Basti Women and the po-po

Forty-five people came together from our slum to attend the protest. Over 40 of them were women, nearly half of those girls. Muslim, Hindu, Christian, in saris and salwars and burkas, from elementary school girls to the elderly, the whole spectrum was represented. They gathered in the city center, joined by 50-60 more women from other slums and a few middle-class NGO workers, and got ready to march on the police in protest over their negligence in a string of horrific rape cases in our city and across the country.

Before they even started marching, the most intense rainstorm of the year hit. Clothes and signs were drenched. The street filled in with deep puddles. But right in the middle of the heaviest rain, the women began their march.

They shouted slogans, held signs and banners, and blocked the street as they marched through them. Within twenty minutes, the police realized what was happening and freaked out. They ran ahead of the marchers and attempted to blockade the entire road just to prevent the marchers from reaching the central government buildings for the state.

Those police officers were a foot away from putting the last metal gate barrier in place when the women reached them. It was no match. The women grabbed the barrier and drove back the police, four officers stumbling backwards under the weight of the crowd. A second heavy barrier segment went crashing to the ground right next to me as the women hit it, and the throng surged through. The police retreated to headquarters as quickly as they could for reinforcements.

As the marchers approached the Parliament building, cameras appeared everywhere. A television crew waited at the gates of the building. When the women reached the gates, 40-50 officers were waiting there for them. The military were also called in...for what? Because the police were afraid of the women? Because they wanted to intimidate the women? Soon law-enforcement/military numbers were over 100, and matched the number of marchers 1-to-1.

Someone came in with portable amps and microphones, and the women began making their demands. Stricter laws for violence against women, new police procedures, heightened transparency and accountability for the police. The police/military formed a three-or-four-deep ring around the now small-looking group of protesters. But they continued to shout their slogans and make their demands with spirit. A dozen young teenage girls held up their banner for the cameras. Two young men with the Democratic Youth Federation helped lead the chants and made speeches alongside the female NGO workers and other women from the slums.

In short time a delegation of eight women was allowed inside to speak to the higher authorities. For about an hour, protesters outside continued to chant slogans and speak to the media. Eventually the delegates emerged, their petition given and their concerns heard, but no concrete ground given other than promises to continue the conversation the following day. What future action will come of this remains to be seen. But I can say with certainly that I have seen the women of the basti stand up for their rights against the authorities with a passion and belief in the righteousness of their cause that I couldn't have imagined before.

Attached below are a couple of photos from near the end of the rally, after the skies had cleared, most of the military had left, and the police had calmed down.

Gai

When I used to spend a couple nights a week hanging out with Cambodian kids in Bangkok’s red-light districts, my favorite kid was Gai.

Gai was 13 or 14 when I met her, though she could have passed for 10. Unlike some kids, who worked hard to sell their flowers to marks, Gai seemed like she could care less. Her dismissive attitude to that work, and the fact that she liked to draw and color and play tic-tac-toe with me, was all it took. I was hooked.

I think the fact that she wasn’t anyone else’s favorite kid also played a role in it. The woman who was her caretaker on the streets didn’t act like her mother, and didn’t seem to give her the best care. She wasn’t as cute as the younger kids who sold flowers, and didn’t try hard to be liked. And so I liked her. A lot.

I remember the first time Gai got sick. She was off the street for weeks at least. I think that it was months, though my memory might be faulty. I remember when we finally saw her again, when she was brought to the red-lights in a sidecar but couldn’t even get up and go out on the street yet. I was incredibly worried for her. But she seemed to get better over time.

In August 2011, I went out into the red lights of Bangkok for the last time. I don’t even remember which night I saw Gai last.

Three weeks ago, Gai died.



I surprised myself by crying a little when I wrote that sentence. I’ve cried for Gai off and on over the last two weeks, but I expected to be past that by now. It had been a number of days since the last time.

Honestly, I don’t really feel like I have the right to cry. Gai was my favorite, but I hardly knew her. As we were both transplants into Thailand, we didn’t have a lot of common language. We saw each other off and on, played games off and on, and did a tiny bit of schooling, and that was it. Since I left Bangkok in 2011 I hadn’t seen her, and as so many other things came up I honestly didn’t think about her a lot. If a friend hadn’t gotten word to me that she had passed away in that hospital, I never would have known.

But I do know, and as little as I really knew Gai, her death still breaks my heart.

Just a couple days after I found out about Gai's death, a friend of mine played a song that he had written recently. The song has hopeful lyrics, but its melancholy tone makes it quite clear that we yearn for something we have not yet seen. The song made me cry for Gai. I recorded him singing it and sang along with the recording on my computer. I got all the pictures I had of Gai, and mixed them with pictures of her native Cambodia and the red-lights she had to work in, and spent hours late at night making a movie that expressed what I was feeling (no, you can’t see it, only two other people have ever seen it and they both knew Gai). I learned to play the song on guitar, and sang it myself. Somewhere in the song and the pictures and the time making the movie, I processed through my thoughts.

But there’s only so far that processing can take you. Because it still comes down to the fact that a teenage girl died after going through a lot of suffering in her life, and no amount of processing I do is ever going to make that feel right.

In After Shock: Searching for Honest Faith When Your World Is Shaken, Kent Annan writes:

If one of my children were diagnosed with a fatal disease, it would reveal nothing new about the world or God. I shuddered while typing that. Friends are going through this now; the most awful things imaginable already happen all the time.

For those who live by some faith, who want that faith to be eyes-wide-open honest, who want to be able to respond to goodness with gratitude, isn’t life itself a kind of continuous crisis of faith?

I believe that God is love, and God is powerful, and that God cares deeply for us. And I also believe that it was really, really wrong that Gai died last month. Unless you’ve completely sheltered yourself in some OC suburb or something, you’ve got to come to terms with a God who exists in a world where little girls are trafficked into the seediest parts of Bangkok and where some of those little girls die. As Annan said in another part of his book, any faith that can’t deal with that ought to die, because that’s reality.

I believe that the world as God intends it to be has not yet come. I believe that God’s Kingdom is already here in some sense, and yet is strikingly absent in the most important sense. I pray for God’s Kingdom to come, for justice to be done and all to be made right. And I know that I better be devoting myself to joining in His work along those lines as long as I’m here. Because to be in a world like this and do nothing is not something my heart could tolerate.

I pray He brings you back Gai.


When the Lord Brings Us Back (unpublished song by Tom Wuest)
Psalms 126, 115, 30

Gracious God bring us back
Captives of our false gods
We have eyes, yet cannot see
We have ears, yet cannot hear

     Those who sow in tears
     Will one day reap with joy
     Restore us O Lord
     Praise God all you saints
     Who plod through the dark of night
     Joy comes with the dawn

When the Lord brings us back
We’ll be like those who dream
Laughter will grace our hearts
Songs will spill off our tongues

     Those who sow in tears
     Will one day reap with joy
     Restore us O Lord
     Praise God all you saints
     Who plod through the dark of night
     Joy comes with the dawn

     Joy comes with
     Joy comes with
     Joy comes with
     the dawn

Out of sight

When we left India two weeks ago, our friend Rodda was about to have her baby.  It had been due three days earlier, but hadn’t arrived yet.  The pregnancy had not been easy, and we were worried for her.  Rose visited her at the hospital and brought her food just an hour before we left.  Our best intuitions tell us that the next few weeks and months are not going to be easy for her either.

Two, three, four days after we left, Rodda and her baby were still on my mind.  But as the first week and then the second passed, I realized that I remembered her less and less.  Soon I only thought of her once every few days.

There are so many others.  Akil Bhai and his family who we lived with, Shahmim who had just found his business non-viable and was trying to get new work, Ali waiting to start his 12^th year of school, Mohammed hoping that his back gets better soon.  The kids working in the shops, the men and women and children begging on our streets, the toddlers sorting through the trash for recycleable scraps.

I haven’t forgotten them.  And I won’t forget them.  And I am still praying for them.  But as long as we are not living there, I remember to remember them less and less often.

Follow-ups on my other blog

My last three stories all ended up coming back to the point that what we do in America affects people everywhere else.  A friend of mine implied that he wasn't sure there was a connection, and so I decided to start posting about those connections on my theological blog.  I'll be making 16 posts - every Wednesday and Friday of Lent - and the first six will focus on the command to "love your neighbor as yourself."

You can view the first post in the series at the following link:

To Trust in God: Thailand and Bangladesh

http://totrustingod.blogspot.in/2013/03/thailand-and-bangladesh.html

What's the opposite of hungry?

I have an amazing language helper. He is only 19, but he is bright, knows what I want, is bold enough to correct me when I mess up and to explain what I'm doing wrong, is extremely patient, fixes not just my vocabulary but also my grammar, pronunciation, and handwriting, praises me honestly and warmly when I do something right, is insistent on staying until the end of our hour each day, and hasn't canceled a lesson once yet.

But this morning, Mohammed had the hardest time with one word. We were doing opposites, and were flying through them. Then we got to "hungry". Mohammed spent two minutes trying to come up with something that would be the opposite of “hungry”. He even asked a friend to help him. Finally, they had an answer. The opposite of "hungry", according to Mohammed and his friend, is "thirsty".

My language helper is very thin. He lives with his family in a tiny home with a dirt floor that floods when it rains. He has been working since the age of 10 so he could pay his own school fees after his father died. Still, I'm sure that he's experienced feelings other than hunger before. There has to have been some time when he was attending someone's wedding, or a guest at someone's house, or was treated at some festival, where he got to be "full" instead of "hungry". To say that he couldn't come up with the opposite of hungry because he had never experienced it would be a bit implausible.

Yet I believe there is meaning there. I spent the first 30+ years of my life without EVER being truly hungry for someone else's sake. In America we spend billions of dollars a year on diets because we eat too much. Some 25% of us are obese and just as many more are overweight, and that's even with eating disorders taking their toll. We try to invent plans that will allow us to maintain our figures while stuffing our stomachs. Fast food restaurants sell lunch meals that have twice as many calories as most third-world slum dwellers get in an entire day.

When I visited India in 2011, I experienced sacrificial hunger for the first time in my life. I ate less than I needed because every bite I took meant less food for someone who needed food a lot more than me. I had already lost weight earlier, but by the time I left India my weight hit 165 pounds, nearly 50 pounds below what it had been when I had left America a year earlier. Yet day after day I kept eating less food than I wanted. Because I could see the consequences.

In America, we don't see. We don't know people who don't know the opposite of "hungry". The closest many of us get to solidarity with their situation is using it to guilt-trip our kids into eating their vegetables. We pretend that our conspicuous over-consumption doesn't pull food off of their plates. We tell ourselves that Central American cattle farms supplying beef for Americans aren't built on the ruins of family farms, that Brazilian coffee plantations aren't constructed on top of land that poor villagers relied on for their livelihoods, that commercial fishing vessels supplying our sushi aren't destroying the livelihoods (and local protein supply) of small-scale fishermen, that laws passed to pad the pockets of our own wealthiest farmers haven't made the situation that much more difficult for farmers overseas. We pass federal laws stating that we will never give any foreign aid that might lead to competition with our own products, even for desperately poor countries for whom that product might be their only available cash crop. We don't ask questions about an economic system that encourages more, and more, and more consumption; more, and more, and more growth. We already consume at a rate the rest of the world will never match, because the sheer land area of the earth could never support such consumption for everyone else. We keep using our 20-25 acres (the area of land it takes to support an average American) without realizing that only leaves a small fraction of that on average for everyone else.

We can ignore such things because we don't have to see them. Because "full" is a much more familiar word than "hungry". Because we've built borders, both physical and psychological, that keep the poor far enough away from our lives and our hearts that we ensure they will never make a significant impact on our stomachs.

This isn't a guilt trip. I don't want you to send money to anyone, grasping for that typical guilt-absolver called "charity". I want you to know that I am BETTER off for knowing Mohammed, even though he forces me to think differently about what it means for me to be hungry and what it means for me to be full.

Get to know the hungry. Learn what it would mean to love them as much as you actually love yourself (in deed, not just in word). When you do, every spoonful of food will become that much more meaningful - both the ones that you still chose to eat, and the ones that you don't. Their world, even their words, are different from our own, but they are still our neighbors. And until we learn to make ourselves a part of their world again, we will not be able to know what it would mean to love our neighbors.

You will always have the poor with you

The boss yelled for a servant. When the servant came, he touched the boss's foot with his hand before asking what he was to do. The boss feigned embarrassment and told him not to, but the servant was clearly used to acting in this way.

The university department head walked through the school. When he passed an open door, every student in the room stood, looking apprehensive. The professor didn't even notice as he continued down the hallway.

