Category: poverty

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.

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 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.

There is no silver bullet.

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I was sitting with my friend as she related to me her financial difficulties over the past week. Not that they had started this week, but the entire family falling ill at the same time hadn’t helped things. She said she was going to have to take change out of the little tin box in her store to buy vegetables for dinner. Just then, the Big Ma’am and three Big Sirs from World Vision arrived, to check how things were going with the store. My friend straightened and parted the curtain that separated her front room from the shop in her back doorway to go and meet them. I stood with her teenage daughters behind the curtain, invisible from the outside but able to see through the lightweight fabric. What I saw was that my friend was in presentation mode, stiff and formal. “How are things going with the store?” the Big Sirs asked. “Great,” she said. “Before we had problems with food, but now things are OK.”

“Call the child,” they said. They meant the youngest daughter, the sponsored child. The sponsored child raced across the room from where she had been standing with us behind the curtain and one of her older sisters began frantically trying to comb down her hair, put in a clip, make her presentable. My friend called the child’s name again, sounding irritated. It wasn’t that the visitors were showing any signs of being demanding or impatient; I couldn’t see their faces from where I was standing, but they might have even been smiling. It was just that my friend knew where she stood with them: they were the patrons, and their expectations must be met.

My friend called her daughter again. The older sister gave up trying to put in the hair clip and the little girl came running to the backdoor to stand next to her mother. I wondered if this group of four recognizes the effect their presence has on people. One of the Sirs took out his camera to take a photo of the two of them standing there, in front of the shop that World Vision had donated the initial stock for. “To provide this family with a much-needed livelihood,” I’m sure the letter will say when the photo arrives at the sponsor’s house in Australia.

“Smile!” the man said. Click.

A moment later they were gone. My friend returned and sat down wearily. “We were just talking about this,” I said. “You’re hardly making any profit from this store. You still don’t have enough money for food or medicine. Why didn’t you tell them that?”

“Unse kyaa matlab hai? What do they care?” she said. Just then, a customer arrived. She pulled out the box where chewing tobacco was hidden away and handed a couple of packets to the man at her door. Understandably, World Vision has forbidden her from selling those addictive products in her store. Unfortunately, they’re just about the only thing in stock that she makes any money on. The other colored packages of cookies and candy and salty snacks have negligible profit margins. “The things they gave me don’t sell,” she said. “They should have just given me money and I would have bought things for the store myself.” Fair enough. But I find myself wondering whether even that modification would have made much difference. There are so many of these little doorway shops in our neighborhood that there’s hardly enough demand to warrant the supply. The fact that most people aren’t able to read or write and have no knowledge of accounting doesn’t increase the chances of entrepreneurial success, either.

I think again of the photo. That photo makes me angry, because that photo will be a lie. The family in the picture is still constantly worried about how to stay afloat financially, and they go into debt over basic healthcare and school fees. When I had a sponsored child on my fridge in college, I certainly assumed the smiling face looking back at me was out of the woods, so to speak, now that a big aid organization had intervened (that was a Compassion child, by the way, but a few years back in Thailand I also discovered sponsored children being withdrawn from the program and sent to the local temple to live as monks because their families still weren’t able to feed them). I understand the marketing of the whole thing, and how you raise more money by turning compassion into a canned feel-good experience that can be personalized to appeal to consumers. Just $30 a month, to change somebody’s life, supposedly. Heck, it’s a good deal.

But those kinds of bargains just don’t exist in the real world. And I would love to turn this little anecdote into a plug for building relationship with the poor instead of just throwing money at them—I do believe that money is the least of my neighbors’ problems, when you get right down to it—but this situation does not demonstrate any such neat and tidy moral. The fact is that I’ve known this family for about two years, and despite the fun times we’ve had together and the stories we’ve shared and the deep sense of connection we have with each other, all that relationship hasn’t had a measurable impact on their finances. At all. The stresses in their lives are essentially the same now as they were when we first met them. But for what it’s worth, they do tell me honestly about those problems. My friend has cried and laughed and even gotten angry and argued with me, which she would never do with a patron, a boss, a donor, or anyone she needed to impress or appease in order to keep the relationship in tact.

