poor (and they don’t trust themselves): Further reflections on Freire

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I was happy to see the lively discussion in the comments section after my last blog about literacy, subversion, and Paulo Freire, but realized from several people’s responses that some of what I am trying to communicate has been misunderstood. Some people seemed to think that I am throwing out everything I have previously talked about on this blog (especially Jesus) in order to focus exclusively on education as the answer for all problems faced by humankind. I want to clarify that this is not the case.

I am not saying that learning to read is an end in itself, or the key to human liberation. What I am saying is that learning to read is a means of nurturing critical thought, which is the starting place for human liberation. Many of us in the West have had minimal, if any, contact with illiterate people. Now that I live in a community where the vast majority of people cannot read, I recognize how much I have taken for granted the basic problem-solving and critical thinking skills that my education cultivated in me. Being able to read and write was the beginning of being able to learn about my world, to encounter new ideas, and to develop my sense of self as I expressed and explored my own thoughts, experiences, and opinions. So much of my faith has been mediated to me through the written word. Nearly all of my ideas about the things in the world that I have not seen for myself—economies, food systems, histories of entire societies, foreign countries and the ways that other cultures have interacted with my own—have come from books. It was through the written word that I learned about my body, how to care for it, how to understand what was happening when I got sick or caught an infection, and how to prevent or treat those problems when they occurred. It was through the written word that I learned about nutrition, about child psychology, about democracy. It was through the written word that I became employable. It was largely through the written word that I learned about Jesus.

Now imagine for a moment that you are not able to read your own scriptures. You are not able to read a newspaper. You are not able to look up information on WebMD, or to even read the prescription that a doctor gives you. You are not able to open bank account, to enroll your child in school, or to even write down the address of a friend or an office you want to visit. You rely completely on the local mullah or the rumors going around your neighborhood or the folklore of your grandparents to mediate the world to you.

Imagine how small that world will be; how your ignorance will prevent you from encountering any new ideas, from questioning anything you are told, or from seeking to change any of the destructive or unjust circumstances you find yourself in. Without a means of acquiring any information for yourself, and without the critical thinking skills to investigate the world and to form your own opinions about it, how will you ever know that there is a different way to live than the way that you and all the people you know are living right now? How will you begin to hope for anything?

That is the narrow, constricted world of many of my neighbors. That is why I think it is important for them to learn how to read: not so that I can simply deposit my worldview into their minds like empty containers, but so that I can empower them to think for themselves and have a chance of discovering for themselves the possibility of wholeness in their lives. If they are empowered to think critically and to consider new ideas, then we can dialogue together, learn from each other, and be a community that fosters spiritual, intellectual, and emotional growth. Dialogue will be something we engage in together, imagining new possibilities and shaping one another as equals.

It will take time, and I don’t know where that path of dialogue in community will lead, because I will not be the one controlling it. But I know that the path from ignorance to knowledge, from worthlessness to dignity, from blindness to sight—that path is the path to freedom. And it is only from a place of freedom that human beings are able to love. I believe God wants humans to be free agents capable of choosing love, rather than mindless followers who are motivated by ignorance or fear.

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A few nights ago we attended a meeting centered around promoting literacy in India. An expert in the field was gave a lecture about the dismal failure of the education system to teach students how to read simple sentences or to recognize numbers 10-99 after several years of schooling, and then outlined the literacy curriculum she has designed to take Hindi-speaking children and adults from illiteracy to being able to read a newspaper in the space of approximately a month (A. and I have been trialing this curriculum in our slum with encouraging results). As soon as the lecture was over, a microphone was passed around the room and one dignified personage after another began pontificating about the reasons why the poor don’t want to learn, or aren’t learning. Each person was well-dressed and most of them were addressing the group in English, a conspicuous marker of education and status. Most of them were speaking authoritatively about the poor based on limited experience interacting with the people who worked in their homes as servants. We were sitting in an air-conditioned, wood-paneled room drinking chilled water from plastic bottles. Meanwhile, back in our slum (and perhaps the slums in which their servants live) the power was out and everyone was giving up on the idea of being able to sleep in the stuffy darkness with no air movement and temperatures still hovering above 90 degrees.

