June 2006 Update

Are you prepared to really read about India?

“Globalization is very fast, it is everywhere.” Sitting in a room with a Catholic Sister who is from a Tribal area of India, Sister Pratiti told me in detail about how Tribal Women are lured from their native villages to the big cities with offers of high paying jobs, only to be locked, beaten, raped, abused, and enslaved when they reach cities like Delhi, the capital of the largest democracy in the world. The next day I met with the Director of the ILO (International Labor Organization) in India and learned about the dangers of the “puffed rice” industry – something I had previously made fun of because it seemed less ominous than the depressing image of children working in brick kilns in Bihar – until I learned how children were burned alive in hot vats of oil, tar and burning tires, in small kitchens that make a popular Indian snack food. The next day began with me reading about a new study that was done in a state nearby to Delhi that found that the price of a cow is $750 – 3 times the going rate of the $250 price tag to buy a female slave. The week ended with a news report of 456 kids freed from factories in Mumbai who had been working non-stop for months, as slaves, bonded-labor, children with stolen lives. Depressing news, followed by devastating discoveries, ending with a silver lining to the India that Thomas Friedman does not write about.

Are you really prepared for the contradictions of our lives?

At night we regularly go to embassy parties, I don’t want to glamorize or exaggerate, often it is work related, such as the rocking Independence Day celebration for Azerbijan and the going away party a friend in the British High Commission. We drive around the city, which is 120 degrees Fahrenheit these days, in our AC car from our AC office to our AC house. All backed up by generators, which is good since the power goes out for hours at a time for 95% of the 14 million people who live in Delhi. The city is facing a water shortage, but our water is delivered in a truck with a US Embassy license plate. We pass by homeless street kids, many of whom we know by their names and they appreciate the cookies and water, which barely makes a dent in the lives they live.

How wide is your lens?

How does Delhi’s Disaster coexist with India Shining? What is the true picture of this country of 1.2 billion people? Is getting better, good enough? What does this matter to me? When you picture the world, do you picture, the whole world? Can you? Have you stopped reading yet? About a year in India has given me a much deeper understand of what the word poverty means, not unlike my time in Bosnia taught me what war really means. Abject poverty is an absolutely hopelessness. It does not kill one’s spirit (homeless kids laugh and play), or one’s faith (even the poorest pray and donate to temples), or always one’s life (it is hard to believe how people still live), but it eliminates one’s hope. Hopelessness is worse than powerlessness, or hunger, or loneliness, because if you have hope then you will still believe these things are coming your way. But practically speaking, the poorest of the poor in this world have no hope and no reason for hope. They cannot see how anything will ever get better.

What Does Human Rights Mean?

To me, fighting for human rights, is the struggle to restore humanity to those who have had it taken from them. Not only to guarantee the basic rights of freedom, food, shelter, but to restore hope (and respect) to those who probably have never had it. The bold faced lie that the media, the government, our subconscious, keeps telling us is that there is nothing we can do about it. We’re completely sheltered from reality not intentionally or maliciously, just practically. Even living next to poverty in this city, one remains protected, separated, windows up, harden your shell, say nice things, do as little as you can. The fact is we have power to change it all. The human capacity to destroy, as great as it is, does not compare to the human power to create – however our creativity gets less practice, while our destructions derives from our fears (not all unfounded), insecurity, and lack of direction.

I have not lost the activism of my innocence, nor the belief than individuals can shape the world. Indeed halfway through my voyage through India has opened my eyes to things that I thought I would never see, and screwed my courage to the sticking point to pursue a life a meaning. Although the struggle remains to determine how best to walk down that path.

I hope you are doing well. Please send me your updates and news from home. I’d love to hear what’s new with you.

Thanks for indulging the wanderings of my mind. Despite whatever tone comes across in this email, Courtney and I are doing quite well in India and wouldn’t trade this experience for anything.