So perhaps I’m being too hard on the international aid groups, because I don’t have a cunning alternative to offer them. But as long as we’re going around not changing the world (because that is beyond us), we might as well get to know our neighbors and try to love them well. Change is slow and small, usually, and it doesn’t always come… but when it does, it nearly always comes through relationship.

Outsiders

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Around our little perch, rockets explode, shaking our thin brick walls. The smoke is so thick that you can’t see where any of the sounds are coming from, but the crackling and booms coming from the narrow alleyway below sound like they could be directly under our floor. All of this is punctuated with children’s shrieks. But this is not a war; it’s Diwali, and it’s being celebrated the same way it has been for years and years. It’s the same with the festival of Moharram. Deaths, births, weddings, fights, crises, hopes and disappointments come and go, but like a primordial clock ticking, the calendar always swings back around to this day, and everyone puts up the garlands of tinsel and beats the drums and cooks up enormous pots of food over wood fires in the alleyways right on cue. The celebration goes on, come what may.

There can be something comforting and inspiring about this: the discipline of setting aside times for celebration and following through with them knowing that the bad things in life are going to carry on anyway so the party should, too.

There can be something deeply discouraging things about this: the way that outsiders and interventions come and go and yet everything stays the same.

This week, there was an ill-thought-out “medical camp” in our slum that was sponsored by a well-intentioned organization with a hotline people can call to report children who are in distress (abused, abandoned, etc.)  The staff came to offer free medical care for a day and to distribute literature about their group’s services for vulnerable children. Of course, none of the people they were targeting could read the flyers they handed out, and their free medical camp only played into ideas of scarcity as people lined up frantically, regardless of whether or not they were sick at the time. Most of our neighbors have very little understanding about what makes them sick, or about how medicine works—but it does work, sometimes. And who knows when you’ll fall ill again, and whether or not you’ll be able to afford more medicine when it happens? Might as well get some free stuff now to have on hand. Many young children were even lined up to see the doctor all by themselves—which is absurd. How can a five–year-old accurately describe symptoms, understand a diagnosis, or remember which pills to take when and for how long? Medical camps like this one also discourage parents from taking their children to one of several private clinics or public hospitals nearby, and serve as a stop-gap method that delays the real change that is so badly needed to make the existing facilities work.

Nonetheless, one of the staff members’ only job was to run around photographing impoverished children receiving free medical care, and I’m sure that will be quite moving on the group’s website, or in their newsletter, or whatever. But because there’s no follow-up to these kinds of feel-good projects, Child Helpline won’t realize that their credibility in this community was completely destroyed within a few hours of their leaving. Someone had an allergic reaction to one of the medicines she had received from the doctor, and as I rushed to the ER with this panicked woman who was struggling to breathe, her sister was announcing to every person we passed on our way out to the road: “Throw all your medicine away! Those people gave us bad medicine—look what it’s doing to her!” And nearly everyone did—thousands of rupees of medicine, thrown away. And trust of this charitable organization was turned to suspicion and anger, just like that.

But the conundrum didn’t end there. Because when we arrived at the ER and showed them the medicine that she had taken right before beginning to feel mental confusion and her throat and airways tightening up, the interns who were staffing the place without supervision from other doctors promptly gave her an injection that caused a second reaction and sent the woman panicking and literally running out of the hospital, refusing to accept the oxygen mask they wanted to give her with medicine to open up her airways. The medical students assumed that she must be a mental patient and sent her home with a couple of antacids and some pills for anxiety.  I’m ashamed to say that I was inclined to agree with them about anxiety being the cause of her irrational behavior—until we were walking out of the hospital, when I got a second look at the box of medicine she had taken and it dawned on me that the drug they had injected her with was the same one that had caused her allergic reaction in the first place. Having disregarded what she was telling them, the staff at the ER had made the sloppy mistake of trying to “treat” her by giving her a second dose of the medicine she was allergic to.

