It is not that we have never met – We have passed each other so often on the streets in Seattle and San Francisco. But it feels as though here in India you attack me. A full assault on my senses every which way I turn. You seem so often carry the face of a child, a young mother, a crippled elder. In India the urban poverty of my daily commute to work strikes a chord never fully hit in the US. I find myself walking by people asleep on the cold hard concrete of Churchgate Station and my heart sinks. Why do I deserve to breeze by them, after a night in a comfortable bed, access to AC, food, a shower a clean change of clothes, on my way to work. Am I working harder than they are? Certainly not, as my cushy office provides zero physical challenge and the intellectual challenge while exciting hardly pushes me to my limit. No I’m not working harder. Am I simply luckier? Lucky to have been born in the US? No that’s not it either as the majority of the other commuters en route to work were born right here in India. My mind keeps circling back to one thing: education. Maybe I am making too many unfair assumptions but I would venture to guess that many of the sleeping people who line the walls at the train station did not have access to education, certainly not beyond basic government schools and certainly not to years and years of quality higher education. There is one young women who sits at the top of the Churchgate Station stairs, she has two small children who cannot be more 2 years of age. What strikes me about her is she always seems to have some sort of joy on her face – so many of the people I pass along the street look as though they have simply turned their back on any hope that humanity has a place for them. I want to sit down and talk to this girl. I want to know her name and her story. I’m afraid to do this – I’m not sure why. I think the brutality with which urban poverty comes at you here makes it feel easier to simply look away. My auto stops at a traffic light in Delhi and children, street kids, come out of the mass of cars, trucks and bikes, through clouds of exhaust they run right to me. Begging. Sometimes they come with something to sell, flowers, toys, trinkets. In that moment I always feel trapped between my heart which is dying to just empty my wallets entire contents into their hands and the system I know is behind their begging. Driving in Delhi with a friend last week we were talking about the emotional rollercoaster of witnessing poverty in India. We both agreed quickly that poverty lives everywhere. It lives in the US, in France, in Brazil, in South Africa and here in India. But the poverty of the place I grew up, the US, that poverty is hidden in a way the poverty of India never is. The slums and make shift homes spill out onto the streets of Mumbai. They line the gates of the airport and greet your plane as it lands, they run up to you when your car is stopped at a light, they pull at the hem of your skirt as you walk through the market. I offer no solution here. I simple offer my reflection of seeing the enormity of poverty, the depth of my privilege and the unanswerable question of why. Selfishly I take comfort in knowing I am working day in and day out here in India to create economic opportunity. Training programs to enable people to go from the streets to work and earn and support their families. But it is not that simple, I know that. It never is. Will that young women at Churchgate Station ever have a chance to attend such a training program? I don’t know.
