Currents

India has no ivory towers and Hyderabad suffers a water shortage. So far I'm 0 for 2 on blog title/reality intersections, but what use is travel if you find what you'd expected?

What I mean to say is, there's little physical insulation from the everyman's poverty, here. One can escape into luxury for several hours, but even the most methodical reservation could not ensure total removal. There simply isn't enough space. So, for the locals, psychological constructs dam oceans of heartbreak and hold back flooding empathy.

It works the same way in Madison, really. There are people without homes, but they inevitably become "homeless people," invisible, irrelevant. If I sound like I'm on a soapbox here, I'm only chiding myself - it's a shameful fact of human nature that we shut out the sufferings of others to get on with our lives and I'm as guilty as anyone.

A big part of coming to India and a big part of living in India has been stepping outside of my own ivory towers, physical or otherwise. There's a system-shock in seeing the abject poverty on every street corner here, from having never seen it, let alone lived in it before in my life. And as I've mentioned before, there's no space to turn your head and no way to ignore it, not coming from where I am.

There's a big movement in modern India today to get children out of manual labor and into schools. While resistance has come from the widely spread "families need working children to survive" perspective, NGOs have found that many parents do want to send their children to school, but face social and geographical boundaries to doing so. And where the perspective does hold true, a number of NGOs have worked through communities, winning their support and generating a social norm of education for all children. It appears a slow, arduous procedure, but longer-lasting when compared to interventions which ignore communities' misgivings, uncertainties and challenges.

Today I had the opportunity to visit a school where children live and learn, children who previously worked long hours for less than half the minimum wage. I sat with my peers and heard their stories. Two sisters were cast out with their mother when their father had a second marriage. After their mother succumbed to alcoholism, the sisters returned to their father, seeking shelter. Their stepmother abused them, refused them food and forced them to live outside. The girls were put to work and forced to live like stray dogs until one day they escaped and found their way to the school.

The abuses these children had endured horrified me - some sufferings escape human understanding for everyone but the ones who lived it. I couldn't imagine the bond between those sisters, from the lives they'd endured and fled together.

The younger one is supposed to be a brilliant dancer and proudly announced her intention to be a doctor. If I knew the Hindi and thought it could mean something coming from a stranger, I might have told her never to let go of that dream. But believing that my older age meant I could pass some kernel of wisdom onto her would have been callously arrogant. In the boiling belly of Hyderabad, she has surely lived a thousand bitter winters and knows resolve and survival better than any human being should.

I don't doubt she can dance like a flame. Beauty is so strangely often born of suffering and her radiant smile was no exception. How someone could laugh, smile and play with a stranger after such heartwrenching rejection amazes and humbles me. Every child had a story and a testament to forgiveness, resolution and restoration. Lord knows we didn't deserve those smiles, and we could never have faulted them had they lived brutal, distrustful lives. We, as adults, others and unknown, would have deserved their hatred.

But they laughed, took us by the hand and led us to lunch, to play, to scrawl our names in their new, pristine notebooks. None of us deserved an ounce of it but they gave it, calling us brothers, sisters.

I've never seen God, but I fell weeping at their altar in my heart of hearts. Theirs was a love I've seen only a handful of times in this life, and it broke my notion of what a spirit can endure, how a person can live gracefully though staggering loss. Sometimes we forget what incredible things this flesh can overcome when there is no other option.

After their stories, some of the children sang and danced for us. They fairly insisted we overcome our shyness as well, so we sang in return.

And when the night is cloudy,
There is still a light that shines on me.
Shine until tomorrow,
Let it be.

It was their song, their stories as best we could retell them, that sounded in that dirt-floored classroom.