I’m almost glad I have the long layover in Frankfurt on the
way back from New Delhi and Mumbai; I need the time for re-entry.
Most of the people I went there to see have money, or at
least their parents do. They pay twenty
to thirty thousand dollars a year for their kids to go to junior and senior
high school. They are international
business people and diplomats or other workers for the U.S. Embassy for the
most part. But you cannot visit India,
particularly Mumbai, without being impacted
by the sheer numbers of people who have nothing. They get almost no government help; they pay
as they go for their health care, which means most of them don’t get health care. If you happen to contract a disease your immune
system can’t cure, hope you have a good friend somewhere with a few bucks,
because otherwise, too bad. The traffic
is otherworldly. Very few traffic
signals, and most of those are just suggestions. I think I saw one “Walk/Don’t Walk signal and
it seemed like a dare.
And yet the traffic, both vehicle (car, taxi, rickshaw,
bicycle) and pedestrian, moves. Horns and blinking headlights in Mumbai are language, and it’s a language that
continues non-stop, day and night. One
driver told me he tried to drive the way he knew in Washington D.C. and “up
comes the finger.” The finger, or
whatever signal they might use in its stead, never comes up in Mumbai traffic.
And it moves, and the people seem to respect each other moving through
their day.
If I give a homeless person in the United States five bucks
to ease his or her day a little, I walk away feeling like I did a little something to ease pain at least
for a few minutes. If I give any amount to a beggar in Mumbai I am
almost trampled. You carry food: a bunch
of bananas, or grapes. And you feel like
you’ve made no dent. Mothers carrying
babies knock on your car windows, touching their mouths with two fingers and a
thumb, indicating hunger. Your driver
will tell you that the head bandage around the baby’s head with the large red
spot on it was on a different baby yesterday; many of these people are
“professionals.” Pretty low standard for
a “profession.”
Discussions for solutions to hunger and disease in third
world countries are always complex, answers hard to agree on. I get it that there are no simple answers,
but I have to say it makes me embarrassed to come from a culture where a
significant portion of its political activists – voters – believe that
culture’s national dream is
accumulation. Shameless, infinite
accumulation. Our economy crashes and
the ultra-rich get ultra-richer. If we
don’t find a way to attach the welfare of the wealthy to the welfare of the
poor, we may not only see our citizens taking to the streets, but find ourselves
with no moral compass whatsoever. “He
Who Dies With The Most Toys, Wins” might be a funny bumper sticker, but think
about having it attached to your celestial suitcase when you arrive at the
gates of whatever heaven you believe in.
In Mumbai I was allowed the privilege of volunteering a few
hours at an orphanage for kids, probably between the ages of two and ten, whose
mothers were lost to the sex trade, many dead, others having contracted HIV
and/or full blown AIDS. My Indian Sarah
Byrnes was there, maybe six years old, horribly scarred on the left side of her
face, eye socket holding a worthless part of an eye. I glimpsed her scurrying past, from only the
good side and she was so beautiful it stung my heart. Eager kids, wrapped around my ankle, petting
my knee as I read David Shannon’s David
Gets In Trouble, excitedly yelling out answers regarding David’s “bad
choices.” One little ten year old
couldn’t get his hand up fast enough to answer questions, not in that annoying
way of gaining attention, but in that intellectually curious way that said he
knew the value stepping forward with your knowledge. When asked later what he wants to be when he
grows up he said, “I want to be a ‘sir’.”
He wants to be a man who garners respect for who he is and what he
does. I think there is a very good
chance he will become a sir.
They live on the mercy of volunteers. They’re the lucky ones; stumbled into the sights
of someone who gave a shit. Volunteers
from the school for rich kids volunteer their time because you can’t live there
without developing a sense of awe of humanity – all humanity – that I fear
Americans are losing, or have lost.
The Superintendent of the American
International School of Mumbai told me how he’d been threatened and then fired
from his first teaching job in the states on the heels of telling his social
studies class that an Iraqi mother who loses her child hurts as much as an
American mother who loses hers. Hard to
blame him for taking his considerable
talents elsewhere.
I can hear the usual suspects
telling me the poor will always be with us, or that those who pick themselves
up by the bootstraps prevail, or that welfare creates a lazy culture. Now would not be a good time for them to say
that to me.