As is often the case with such meetings, well-intentioned wealthy people had congregated to applaud each others commitment to social causes and to take shots in the dark about to help the poor without consulting any actual poor people at all. Here we were debating the causes of illiteracy and the way forward, but there was not a single illiterate person in our midst, much less someone who could speak from experience about how they personally had managed to become literate in spite of poverty and the barriers it created. To me, this demonstrates a lack of trust in the poor; an assumption that they would have nothing of value to contribute to our discussion.

Of course, we were at this fancy reception, too, enjoying the air-conditioning and lavish food: wealthy foreigners among the wealthy. Yes, A. and I would go home to the sweaty power outage in the slum at the end of the night, and step over the kids from downstairs who fell asleep in front of our doorway trying to take advantage of any chance breeze that might sweep across the roof. We would breathe a sigh of relief in the unscripted familiarity of “home” after so much awkward social mixing. But the point is that we were invited to this elite gathering that our neighbors would have never been included in. We still move easily between the worlds of the downtrodden and the powerful because although we may have committed ourselves to the cause of the oppressed, we are not the oppressed. And like the elite philanthropists at the literacy meeting, I also struggle with a lack of trust of the poor—even though I have committed myself to my neighbors in many other ways. It would be bad form, bad development, to voice it, but sometimes we agree with our neighbors’ assessment of themselves: “You’re right—you may not be able to do this. It would be a lot easier if I just did it for you. Listen to my advice. Adopt my opinion. Listen to my idea. Become more like me.” We talk about empowerment, but deep down we’re afraid that our neighbors are just going to screw it all up. Their thinking is so narrow, their self-esteem is so low, their dreams are so small.

The poor carry with them the “deformities” of having been oppressed. Often their bodies have not fully developed because of malnutrition. Their minds have not fully developed because in addition to lacking food they have lacked opportunities for learning as well. Their sense of self has not fully developed because they have always been told that they are small, unimportant, and incapable. “Just let us do it for you, you can’t do anything to help yourself,” so many people have communicated to them when they’ve come in to “help.” “No need to think about creative solutions, we have the answer for you, because we are the ones who know,” others have insinuated when they come in with their ready-made programs, assuming complete ignorance and passivity on the part of the poor and never stopping to ask for input or participation. Because of all these factors working against them, poor people often do lack the confidence and the skills to help themselves, and they adopt the passive, dependent role assigned to them. Others’ lack of confidence in them inspires a lack of trust in themselves. The poor have been robbed of the very tools they would need to break free of this cycle: critical thinking to re-imagine themselves and their world, and to realization that their unjust situation “is not a closed world from which there is no exit,” but rather “a limiting situation which they can transform.” This can sometimes make our interactions with poor people extremely frustrating.

We who have enjoyed life’s advantages, on the other hand, are able to problem solve and plan ahead and think critically. We’re well-spoken and capable. But we carry with us the “deformities” of our background, too. One of these is our misconception that we are the ones who know… meaning that they are the ones who don’t know; they are lesser and can’t be entrusted with such an important and difficult task as transforming their lives! We need to be disabused of the idea of our superiority and independence so that we can become more fully human ourselves, by acknowledging our interdependence with others and allowing ourselves to be humbled and changed by our fellow human beings in community. If we want to acknowledge our neighbors’ full humanity and their innate human vocation alongside us as “co-creators” in the world, then we must be willing to work patiently alongside each other.

