Poverty
on REM Zoe Lara (in India) (India), 12/Jan/2011 07:10, 34 days ago
After the workshop in Jaipur in my third weekend in India, I saw a man at the train station who had lost the use of his legs but had no wheelchair or crutches. I had met many people at the workshop without working limbs - but they all had support devices of some kind. This man crawled forwards on all fours along the platform, dragging his legs behind his hands until his back rose in the air, then stepping forward with his hands, and dragging his legs behind him again. His posture looked like a dog or an animal, but he was a person. The most heartbreaking thing was his ease in loping like this - it was clear from the way that he moved that he had become adept at it, practiced, even though the cost of crutches really couldn't be all that high. Every passer-by, who clearly had Rs700 (£10) in change for their bag, suitcase, make-up, train ticket, immediately felt like a perpetrator to some kind of social crime. Contempt tingled in my skin. Why hadn't somebody with means bought him some crutches? How could all the others on the platform pass him so nonchalantly? I'd worried thatI didn't have suntan lotion in the morning, and he was forced to view the world horizontally. The gritty reality of the contrast hit me so suddenly that I burst into tears at the platform as I watched him disappearing off. Then I hid my eyes from my colleagues and got on the train, feeling helpless.I pictured him colliding with a passer-by, and falling down with his face on the ground as well as his hands and feet.I've had a lot of colds since I got to Delhi, mainly because the weather is turning and VSO homes don't have carpets, curtains or central heating. At first I'd decided I couldn't afford a heater on the VSO allowance so I bought an extra blanket instead and felt a little bit worried - and if I'm honest, bitter - about how my health is suffering because I decided to volunteer here. The next day I jumped out of an autorickshaw to go to hindi class. I coughed a little, and my cough seemed to echo. I turned in the echo's direction to see an old lady on the street covered in an orange shawl, coughing blood. I had no central heating but she lived outdoors and wouldn't make it through the winter. Self-contempt pricked me again. I gave her some rupees and ran off to class feeling no less miserable about my own situation, more miserable about hers, and selfish that I hadn't given her more.There isn't a way to feel good in the face of overwhelming poverty. My first impulse is to want to give away everything until it is enough, though of course it never would be. Estimates vary, though it is certain that at least 42% of the country - more than eight times the population of britain - live below the international poverty line of $1.25 per day. In Delhi the poverty is grittiest, because the people on the streets are those who have been displaced from their homes, have come to this polluted city seeking work, have failed and are desperate. Alongside an impulse to give, my survival instict kicks in and says that I am materially much worse-off here than I was in the West, and I'd end up in their situation if I gave as much as ought to. This is nothing more than valuing my own life above theirs, and the selfishness of it makes me miserable. I have resorted to buying bags of sweets and nuts and handing them out to children and beggars at lights. It feels like tokenism, because that's what it is.While I fight an internal war with myself about the poverty here, I also wonder how better-off Indians respond to it. It's so strange to be in a city where there is an indian middle class with perfect english working for international companies, earning good salaries and living (materially) just as we do in europe - yet on the streets, at their feet, there are old people and children visibly hungry, ill or even dying around them, hunched on sidewalks and in slums. Because the middle class live so similarly to us in Europe, and because it is so easy for me to imagine having slotted into this city in an air conditioned apartment with a driver rather than a nicely-lit but termite-infested one with a ceiling fan, I ask myself quite frequently: would we all still go about our business in the UK as the middle class in India do, if almost every other person we saw lived in poverty?Yet this is the wrong question to ask. Analogies between countries are speculative goose-chasing - impossible counterfactuals that are condescendingly framed and in this case, fuelled by blame-defecting. Even if the proportion of people in poverty is less in the UK, I walked passed homeless people in Oxford weekly, and if I ever gave, it was only ever enough to make a difference for one meal or one night. Secondly, though our average wealth level in Britain is something that I am comparatively happy about, I should also be conscious of the injustices Britain perpetrated in the way that it generated its wealth. And I should think about this before I start tutting because the Indian government isn't redistributing grain, because the middle classes aren't giving or because I can see people around me dying. As Gandhi quite rightly pointed out"It took Britain half the resources of this planet to achieve its current level of prosperity. How many planets would India need?"I'm often asked by relatives why I'm doing VSO. I thought I would really enjoy it. I also thought it would be wrong for me to hop out of university straight into a job in the City. I don't feel as though I'm "helping" out of the goodness of my heart in volunteering here (as the experience is condescendingly marketed) because I feel as though it isn't something I should do out of charity, but out of justice. I was born into one country rather than another quite by chance, and my country owes this country quite a bit (in resources as well as bloodshed) for the fact that we're at a level of material wealth that means I can come here and - unthinkingly - feel smug that there isn't poverty in the UK on anything like Delhi's scale. I can only come because I happened at birth to land in a middle class family on an island with a free education system up to 18, which now gives me the opportunity to travel the world doing human rights work while another person with just the same level of intellect is probably living illiterate on delhi's streets and always will. Part of the reason why they are rising more slowly than they could from poverty is because my government has participated in the creation of a trading regime which is unfair to developing countries. In a difficult-to-measure degree, I know that some of the material wealth I was comfortable with growing up found its way to me because other countries are kept down.Now that I'm away from the ivory towers where I could quite freely intellectualise about what humans owe to other humans (because I was thinking and talking and writing and not actually doing!), I'm starting to see for real how demanding the beliefs that I came out of Oxford with really are. And I can see where I'm falling short of the same standards that I held others to in my essays on global justice. For example, even though my (rationalised) reasons for being here are about what I owe to others, I still get offended because even though I'm trying to get closer to the poverty, trying to learn hindi, living on the salary of an 'average' NGO delhi-ite, I am suspected by every local of being a rich white businessperson with a rich white businessperson's salary, and am ripped off almost every time I go outside (quite justly, given the assumption!). I want a little card to flash at auto drivers and sellers that says "Here to Help Not to Extract", until I realise that 'helping' is the wrong word, and my mentality is wrong too. Less abstractly, I fall short whenever I could have given more and I spend it on myself instead, in true champagne socialist style. I notice and therefore twinge to this tune several times a week, and know that there are still more lamentable such occasions in which I fail to notice at all.A favourite quote is very apt -"Ideas which have conquered the mind, to which reason has welded the conscience, are chains from which we cannot break away without breaking our hearts" - MarxI can start to turn a blind eye to my blanket-buying - or worse, frivolous or unnecessary purchases not related to survival but preening, like make-up - but my heart is breaking a little bit. Greed is the little forgettable space between what others need and what we don't. I'm going to try to work out a middle ground, so that I can pass through each experience of poverty here with a little less sadness and give, though I recognise that whatever I decide I "need" for myself will most likely be an overestimation, involving some subtle flaw in my reasoning, some denial of what I really believe about what I owe. My conscience will itch a little bit because of it, though undoubtedly less than it should. I'm learning a little more here of the sorrows in self-honesty, which is nothing more than a recognition of the failings of the self.