The Dilemma of the Poor

The poor are all around you in India. Unlike in the UK where poverty is relatively hidden, here it literally screams at you in the face every where you turn!
There are some horrendous statistics about the poor in India: an estimated 450 million live on less than 50 rupees a day ( about 80 pence) and 75% of population of the country live on less than 100 rupees a day! One third of the worlds poor live here and 22,000 children die everyday due to poverty. 56% have no access to electricity. Only 40% are functionally literate and 30% are illiterate!
The real challenge about living here day by day is working out how best to respond to the poor. The danger is that over time your heart can become hardened to the needs of the poor and so you just brush them aside and ignore what is going on. Many,many people live like that here because they have been brought up seeing poverty around them all their lives. We really need to have God's compassion for the poor. Jesus demonstrated God's heart as he constantly reached out to the beggars, the lepers and the prostitutes and that is the challenge for us today.
Giving money is not always the best solution as many of the children are in organised gangs and the money goes straight to the leader and doesn't benefit the child. Also a lot of the children would rather just use the money to buy solvents which take away the hunger pains! Giving food is a better way but food that is opened and cannot be sold on. Another way to help is to get involved in the many NGO organisations around the city
Tim and I went on a tour organised by the Salaam Baalak Trust, an organisation that rescues street kids and helps to give them a home and education. We were taken around the parts of the city where the street kids hang out , like the railway stations etc and shown the contact points and one of the boys homes. A former street child, now a worker for the trust, described life on the streets and it was very moving! For girls it is especially tough as there are not so many jobs they can do and they are a lot more vulnerable than boys. He said that girls as young as 7 were taken into prostitution and a young girl could have up to 45 clients a day!! Many die by the age of 16 from pain and trauma.
Yesterday a friend and I went to visit a girls shelter home to see if we could get involved in some way. The home houses 55 girls at present who have been rescued from the streets. The youngest is 5 years up to 18 . The home was in a pleasant , leafy street and very well organised but it did remind me a little of a prison because it had a central atrium going up to the roof with walkways on different levels with rooms going off them One of the older girls showed us round . I commented on the girls excellent English to the manager and she told us that the girl and her sister had been adopted by an American family from am orphanage and taken to Boston but they had struggled with her and sent her back but had kept her sister! They had found her abandoned on the streets. The girls's day is highly structured with chores and schooling and other workshop activities. Some girls go to the local school but most are schooled in the centre as they are too far behind to go to the mainstream school. The older girls are also encouraged to learn a trade such a hairdressing or dressmaking etc.
Both my friend ( who is a doctor and also called Liz!)) and myself are very keen to volunteer there, so as from next week my friend is going to work with the teenage girls on health issues and I am going to teach English to the younger ones to try to prepare them for school. How exciting!

Early Days

26/10/10 FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Delhi is a city of contrasts; from the uber rich living right next door to absolute poverty. Huge air conditioned malls and five star hotels are being built all over the city co-existing next to slum areas. What amazes us is the way people accept this as ok, how there are no major uprisings about the unfairness of everyday life! We've been in Delhi just over a week now and life here constantly amazes, excites and horrifies us all at the same time. Mind you living here is more bearable than Mumbai where we were the first week with it's sweltering humidity and it's seething mass of humanity! In comparison the temperature here at the moment is like a pleasant English summers day ( the daily newspapers currently report that winter has arrived!!!!) and the city streets are wider and generally a little more ordered and calmer. The city is green and fertile after heavy monsoon rains and there are many parks to wander in and leafy streets. In some areas you could believe you are anywhere in Europe until you turn a corner and suddenly the area changes into dusty pot holed streets, dilapidated houses with wires hanging in all directions and cows meandering down the middle of the road , chewing on piles of rubbish.


1/11/10 HOUSE HUNTING

We have managed to secure a flat in a sector in South Delhi called Vasant Kunj.The suburbs are divided into gated sectors and ours is sector B1. Each sector has rows and rows of flats with small park areas and a few shops that sell everyday food stuffs. It's been really hard looking at all the flats as the standard of cleanliness and maintenance is SO different to what you'd expect in the UK. Everything here is filthy, and often fittings are all broken ! Still we've settled on a ground floor duplex which definitely has potential – I just have to try to imagine it with furniture and curtains in it!! we do have some resident pigeons and some rats that have made their home there to so we need to to try to evict them!!!! One great thing is that we came to hear about an American couple who are leaving to go back to the US in December and are selling off all their furniture so we visited them and have agreed to buy their sitting room furniture and a double bed and side tables. We can't collect them till the end of November but at least we've got some nice furniture to look forward to! Until then we shall make do with some plastic chairs and sleeping on a blow up mattress.
If I look outside my kitchen window there is a little ironing business going on outside. They charge 2 rupees an item ( 3 pence) so I won't need to buy an iron!!!!

10/11/10 EARLY DAYS IN OUR NEW HOME

Our first night in our new home seemed very strange! We slept on a friends blow up double mattress – our only furniture ,apart from a singe mattress in the living room to act as a seat, a TV , fridge and gas burner. Sleep was intermittent as we kept on being woken up by planes coming to land at the international airport! We're obviously under the flight path and some of them were so loud we thought they would scrape our roof!!!! Hopefully we'll get used to them – People say that they alternate the flight path over the sectors so we won't get them every night!
Our first morning dawned with no water in our taps!!! We have to turn a pump on to pump water from an underground tank up to the roof and then wait about half an hour . Next the electricity went off for 2 hours which meant the pump wouldn't work! Very frustrating but in the process we got to meet our neighbours to the right of us, a husband and wife and their daughter and son-in law. They were really friendly and helpful, inviting us in to their house for coffee. Everyone on the sector seems to be welcoming, smiling and saying hello.
The ironing lady behind our flat came up to me today and asked (in Hindi with some miming for my benefit) if she could clean for me! She's going back to her village for a few days so will start in a week. I must brush up on my cleaning and household commands and vocabulary. On the subject of Hindi, some of the sounds are so difficult to produce correctly!! For example the word jhadoo means sweep but the 'h' sound is really difficult for us to pronounce as it's not the same as in English. Also the 'd' is made in a different place in the mouth and I can't hear the difference! Whenever I say the word apparently I'm saying 'magic' not 'sweep'!!! Now I really know how all my poor students felt in my classes when we did pronunciation work!
I am determined to be able to converse with people so I must study at least an hour a day Hindi, learn as much vocabulary as possible and take every opportunity to practise.

Just around the corner from our flat is a little group of shops/stalls selling all types of foodstuffs, stationary and household items. There is also a little man with a singer sewing machine and a small chemist . I made friends with one of the shopkeepers who was very chatty and had good English a lthough I am practising my Hindi on him. It's great, you pay for your things and a boy brings them round for you. You can also ring for items and they will bring them to your door for a small fee ( 15p).
The labour workforce is so intensive here- in the morning there are maids everywhere, boys employed to clean people's cars, boys who collect the rubbish from every house, men sweeping up all the leaves and rubbish from the streets etc.
even at every ATM there are one or two security guards!