 

Source: New feed

Conscientização 

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n. Critical consciousness. Portuguese origin.
Recently, a friend of ours who was passing through introduced us to the writings of Paulo Freire. Freire is a Brazilian academic who is well-renowned for his alternative education methods, but he’s not your typical university professor—Freire’s adult literacy campaigns in Brazil landed him in jail for over two months and then political exile for several years after that. Since we just began teaching literacy to adults and children in our slum three weeks ago, we probably couldn’t have begun reading his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed at a more appropriate time. His theories concern a lot more than how to teach peasants how to read. They have to do with empowering the oppressed in society to retake their rightful place as full human beings—a task which involves no small amount of social upheaval. Freire says that the true purpose of education should be the process of making the oppressed conscious of their own identity as human beings, conscious of the unjust situation they are in, and conscious of their power to change it. He writes about education as a process of human liberation; a “subversive force” which helps individuals to reclaim their humanity after they have lost it by either dehumanizing others or by being objectified and controlled by others. The bottom line is the pursuit of wholeness for everybody, oppressed and oppressors alike.

In our slum, we see this need for wholeness, and we see the link between illiteracy and oppression. Not being able to fill out a form, to read a prescription, or even to recognize your own name makes you vulnerable to extortion and deceit. It makes it impossible for you to claim your rights (if you can figure out what they are in the first place). It means that you’ll live in unquestioning fear of the police, and bribe them to do what they’re already paid to do, or to refrain from doing what is illegal for them to do. It also means that you’ll have to pay thousands or rupees in “baksheesh” to doctors, nurses, and even cleaning people in order to get a “free” surgery at a government hospital, without ever raising your voice in protest, lest the powerful people get angry and refuse to treat you at all.

This same sense of powerlessness, engendered by lack of education, is a big reason why so many of the skinny, malnourished children we know work long hours at tedious manual jobs polishing furniture in factories owned by fat, wealthy owners who enjoy big profit margins from exporting the finished product. These owners call the expendable, underpaid laborers who create their wealth “dirty” and “cheap”, looking down on them for their ignorance and low station in society.

Meanwhile, the illiterate widows we know travel on foot from their bamboo and plastic shacks to the flashy apartments of the wealthy to wash dishes and clean floors for a few cents a day, knowing that they can’t afford to ask for a fair wage because so many other, more desperate women from the villages are willing to take their places at even lower pay. Their employers give them bonuses, food, or hand-me-down clothes at holidays and imagine themselves to be generous benefactors; the domestic helpers gratefully accept this false charity because they consider themselves helpless and unimportant, and they count themselves fortunate to have attached themselves to such important people who sometimes, on a whim, toss them a bone. In all of these situations, the rich consider themselves divinely ordained to privilege and power over others while the poor consider themselves powerless dependents. Everyone involved ends up with a distorted view of themselves, and no one’s humanity is left in tact.

Reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I love the connections between Freire’s concept of education as human liberation and Jesus’ teachings about the role of the oppressed in the Kingdom of God. The book sheds light on what Jesus the servant-King meant when he declared that it is the poor to whom the kingdom belongs: it belongs to the poor because they are the only ones capable of ushering it in through the love and radical forgiveness of their oppressors. Freire writes that “the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity… become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.” The special mission of the oppressed throughout history is to “liberate themselves and their oppressors as well” because those “who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.” The power that springs from weakness is love, and it is exemplified by Jesus in his reliance on forgiveness rather than vengeance to overcome the world.

So the point of marginalized people learning to read isn’t just to open up job opportunities, although literacy does do that. The point is to change the way that the poor perceive themselves. Education should be a process through which “each man wins back his right to say his own word, to name the world.” It should be a process through which the poor begin to think critically about reality instead of just accepting whatever interpretation of reality has been handed on to them from someone else; a growing realization that they, too, are “creators of culture, and that all their work can be creative. ‘I work, and working I transform the world.’” The point of teaching literacy is to help the oppressed recognize the transformative power within themselves.

