India is a paradox. She is vibrant and beautiful: diverse cultures, languages, and religions find colorful expression in her streets, which are always crowded; always full of life. But the rainbow of saris, spices, and fruits is not the whole story. The lively drumbeats of Hindi music blaring from autorickshaws and temples and the cacophony of air horns and motorcycle traffic are only part of it. The smell of incense and curry is not as common as the smell of decaying trash and open sewage. In the midst of all this buzz of activity there are signs of death as well as signs of life.
This week we visited a very bright, tropical city—which is another way of saying that it is very hot and humid. We visited a slum where people had built bamboo huts for themselves on the side of the road, next to a murky black canal that could serve as a toilet. We visited a slum where the original bamboo huts had been replaced with a giant concrete building which was darker and more crowded than the original huts, which still provided no toilets, and which took away the possibility of the residents raising goats or other animals for food as they had done before. We visited a big slum community that was built around a garbage dump, where the residents told us that there is significant flooding for three months out of the year, and where we saw for ourselves that the public toilet (meant to serve hundreds of people) was so filthy that it had become totally unusable. A fire there had recently destroyed more than one hundred homes, so more than a hundred families are living in tents after losing whatever meager possessions they have ever owned. In still another community, we saw children whose skin was covered with rashes and some of whom had strange skin infections, presumably due to lack of clean water and generally unhygienic conditions. One boy stood out to us in particular—he couldn’t have been more than twelve years old, but he was unmistakably ill. His eyes were yellowish and sunken. One baby stood out to us in particular. She was 14 months old, and very, very skinny. Babies aren’t supposed to look like that. Her mother’s face looked tired and resigned as she fed and held her baby, and as I watched them I thought, What must that feel like? To know that your child is sick, or wasting away, and that you have no power to do anything about it? I was chilled by the idea that many of the people we were seeing and talking with may not be in this world much longer.
Later that day at the train station, the point was driven home. As we stood outside the train station we were shocked by the sudden realization that for the past several minutes we had been standing together and chatting just a few feet away from two dead bodies lying on top of makeshift bamboo stretchers. Human-shaped lumps under white sheets with rigid feet sticking out at the bottom. Were they people who had been hit by trains? we wondered. No, they were probably beggars who had eventually died inside the train station from old age, or hunger, or parasites, or some other disease. People who had been neglected their entire lives, and who were being neglected still as they lay there in the solemnity of death while the rest of us casually carried on with normal life around them, talking, laughing, failing even to notice their presence.
The idea of those unknown people dying alone and then having their bodies collected by a stranger and left outside was quite disturbing to us. It is a good reminder of why He came into the world and of why we have come to this part of the world. But we have a long way to go in following His example.
“The one thing that Jesus was determined to destroy was suffering: the sufferings of the poor and the oppressed, the sufferings of the sick… But the only way to destroy suffering is to give up all worldly values and suffer the consequences. Only the willingness to suffer can conquer suffering in the world. Compassion destroys suffering by suffering with and on behalf of those who suffer. A sympathy with the poor that is unwilling to share their sufferings would be a useless emotion. One cannot share the blessings of the poor unless one is willing to share their sufferings.”
— Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity
This week we visited a very bright, tropical city—which is another way of saying that it is very hot and humid. We visited a slum where people had built bamboo huts for themselves on the side of the road, next to a murky black canal that could serve as a toilet. We visited a slum where the original bamboo huts had been replaced with a giant concrete building which was darker and more crowded than the original huts, which still provided no toilets, and which took away the possibility of the residents raising goats or other animals for food as they had done before. We visited a big slum community that was built around a garbage dump, where the residents told us that there is significant flooding for three months out of the year, and where we saw for ourselves that the public toilet (meant to serve hundreds of people) was so filthy that it had become totally unusable. A fire there had recently destroyed more than one hundred homes, so more than a hundred families are living in tents after losing whatever meager possessions they have ever owned. In still another community, we saw children whose skin was covered with rashes and some of whom had strange skin infections, presumably due to lack of clean water and generally unhygienic conditions. One boy stood out to us in particular—he couldn’t have been more than twelve years old, but he was unmistakably ill. His eyes were yellowish and sunken. One baby stood out to us in particular. She was 14 months old, and very, very skinny. Babies aren’t supposed to look like that. Her mother’s face looked tired and resigned as she fed and held her baby, and as I watched them I thought, What must that feel like? To know that your child is sick, or wasting away, and that you have no power to do anything about it? I was chilled by the idea that many of the people we were seeing and talking with may not be in this world much longer.
Later that day at the train station, the point was driven home. As we stood outside the train station we were shocked by the sudden realization that for the past several minutes we had been standing together and chatting just a few feet away from two dead bodies lying on top of makeshift bamboo stretchers. Human-shaped lumps under white sheets with rigid feet sticking out at the bottom. Were they people who had been hit by trains? we wondered. No, they were probably beggars who had eventually died inside the train station from old age, or hunger, or parasites, or some other disease. People who had been neglected their entire lives, and who were being neglected still as they lay there in the solemnity of death while the rest of us casually carried on with normal life around them, talking, laughing, failing even to notice their presence.
The idea of those unknown people dying alone and then having their bodies collected by a stranger and left outside was quite disturbing to us. It is a good reminder of why He came into the world and of why we have come to this part of the world. But we have a long way to go in following His example.
“The one thing that Jesus was determined to destroy was suffering: the sufferings of the poor and the oppressed, the sufferings of the sick… But the only way to destroy suffering is to give up all worldly values and suffer the consequences. Only the willingness to suffer can conquer suffering in the world. Compassion destroys suffering by suffering with and on behalf of those who suffer. A sympathy with the poor that is unwilling to share their sufferings would be a useless emotion. One cannot share the blessings of the poor unless one is willing to share their sufferings.”
— Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity