India has a large and growing middle-class, many of whom have many of the same lifestyle and consumer amenities that would be familiar to many Americans: a comfortable apartment (and sometimes a detached house), often a car (and sometimes a hired driver), sufficient and tasty food (and often someone to cook it--servants are a more common middle-class perk than in the U.S.), relatively engaging work, a college education or more, and enough resources to travel not only within India but out of the country as well (perhaps to visit relatives in Britain, America, or elsewhere).
On the other hand, a large portion of India's people still live in rural villages. As in most poorer countries, the gap between village and urban lifestyles is is often far greater than you'd find in richer countries (the U.S., Europe). About half of India's children are malnourished, and many show stunted growth from a lack of nutrition during the critical first several years of life. People often don't have running water or indoor toilets, or water that's safe to drink, and these are health issues rather than "only" a matter of convenience. People may be able to provide for their needs directly (such as by growing food if they're farming), needing less cash, and I think one might be able to get by more satisfactorily in the village than in the city if they were truly poor (where one sees the poor sleeping overnight on the streets on a pile of blankets, or seeking food at charities, or begging). But being village poor is not easy either. (And take all this with a grain of salt--our stays were short in each place, and these are my impressions.)
As noted in an earlier posting, many villagers are moving to the cities to seek cash-wage jobs. A changing climate may make it more difficult to farm reliably, villagers who see images of city life on television or Bollywood movies may be pulled by the excitement or glamour, and people may want to join relatives who moved to the city earlier. But most who come do not have enough education (perhaps even literacy) to find more than a day job of manual labor at low pay (a migrant to Delhi has little bargaining power when 600 other migrants arrived the same day he or she did, seeking the same kinds of jobs). Many do find work, but the city is not a subsistence place--one has to buy so much of what one needs, including materials to build one's one-room house, "squatting" on a piece of empty land in a "slum" which may be adjacent to a fancy high-rise and exist only until those with more clout and resources decide to move the poor away. Teachers we talked with in some of the schools set up by religious or other NGO groups for the very poor told us that they need to provide two or three meals a day to make it possible for the students to concentrate on their school work and keep them attending; after month-long breaks, some of the children return visibly thinner.
This is a rather long introduction to what I want to actually talk about: the admirable and inspiring efforts a number of religious or educational or other organizations are making to address these issues. Some of these are in the villages: one-room schools to give young children a better start (and in our experience in these classrooms the children seem excited and engaged), or well-baby programs to weigh and vaccinate babies or encourage women to breast-feed, or programs to empower women to develop small-scale economic projects to add some money to their families' resources.
Some of those projects we visited were in the cities. We visited "slum" projects, sometimes sponsored by our first two host universities (Madras Christian College and Christ University), including multi-grade schools (much beyond the one-room village schools), or projects in which poor women could learn to make use of recycled trash materials to create crafts for sale. In the photo below, we see women dismantling the "tetra-paks" (juice boxes) in which perishable liquid foods are sometimes sold in places with less refrigeration. The materials in these boxes are super-strong, and the women weave them into large carrying-bags (I asked if I could take this photo, and one of the women borrowed my
my camera to take several photos like this herself.) Women also recycle cement bags, which again have a very strong material that, after being cut and washed, can be fashioned into a variety of purses, wallets, and carrying bags which they can decorate with colorful cross-stitch patterns (a number of our students bought some of these). Such projects as these provide a place off the street where women can work together, and avoid some of the more heavy or dangerous construction labor that women are sometimes hired to do; their earnings may also bring them a bit more influence within their families.
Village migrants (and the urban poor in general) also face a lot of pressures that take their toll on people's emotions, marriages, and relationships with their children. We visited a community clinic which offered a wide array of services for minimal charges, such as marriage counseling, teen support groups, individual counseling, life-skills training, health-screening, and so forth. We heard from a number of their professional staff (see photo below) about their work, and were impressed with their decision to put their clinic right in the middle of a community with needs rather than another location outside the community whose people it would be servicing. (Small detail: note that this women is
is wearing a traditional "kurta," a modest three-quarter length shirt/dress (to the knees) with three-quarter length sleeves, with a scarf, a common and comfortable outfit for women who aren't swearing a sari. She she also has short curly hair, perhaps just a personal choice, but one also still-uncommon in southern India where most women have long, straight hair, often parted in the middle, with a streak of deep red vermillion down the part if they are married and observant in that way.)
In addition to school projects, women's empowerment programs, mental and physical health projects, and others, I want to end with our experience at the Sikh Temple in Delhi, right around the corner from the YMCA where we were staying. (See photo below of the temple.)