*All quotes are taken from Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire, 1970

The Neglected Center

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This week I read a very insightful article* about cultivating a “spirituality of contentment” through living a simple lifestyle that draws us into greater connection with God, our neighbors, the Creation, and ourselves. The author of this article, Dee Dee Risher, writes as a seasoned veteran of this approach to life, and as someone who is well-acquainted with its particular gifts and struggles. She is aware that “simple living” has the ironic tendency of becoming a very complicated existence which obsesses over material concerns: how many things do we own? How much money do we spend? How many square feet do we live in? According to Risher, all of these material concerns as a tell-tale sign that the external changes in our lives have outpaced the inner transformation of our heart, so that we are ascetically denying ourselves of things without moving toward some alternative. Simplicity, she says, is not about going without. Its about building something new: moving positively toward a fuller life that would have been impossible without the clutter in our lives being cleared away. If we try to throw off the yoke of mainstream culture without developing an alternative dream, then we will never be content because we will always be longing for the very things we have decided to set aside. For most of us middle- and upper-class North Americans, the narrative that has been programmed into us is upward mobility, accumulation of possessions, comforts, and status. It involves making a place for ourselves in the world and then sitting back to enjoy the fruits of our labors, letting others compete with us and fare poorly or well as they may. This is essentially the American Dream. If we want to walk a different path, then we need a different dream to guide us, because merely building our identity or our life in opposition to something will only turn us into a hollow inverse of what we wish to change. We won’t have created anything new.

//

I resonated with this problem of externals outpacing internals. Perhaps that’s exactly what’s happened to me, living in the slum. Up til now, my spiritual growth has always been driven by external experiences. As I have chosen to act on what I felt was right, what I read in the gospels of Jesus’ life, my experiences of reaching out to others to serve them and to get to know them has always led me into deeper understanding and experience with God. External actions and circumstances have seemed to drive internal transformation, and perhaps that’s as it must be, in the beginning. Until we leave the realm of what we already know, how can we encounter anything new, or challenging, or larger than ourselves?

But I think this necessary and appropriate pattern may have led me, somewhere along the way, to mistake the means for the end. Serving the poor is the ultimate goal, I decided, living as simply as possible in the worst possible place and doing as much as possible to help. Alas, I am discovering that the opposite is true: compassion and service and simplicity should be the means of communing with God, of recognizing God in myself and the people around me (especially the suffering poor), and of joyfully living in Love’s embrace.

How did Jesus live? I asked myself. He hung out with outcasts, poor people, blind people, sick people, enemy soldiers, their yellow-bellied tax collector cronies, and heretical half-breeds like the Samaritans. So that’s what I’ll do, I thought. Find the poor and the outcasts, befriend them, tell them that God loves them, and invite them into the community of the Kingdom in which there is always a place for them at the table.

What I failed to realize until I was smack-dab in the middle of the needy crowds, trying to offer hope to the down-and-out people spit out by the system, was that Jesus didn’t just up and begin his mission with the sheer force of willpower. It takes more than principles or warm fuzzies to sustain any kind of long-term commitment to the messy occupation of loving other people, particularly in a demanding and depressing context like a slum. I neglected to pay attention to the forty days of fasting and prayer in the desert which immediately preceded Jesus’ public life, the lonely hours of prayer and solitude which sustained it, and the 30 years of spiritual preparation that preceded it. Jesus was only able to do what he did because of his strength constantly being renewed by God inside Him. He was only able to maintain hope among misery because of his intense awareness of God’s loving presence; to experience joy in the midst of exhaustion and suffering because he was already well-experienced in cultivating an awareness of God’s presence in all circumstances; to weather frequent rejection and confrontation, and eventually total betrayal, because by the time these things happened to him, he had such an unshakeable sense of his identity as the Beloved of God that he was entirely free from the opinions of others—free enough to serve others without any need of gratitude, to love even those who repaid his compassion with hatred.

This incredible love and courage was only possible for Jesus because he had already experienced this unconditional love in the depths of his own being. It had defined him, and it had become the root of everything he did.

