The same fever is not the same fever

Three weeks ago I had a fever. I started getting headaches, my skin was achy, I became very tired, and a crazy red rash spread all over my body from head to toe. It might have been a mild case of Dengue Fever, or it could have been any number of other viral infections. A little more than a week after the first symptoms, I was fine.

It wasn't until I got better that I realized how many other people in the slum were sick. My good friend's baby had a fever. So did his aunt. So did my language helper. All five people in the family we ate the feast with were sick. So were four members in another family we knew. So were all sorts of other people in the basti – one here, one there. Rose, gratefully, never got sick, nor did our landlord or their family, but almost everyone else we knew seemed to have at least one family member go down.

It was in the midst of this little epidemic that I realized how different my experience still is from the experience of my neighbors. For me, getting the funny rash/fever was a little bit of an adventure. I enjoyed trying to figure out what I had. I was somewhat uncomfortable, but not horribly so. I had to take it easy for a few days, but I don't have a lot of responsibilities anyway. When I went to endure a 2.5 hour liturgy near the tail end of the illness (at a church we have to walk 2 miles to get to), I made it a little bit of a personal contest to see if I could continue to stand up without passing out. I observed my symptoms closely, and was ready to go to a doctor the moment that anything extraordinary happened, but nothing occurred that forced me to take the fever very seriously.

It is not that way for my neighbors. For them, even the “mild” fever hits their health hard. They don't have the background of good rest and nutrition and exercise and easy living that I have, and so their bodies have far less leeway. They are really wiped out when a virus makes their body work that much harder. The adults get less work done. The kids miss school, some more than a week. Death is a real possibility for babies and young children and the elderly and those whose bodies are already wracked by other thing. In families where multiple members are sick, a lot of the normal life stops.

And these little epidemics are something that happens a lot in the basti.

I am reminded that no matter where I choose to live, or how I choose to live, for me it is a choice. I wasn't forced into this life, and I could leave it whenever I want. And no matter what possessions or connections I give up, I haven't given up my education, my stable and healthy upbringing, my foreign passport, my medical insurance, or my access via friends and family to as much money as I would ever need (no matter how little might be in my own bank account).

I hope, through this life, to know the poor better. I hope to have solidarity with them in some way, to understand their hopes and fears to a deeper degree than I could if I didn't live with them, to be able to form a community together that will benefit both of us.

But I am reminded that as much as I have solidarity with them, I will never be them. And because of that, they keep having to suffer in ways that I don't, even when we share the same fever.