This temple has a large hall where each day, all day, people in need of a meal may come to fill up, in half hour shifts, sitting on mats on the floor, facing one another. (Sitting on the floor in India is common; when Barbara and I visited the Minneapolis Sikh Temple for a memorial service for the six Milwaukee Sikhs murdered in August, 2012, while at prayer by a man who believed they were Muslims--Sikh men wear "turbans"--we also sat on the floor, in rows facing each other, for the meal offered after prayers were offered for the dead. I couldn't help but remember that, in India, where some might have wondered if we were "safe," we felt more safe than Milwaukee proved to be for the Indian Sikhs there.)
We took our turn eating a lunch where meals were being served, when our turn came up. Some students worried that perhaps we were eating food meant for the poor, when we could of course afford to pay, but my sense is that it was a place where a variety of people were being offered food regardless of their need or the usual stigma that might attach to someone who "had" to rely on charity. The food was simple--chick peas (chana), dal (lentils), a little bit of spicy pickle, some potatoes, and flat chapati bread. Servers went up and down the rows, filling the little compartments on our metal trays, and coming by again, and again, if anyone wanted more. If one wanted another chapati, you would hold your hands in front of you, palms up, which was (to some of us) the attitude in which we might take communion. And for Indians, chapati is indeed the bread of life. And the server, coming by with extra chapatis, always says, when placing the bread in one's hands, "this is a gift from God." It felt like we were in more than the usual "soup kitchen," as laudable as those can often be. We estimated that perhaps 5,000 people were served each day.
But that was only the beginning. For we were also welcome to serve, and to do so by working in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, rolling little balls of chapati dough into round flat pieces for cooking on the big metal griddle, washing used trays, cleaning up, or even taking a turn serving the food and passing out the chapatis. One of our students, who in her other life is sometimes a small-town waitress,
chose to serve food; she's also sorting through what her church heritage means to her now, at this point in her life, and I think found it meaningful to encounter communion in a different way. In the photo above, which is only half the huge kitchen area, you can see two large metal sheets on which the chapatis are cooked (they are the white disks in the left middle), but there are also vats of dal and chana cooking away. Half the students and I decided we'd try our hand at making chapatis; two older local ladies were rolling the dough balls, and then tossing them at us so we could use our wooden rollers to try to transform them into something round and flat. I failed every time; a local woman sat down next to me and turned out a perfectly round chapati, and the secret seemed to be turning the dough a little with each sweep of the roller, but without touching the dough with one's hands, just with a little twist of the wrist. We enjoyed it, and some of the students even went back a couple days later to make more chapatis.
I better stop here for now. But I wanted to share some stories of people in India who are working to make a difference in others' lives. Are their efforts "enough"? The needs seem overwhelming. But, may days, what they do is at least enough for those whose lives they touch.
On the other hand, a large portion of India's people still live in rural villages. As in most poorer countries, the gap between village and urban lifestyles is is often far greater than you'd find in richer countries (the U.S., Europe). About half of India's children are malnourished, and many show stunted growth from a lack of nutrition during the critical first several years of life. People often don't have running water or indoor toilets, or water that's safe to drink, and these are health issues rather than "only" a matter of convenience. People may be able to provide for their needs directly (such as by growing food if they're farming), needing less cash, and I think one might be able to get by more satisfactorily in the village than in the city if they were truly poor (where one sees the poor sleeping overnight on the streets on a pile of blankets, or seeking food at charities, or begging). But being village poor is not easy either. (And take all this with a grain of salt--our stays were short in each place, and these are my impressions.)
As noted in an earlier posting, many villagers are moving to the cities to seek cash-wage jobs. A changing climate may make it more difficult to farm reliably, villagers who see images of city life on television or Bollywood movies may be pulled by the excitement or glamour, and people may want to join relatives who moved to the city earlier. But most who come do not have enough education (perhaps even literacy) to find more than a day job of manual labor at low pay (a migrant to Delhi has little bargaining power when 600 other migrants arrived the same day he or she did, seeking the same kinds of jobs). Many do find work, but the city is not a subsistence place--one has to buy so much of what one needs, including materials to build one's one-room house, "squatting" on a piece of empty land in a "slum" which may be adjacent to a fancy high-rise and exist only until those with more clout and resources decide to move the poor away. Teachers we talked with in some of the schools set up by religious or other NGO groups for the very poor told us that they need to provide two or three meals a day to make it possible for the students to concentrate on their school work and keep them attending; after month-long breaks, some of the children return visibly thinner.
This is a rather long introduction to what I want to actually talk about: the admirable and inspiring efforts a number of religious or educational or other organizations are making to address these issues. Some of these are in the villages: one-room schools to give young children a better start (and in our experience in these classrooms the children seem excited and engaged), or well-baby programs to weigh and vaccinate babies or encourage women to breast-feed, or programs to empower women to develop small-scale economic projects to add some money to their families' resources.