//

As for me, all the labor of love has been exhausting, and my feverish attempts to pour myself out has revealed an emptiness in myself that I was never aware of before. Now its impossible to ignore the aching expanse within myself that has yet to be filled with the unconditional love of God. I am yet to claim my identity as the Beloved, and am desperately trying to build an identity for myself out of all the good things I am doing. See how much I suffer! See how much I am willing to sacrifice! My soul yells. I will earn your love yet. And yet…

God is not waiting for a display of faithful obedience, for exploits of courage and self-denial in order to embrace me. He embraces me with my empty hands and tattered clothes, as the beggar that I am. As the child who could ever do anything to make her Parent love her more or less. As the Prodigal son, returned home after all his fruitless attempts at making a life worth living for himself apart from the love of his Father.

I am the poor, I am the sick, I am the rejected. I wait in grief and hope for the mercy of God to reveal my true identity to me, for God to rock me to sleep in strong arms like a newborn baby, safe and wanted and loved. My neighbors often bear their scars and their struggles openly on their faces and in the rough edges of their lives, but mine are hidden inside.

I am the poor and they are me. God is in us, and we are in Him. Perhaps the whole purpose of life is for us to realize, together, the depth of our poverty, and to help one another to accept the Love that will satisfy it.

*Cultivating A Spirituality of Contentment by Dee Dee Risher

Source: New feed

The wind is blowing

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The hot season has begun–which means mangos, afternoon naps, kulfi (a kind of traditional Indian ice cream), and of course, sweltering heat. But we were surprised to learn a few days ago that the hot season in this part of India also involves occasional dust storms. I was home alone when the last one began: the relief of temporary cloud cover and the welcome, unexpected, light rain quickly turned more sinister as the wind picked up speed, thrashing trees around and beginning to lift old tires and plastic tarps off of our neighbors’ roofs. I stood in our doorway and watched as the whole landscape suddenly went red, as though we were on Mars. I shut the door against the sideways stream of rain and grit, but a few minutes later the mud-spitting wind actually lifted off a piece of our roof and carried it away! As soon as I saw daylight expanding overhead, I ran downstairs to take cover in our landlord’s room, thinking that the whole roof might be peeling back. When my husband and my presence of mind returned a couple of minutes later, we went back upstairs to salvage books, guitar, and clothes from getting soaked. I was offended after the storm when we started the work of trying to clean up the mess and a neighbor who came up to survey the damage started laughing–offended, that is, until I looked next door and realized that her roof had been split open, too! Everyone just took the storm in stride, and within a few hours most people had already climbed onto the roofs of their homes and repaired the damage. A couple of the bamboo and plastic shacks in the community would have to be rebuild from the ground up, but even this seemed to be casually accepted. The missing piece of our roof, it turned out, had flown into our neighbors’ courtyard behind us and cracked one of the boards of their wooden bed, and a couple of people had been struck by falling bricks from other houses, but fortunately no one had been killed. People here have learned to live with what they can’t control; they have a no-nonsense way of recovering from almost anything and getting on with life. When the temperature began its rapid ascent, we responded first by buying a matka, a traditional clay water pot which is just porous enough to allow water to slowly leak through and evaporate, keeping the water inside cool. For the first few days, we were dipping refreshingly cold water out of the matka and joking to our neighbors that it was a like a cheap fridge that didn’t even need electricity. Then the weather got a bit hotter and the water in the matka went warm. This week, temperatures have climbed high enough that by midday, our ceiling fan is churning down hot wind from our thin roof, and even with the windows and door open, we can sit in the shade and sweat through our clothes in a matter of minutes. Since temperatures reached 107 degrees fahrenheit a few days ago, we decided to opt for a “desert cooler” and spent yesterday afternoon rearranging our room to accommodate the new appliance: a big, aluminum box with a fan inside and a water pump to wet down panels of dried grass from which water will evaporate and be sucked into the blades to pump out a stream of cool air in whichever direction the cooler is facing. A.’s self-taught electrician skills came in handy for rigging up a way to wire the cooler into our existing electrical board and run wires across the ceiling so that the stream of slightly-damp, cool air blows directly across our bed at night. That gives me hope that I’ll be able to do more over the next couple of months than just laying around in a sweaty daze.