At 3 a.m. the next morning, when one of our neighbors caught a young teenage boy in the act of breaking into his house to steal, a crowd of angry people quickly formed, mostly people whose homes had also been recently broken into, and we were woken up by the ruckus. There has been a string of such nighttime thefts in our community lately. People here own so little that they are hit hard by the theft of a cell phone, a wad of cash, or merchandise for a small store they run out of their home.  And our neighbors’ poverty ironically makes them especially vulnerable to thieves.  Even though rich people own more that’s worth stealing, they have the means to protect it with guards and gates and high, sturdy walls; the poor may or may not have a door on their shack, or the ladder or staircase going up to the roof may provide a way into their rooms from above. In our neighborhood, most people’s homes are packed so close together that many of the roofs are connected, and without access to bank accounts, a lot of people store their life’s savings in their homes.

So all of that pent up fear and anger about the multiple robberies of the past two weeks was directed against this boy. He was certainly a child in distress, but we feared that the hotline staff’s presence might just stir up more wrath from the community since the memory of the “bad medicine” they had handed out was still fresh on everyone’s minds.  And we knew from past experience that it was a coin toss whether police would escalate the violence or restore peace. Following our desperate attempts to intervene and to reason with the crowd, and a few other voices calling for restraint, another neighbor who felt conflicted about the direction things were headed eventually did call the cops. But the boy was pretty roughed up and humiliated by the time they arrived, and just as everyone had predicted, they did nothing to help. After hauling the kid off to the station, they demanded a bribe from the man whose house had been broken into, and when he refused they simply let the thief go without even filing a report of the incident.

It’s no wonder that people take the law into their own hands when there’s no higher authority to appeal to for help. And I shudder to think what kind of situation this poor child is going back into… probably back into the custody of adults who force him to risk his life to steal for them by climbing into houses at night, through the holes too small for them to fit through themselves. The police are as much to blame for this situation as the thieves themselves.

The next day, fears of theft continued but everyone went on with life as usual, and people prepared for the festival. They beat the drums. They hung up decorations. They held a community event in the square where the thief had been tied to a pole and interrogated the night before. It seems that the outsiders who interact with our community—the social workers, the loan sharks, the politicians, the police—either come in with open contempt for the people here, wearing contempt and indifference on their sleeve, or else arrive as “helpers” harboring a more subtle form of disdain that manifests as pity and condescension.  It’s as though none of these people speak the language of the locals, even though their attempts to communicate are made in Hindi. Meanwhile, the people who live here know that they can’t trust doctors, or charities, or government officials, or police—but for them this is nothing new. They’re used to that. And so they don’t set much stock by what any of those people say. The only people they can depend on are each other. They stick to what they know, and nothing ever changes.

Being outsiders ourselves, but wanting to carve out a completely novel role for ourselves, leaves us with a very thin place to stand. We have white faces and foreign passports and Hindi is not our first language, so we will never be able to dissolve into our neighbors’ society as completely as we would like. But it’s clear that whatever slow change we hope to catalyze, we won’t be able to do it as outsiders—or at least, we will have to be a very different kind of outsider than people have encountered before: the kind who are interested in listening and learning from people on the inside, and the kind who are willing to stick around long enough to become quasi-insiders ourselves.

Blessed are those who mourn

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Picture

An oil pastel reflection on Rachel’s lament (Matt. 2:13-18), inspired by recent events in our neighborhood.
          Last month there was a very sad day in our community when two children—a one-month old baby and a two-and-a-half year old boy—died suddenly of fever and diarrhea within hours of each other.

