Tag: bad development

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.