In spite of the mounting heat, there have been a couple of exciting things going on around here lately. The first sign of hope is that our widowed neighbor, whose husband died suddenly a couple of months back, has finally found a job! We had been helping her in a lengthy job search which had been fruitless and discouraging up until now, especially since she and her three young daughters had been struggling to eat even once a day throughout those long weeks. We were encouraged to see other poor neighbors generously sharing food with them even though there was very little to go around, but we also struggled to know our own role in helping without either creating unhealthy dependence or discouraging the rest of the community from being involved. The entire process was a cruel reminder: the poverty of the poor is often what keeps them poor; cyclical, exponential disadvantages piling on top of one another. It was hard to get our neighbor a job because she looked so poor. She looked so poor because she didn’t have a job. Wealthy prospective employers would look at her and say, “She looks too weak to do the work.” But she does harder work than cleaning floors when she’s wandering around the city on foot looking for work! I wanted to say. Or they would say, “You need to dress nicely if you’re going to work here. We like cleanliness.” But the reason that even her best suit is old and has holes in it is because she has been unemployed for two months, and she was living hand-to-mouth before that!

You aren’t very employable when you’re illiterate, slightly disabled, stand less than five-feet tall, and look obviously, desperately poor. But you also aren’t going to get any less malnourished and desperate-looking until you land a job. When I would talk and pray with her about the situation, she would tell me despairingly, “If only I had a job, then I wouldn’t be distressed anymore! Everything would be fine! God could give me a job. God just isn’t listening.”

Finally, one of the myriad connections we had tried to make for her finally came through, and she is now employed at the home of a compassionate middle-class woman who lives just a short distance away from our community and who has even bought a month’s supply of food to last the family until the first pay day.

The second recent development is so new and fragile that I hesitate to even mention it yet. We’ve met a woman who began a couple of weeks ago to create an interactive, and student-led curriculum for teaching literacy to adults and children who are fluent in Hindi but who can’t read–either due to their having never been afforded the opportunity to go to school, or due to their having been subjected to the experience of spending a few years in an Indian government school where teachers were absent more often than students, or where the teachers’ presence facilitated rote memorization and useless examinations without any learning whatsoever. I don’t have time to fully explain the blatant inadequacies of the Indian education system, and the corruption that prevents so many kids from being able to access what exists on paper as their basic right. But against that backdrop, this literacy curriculum is shockingly simple: it teaches the Hindi script phonetically rather than having students begin by memorize the names of each letter of the alphabet, it relies on simple pictures to connect letters with sounds, and it helps learners to immediately begin piecing sounds into words and words into sentences, so that instant gratification gives them confidence and propels them to continue learning. It’s also student-led, which means you barely need a teacher at all. A. and I, along with a couple of other friends, are helping out with the pilot project by trying the curriculum with some of our neighbors, and it’s been exciting to see the enthusiasm of kids and adults alike as they begin timidly and then experience unexpected success in starting to achieve something that has seemed unattainable for them for so long.

The woman behind this program is passionate and ambitious about ridding India of illiteracy, and has plans of using the curriculum on a large-scale. It remains to be seen how all of this will pan out, but for now we’re excited by the possibility of sitting down with even a few individuals in our community to guide them through the process, and then give them the chance to pass on their new-found skill to their kids, friends, relatives, and neighbors in the slum.