Some of those projects we visited were in the cities. We visited "slum" projects, sometimes sponsored by our first two host universities (Madras Christian College and Christ University), including multi-grade schools (much beyond the one-room village schools), or projects in which poor women could learn to make use of recycled trash materials to create crafts for sale. In the photo below, we see women dismantling the "tetra-paks" (juice boxes) in which perishable liquid foods are sometimes sold in places with less refrigeration. The materials in these boxes are super-strong, and the women weave them into large carrying-bags (I asked if I could take this photo, and one of the women borrowed my
my camera to take several photos like this herself.) Women also recycle cement bags, which again have a very strong material that, after being cut and washed, can be fashioned into a variety of purses, wallets, and carrying bags which they can decorate with colorful cross-stitch patterns (a number of our students bought some of these). Such projects as these provide a place off the street where women can work together, and avoid some of the more heavy or dangerous construction labor that women are sometimes hired to do; their earnings may also bring them a bit more influence within their families.
Village migrants (and the urban poor in general) also face a lot of pressures that take their toll on people's emotions, marriages, and relationships with their children. We visited a community clinic which offered a wide array of services for minimal charges, such as marriage counseling, teen support groups, individual counseling, life-skills training, health-screening, and so forth. We heard from a number of their professional staff (see photo below) about their work, and were impressed with their decision to put their clinic right in the middle of a community with needs rather than another location outside the community whose people it would be servicing. (Small detail: note that this women is
is wearing a traditional "kurta," a modest three-quarter length shirt/dress (to the knees) with three-quarter length sleeves, with a scarf, a common and comfortable outfit for women who aren't swearing a sari. She she also has short curly hair, perhaps just a personal choice, but one also still-uncommon in southern India where most women have long, straight hair, often parted in the middle, with a streak of deep red vermillion down the part if they are married and observant in that way.)
In addition to school projects, women's empowerment programs, mental and physical health projects, and others, I want to end with our experience at the Sikh Temple in Delhi, right around the corner from the YMCA where we were staying. (See photo below of the temple.)
This temple has a large hall where each day, all day, people in need of a meal may come to fill up, in half hour shifts, sitting on mats on the floor, facing one another. (Sitting on the floor in India is common; when Barbara and I visited the Minneapolis Sikh Temple for a memorial service for the six Milwaukee Sikhs murdered in August, 2012, while at prayer by a man who believed they were Muslims--Sikh men wear "turbans"--we also sat on the floor, in rows facing each other, for the meal offered after prayers were offered for the dead. I couldn't help but remember that, in India, where some might have wondered if we were "safe," we felt more safe than Milwaukee proved to be for the Indian Sikhs there.)
We took our turn eating a lunch where meals were being served, when our turn came up. Some students worried that perhaps we were eating food meant for the poor, when we could of course afford to pay, but my sense is that it was a place where a variety of people were being offered food regardless of their need or the usual stigma that might attach to someone who "had" to rely on charity. The food was simple--chick peas (chana), dal (lentils), a little bit of spicy pickle, some potatoes, and flat chapati bread. Servers went up and down the rows, filling the little compartments on our metal trays, and coming by again, and again, if anyone wanted more. If one wanted another chapati, you would hold your hands in front of you, palms up, which was (to some of us) the attitude in which we might take communion. And for Indians, chapati is indeed the bread of life. And the server, coming by with extra chapatis, always says, when placing the bread in one's hands, "this is a gift from God." It felt like we were in more than the usual "soup kitchen," as laudable as those can often be. We estimated that perhaps 5,000 people were served each day.
But that was only the beginning. For we were also welcome to serve, and to do so by working in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, rolling little balls of chapati dough into round flat pieces for cooking on the big metal griddle, washing used trays, cleaning up, or even taking a turn serving the food and passing out the chapatis. One of our students, who in her other life is sometimes a small-town waitress,
chose to serve food; she's also sorting through what her church heritage means to her now, at this point in her life, and I think found it meaningful to encounter communion in a different way. In the photo above, which is only half the huge kitchen area, you can see two large metal sheets on which the chapatis are cooked (they are the white disks in the left middle), but there are also vats of dal and chana cooking away. Half the students and I decided we'd try our hand at making chapatis; two older local ladies were rolling the dough balls, and then tossing them at us so we could use our wooden rollers to try to transform them into something round and flat. I failed every time; a local woman sat down next to me and turned out a perfectly round chapati, and the secret seemed to be turning the dough a little with each sweep of the roller, but without touching the dough with one's hands, just with a little twist of the wrist. We enjoyed it, and some of the students even went back a couple days later to make more chapatis.
I better stop here for now. But I wanted to share some stories of people in India who are working to make a difference in others' lives. Are their efforts "enough"? The needs seem overwhelming. But, may days, what they do is at least enough for those whose lives they touch.
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