On this particular day, I sat under two white funeral tents, one after the other, staring at two tiny, motionless bodies with perfect, chubby baby faces that looked as though they might only be sleeping. I sat with the grieving mothers and siblings and aunts and grandmothers and felt their sadness seep into me. My husband went with the men twice to the graveyard, helping to carry the bodies which felt much too light, watching over them while the other men went into the mosque to pray namaz on the way to the cemetery, and helping to bury them as each of the men poured one or two handfuls of dirt into the grave. No one will ever know what these children actually died from. Were their mothers anemic during pregnancy? Maybe, but nearly three quarters of poor women in India are. Was it dengue, or some other mosquito-borne illness? It could be—others are dying of that this time of year. Maybe it was as banal as dehydration. But it’s unlikely that their births were ever officially registered, so their deaths won’t even contribute to statistics of child mortality, and there certainly won’t be any information on how to prevent future deaths, if these deaths were indeed preventable. Both mothers have lost children before, in what could only have been similarly baffling circumstances. I used to be confused by my neighbors’ apparent paranoia with taking their kids to the doctor for every little cold and cough, but now I understand—with every illness, no matter how minor, memories of other children remind parents that this could be the fever or the cold or the cough that suddenly ends their child’s life, for reasons that they don’t understand. I have spoken before about poverty of relationship, but poverty is also about lack of information, lack of control…

In this culture, a bed will be carried outside of the house into the alleyway, and the body of the person who has died will be laid on it. Then someone will set up a white tent over the area (for white, rather than black, is the color of death in Asia). The viewing goes on all day, and there is a custom of women sitting together, gathered around the body for hours and hours, not really saying anything to console them but just bearing witness to the grief of the person’s family, crying with them, and being together. Then the men carry the body to the graveyard for burial. When they come to wrap the body and take it away, a wail goes up from the crowd of women and the mourning reaches an inconsolable crescendo. This is the moment of final separation from faces never to be seen again. Sometimes people don’t even own photos of their children.

At first, I was uncomfortable with these rituals that center around crowds and noise when my culture treats grief with such distance and silence. This was not the reverent hush of a funeral home, or the solitary contemplation of a graveside service. Funerals here are crowded, and between all the stories being passed from one person to another about the circumstances surrounding the death, all of the ruckus of the babies on hips and children running around underfoot, and all the vocal lament of those closest to the deceased, funerals here are loud.  But I am coming to understand the value of this type of mourning process. My neighbors are well acquainted with grief, but that doesn’t dull the pain. Sitting together, each is able to enter into the sorrow of the other through the door of her own experiences with loss. No one tries to hide their sadness. Emotional demonstration is accepted and encouraged. There is power in that kind of solidarity where one is sure that all of the people around her truly understand what she is going through and that she is free to express it, because their pain resonates with hers.

I keep thinking of Jesus’ words: “Blessed are those who mourn” (“for they shall be comforted”), and I wonder: what did he mean? Perhaps those who mourn are also connected with God’s heart in an intimate way because God also mourns—She knows what it’s like to lose a son. God knows the grief of watching powerlessly every day as precious children die of preventable disease, violence, and poverty. Perhaps Jesus is also alluding to the coming of his Kingdom in which thing will be set right, people and families and societies will be restored, and life to the fullest will be the rule instead of the exception. But I think part of Jesus’ meaning must have been for right now. Maybe it’s that we can’t receive comfort until we’re willing to face our loss, share our pain with others, and actually go through a process of mourning—no stiff upper lip, no denial or repression. Mourning invites people to come and comfort. It invites community. If this is the case, then I am realizing how often I have missed out on the blessing that is meant to come in the midst of pain.

Blurring the Lines (guest post for D.L. Mayfield)

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D.L. is a kindred spirit who is living incarnationally among the poor in the American Midwest. I “met” her a few months ago through her writings online, and her blog continues to be a source of insight, inspiration, challenge, and commiseration for me as she wrestles through the tough questions that come with a messy life of following Jesus into the margins of society and the lives of people who do not share our cultural, religious, or economic background. I have come to appreciate her willingness to be honest and vulnerable about the journey, and I was honored when she asked me to contribute a guest post to her series on downward mobility.