Easter

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Picture

“The Incredulity of Saint Thomas” by Caravaggio

 

In my little corner of the world, I see a lot of suffering and death. I spend a lot more time contemplating the crucifixion and that silent Saturday when Jesus remained in the tomb than I ever used to in the West. It’s easier to believe in victory and new life when most of the people around you are doing well, and most of the stories you know turn out OK. It’s harder to keep faith in resurrection when most of the people around you aren’t doing OK; when they’re doing horrible things to each other and having horrible things done to them. Sometimes you lose track of the plot line when bad things happen one after another with no resolution and no catharsis, just banal disappointments that drip out like a leaky faucet.These days I often find myself walking through thin places between hope and despair, and the question is unresolved in my mind as to whether or not anything we do is worth it; whether all will be made well in the end. But there is room for all of that in faith—there has to be. Without that kind of desperation, what is the meaning of hope?

These last few days as I have contemplated the story of Jesus—his tragic death, his closest friends betraying and abandoning him, his anguished voice wondering aloud from the cross whether God is still with him in the midst of so much pain—something new has come into focus for me for the first time:

The resurrection was a surprise.

Everyone, everyone had given up on Jesus. His closest friends and followers whom he had literally spent years teaching and preparing for this moment. He had told them so many times that he would suffer and die, but that wouldn’t be the end, and they couldn’t grasp it. When he was tortured and killed by the state and the religious institution they were still fumbling around in the dark for what the kingdom meant and how it was possible that their fearless leader could have failed to accomplish his mission. He was dead and gone, and they thought it was over. The women mourned him and prepared spices to pay their last respects; the men returned to their fishing nets, disillusioned.

I think it was only their total despair which catalyzed such unbelievable joy when these disillusioned followers discovered Jesus alive, and it was this tangible experience of moving through death and loss to new life that made their faith so strong from that point onward. If they had confidently expected his triumphant return all along, then perhaps they wouldn’t have had a real sense of being delivered from any real danger or pain. Real suffering brings questions to the surface, and even to the lips of Jesus: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

So Jesus didn’t hold his friends’ doubt against them. Peter, poor Peter who had denied his best friend and teacher three times to save his own skin: Jesus cooks him breakfast on the beach, reinstates him, and entrusts him with the future of his movement (“On this rock I will build my church…”). There is resurrection in Peter’s own heart as Jesus forgives him and Peter learns to trust himself again. Later this former turncoat will be faithful to the point of death on a cross himself.

I often feel overwhelmed by the current state of the world, and I wonder how the kingdom can ever come. I find it hard to imagine history somehow rolling on from the present into heaven on earth. But I read this story and I realize that there is a place in the Easter narrative for the grief and confusion I so often feel. For Peter and the others, there was as little continuity between their experience of absolute loss on Friday and absolute joy on Sunday as there is between my current experience of the impoverished, suffering world as it is and the world as it will be when it is restored.

I am not lost. I am seeing Saturday. But Sunday morning will come, when I least expect it.

And it does come, even now—in those little signs of hope, tiny as mustard seeds, that spring up through the ground of despair. We see resurrection in our relationships when we offer forgiveness after conflict seems to have killed off affection and friendship, or when we creatively imagine new possibilities out of apparent failures. We catch a glimpse of the kingdom when we share a joyful meal with people of different languages, cultures, and religions, choosing to build community instead of walls. There is resurrection in my own heart when old wounds are bandaged and they heal. There is hope when we sow and sow and sow, and then one seed (maybe one in a hundred) bursts into life, we know not how.

I wrote last year about hope being a candle in the dark, never quite filling the room but never ceasing to burn either. Sometimes hope still feels like a lonely candle, but other times I get the sense that what I’m seeing is not just a small flame in the darkness, but rather slivers of a huge light behind everything that’s merely been painted over with black. Perhaps as we work to uncover more and more, we discover that the darkness, convincing as it may be, is what is surface-level and temporary, while the light is what is real and permanent and strong.

May we have the courage to suffer with Christ in the people around us.

May we have the faith to live in hope of new life,

the eyes to see it coming,

and the joy of helping to bring it into being.

May we practice resurrection in our lives.