Head over to D.L. Mayfield’s blog to read my post!

The generosity of the poor: friendship at the margins

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          We’ve now spent just over a week in our new community, but it feels like we have been there much longer.  For the first few days, we had a constant stream of children and adults visiting our room, giving us suggestions on how to set things up, watching to see how we would make food, and asking us how much we paid for each thing we brought home from the market (we usually paid too much, and they were sure to let us know!).  One day, to make sure we got a fair price, our landlady took us to the market to bargain for our wooden bed platform.  She drives a pretty hard bargain.  After we bought it, the bed was loaded on top of a cycle rickshaw, we sat on top of it with our landlady’s 10-year-old daughter, and the three of us rode down the main road all the way back to our community, like a slow-moving parade float in the midst of car, bus, and motorcycle traffic whizzing past us!  Slowly, we’re learning how much we should bargain things down in the market, how to knead dough for chapatti with the perfect ratio of water to flour, which spices to crush together for a meat dish.

We’re also getting to know the people who live around us, their families, and their stories.  Many of those stories involve loss, because sisters or daughters have died in childbirth, parents have died in the prime of life from disease, and family members have been injured in accidents or suffer from chronic health problems.  We are amazed by people’s resiliency as they deal with so much tragedy and death, and by the strength of the families here and their ability to care for the orphans, the elderly, and the otherwise vulnerable people among their relatives.  It’s not uncommon to see a single son supporting his mother and sisters, saving up his earnings to pay for their dowries one at a time, or a single mother taking a job as hired help in a rich family’s home to be able to keep sending her children to school.          Andy has spent a lot of time wandering around with the guys in our neighborhood, drinking chai and visiting their workplaces—most of which are recycling-collection stands or workshops where they make beautiful wooden furniture by hand.  I’ve spent a lot of time visiting women, many of whom are literally hidden away from the outside world because cultural tradition, a conservative mother-in-law, and/or fear of sexual harassment (a threat which has some basis in reality but which is also trumped up and used as a means of control) keep them from ever leaving the house.  We’ve both spent time visiting the families who live in crowded plastic and bamboo tents on the alley behind us, several feet lower and closer to the black river which surely expands during monsoon.  As we fill our water drum from the leaky hose in the morning, we watch women and children from that alleyway haul water back and forth by hand in small containers because there’s no morning hose service to their homes, and they’re too close to the sewage canal to dig a well.  And when we head over to our landlady’s back courtyard to use the toilet, we look over a low wall into that same alleyway where we know that there are no toilets at all.

There’s a custom in Indian culture that when guests are invited over for dinner, they eat first while the hosts watch.  The hosts actually don’t eat until after their guests leave.  When we first came to India, we found this an awkward and obnoxious arrangement, but the longer we’re here the more we come to appreciate it.  In our community, a dinner invitation from a poor family is a big gift to begin with.  Offering the guests food first—after you’ve already spent hours preparing it and are feeling hungry yourself—is sacrificial.  You’re making sure that the guests eat until they are full, even if it means that there may not be enough left for you and you may go hungry, and even though you’ve just spent a large percentage of your income on that meal.  In the past week and a half, we’ve already received this sacrificial gift many times over.  We still don’t feel comfortable being given food first, but it has challenged us to give to others more sacrificially than we are used to doing.

The more we learn, the more we realize there is to learn, and we feel honored to be welcomed into our neighbors’ world.  We feel humbled by how much more our neighbors have been able to offer us and to teach us in the past week and a half than we have been able to offer or to teach them.  Coming as outsiders with nothing, as yet, to contribute, we have no claim on their generosity and friendship, much less their patience with our own ignorance and unintended faux paux.  But if grace is undeserved favor, then our Muslim and Hindu neighbors are mediating our Father’s grace to us in abundance, and teaching us a lot about Him in the process.