My experience of power in relationships is different here. Where I grew up, most people would be horrified at such interactions. I've heard that there are places in America with similar power dynamics (wealthy white persons with black servants in the South, or wealthy bosses using migrant labor near the borders), but I've never lived in such situations. To me, the interactions appear alien.

But then I notice another thing about the culture. In this country, the rich and the poor are next to each other. Wealthy masters interact with their poor servants every day. The nicest condos usually have a slum full of dishwashers, janitors, and maids within sight. Due to the cheapness of labor, even those working in the highest-paying occupations will have coworkers who live in poverty. Due to the incredible urban crowding, many of the nicest homes are found within a stone's throw of a slum.

I hate seeing relationships where people are not treated as having the same inherent worth. I hate the attitude of submission that the poor have learned to take on, the way in which bosses sometimes don't even bother to know their servants' names, the relics of caste that permeate the culture.

And yet I know that these are all problems borne out of actual interaction. In America we've found a different way. In America, the rich and powerful don't worry about how they should interact with poor people, because they do everything possible to make sure they never have to. Gated communities are the ideal, most wealthy people won't have a poor neighborhood within miles, and they justify attempts to keep people away who don't meet their standards by saying they "bring down property values". They choose their neighborhoods for the "good schools", often defined by how few poor children attend them. Workplaces are specialized/segregated enough that most of the wealthy never interact with anyone in an impoverished position, unless they have them as a client. And the wealthiest doctors, lawyers, engineers, bankers, businessmen, etc. will never have impoverished clients.

And, at the greatest extreme, our cheapest labor is outsourced outside of our borders to other nations altogether, so we can get the benefits of paying extremely low wages and buying extremely cheap products while avoiding the costs of having such poor workers actually living in the same country as us.

I wonder how America's powerful would act if they interacted with poor persons on a regular basis. On the surface, it would probably look better than it does here, though at first the lack of familiarity might make the interaction extremely awkward. But isn't it rather significant that no one tries?

Comedic interlude - one such painful interaction:

I read about Jesus eating with sinners and "sinful women". I see him going into the homes of lepers and tax collectors. I hear him telling stories where publicans, Samaritans, and destitute widows are the heroes. I see how much time he spent with beggars, the disabled, those plagued by demons, those rejected by the religious leaders. I see him commanding his followers to invite the poor to feasts in their own homes, instead of inviting our rich friends (Luke 14:12-14). I see his disciples carry on the message, reaching out in love to foreigners, lame beggars, Samaritans, eunuchs, and even slaves. It is clear from the description of their community (Acts 2:43-47, Acts 4:32-37), as well as their letters (Romans 15:25-27, 2 Corinthians 8:1-9:15, Galatians 2:10, 1 John 3:17, and all of James, especially 2:1-9) that the poor and the marginalized were to have an honored place in the community where they were treated with equal worth. Jesus told his disciples that the poor would always be with them. And it was clear in the New Testament, and from historical documents up through the first 300 years of the church's existence, that that was true for a long time.

So where are the poor now? And where are we? Are the poor always with us? When they are, do we treat them the same way we treat our friends? And if they are not with us, or we do not treat them as good or even better than we treat our other friends, are we truly acting as his disciples?

Looking them in the eye

I'm sitting on my mattress writing an essay about child laborers. Three feet in front of me, an actual child laborer is coloring pictures on a piece of paper, likely her best intellectual stimulation in days. To my left, her little brother is hammering away at Rose's purse, fixing a strap that's been broken for months. He fixed the zipper on my laptop cover before that. In both instances we didn't ask him to do it, but he's in our room a lot and just noticed things that needed fixing.

We're taking advantage of the job skills of a 9-year-old child laborer.  He and his sister work at home making purses instead of going to school.  Is it a bad thing that we let him fix our things today, getting an advantage from skills that he learned in place of learning to read?  Or is it a good thing because we're giving him a chance to feel important and serve us in some way, making our relationship more even? Should we pay him for what he's doing? Or is it better to keep a give-and-take as part of our friendship, where we share our food and buy him notebooks and pencils to draw and color with, and he fixes our zippers and purse straps?

These are the questions we ask ourselves. I can buy breakfast from 13 and 14-year-old sisters who roll out pooris. Dinner could come from a 15-year-old who has been working all day to prepare fish for her mom's restaurant. I pass doors where young boys who should be in elementary school are weaving rugs and melting on shoe soles. Nearly every corner store will be manned by a preteen for at least part of the day. The garbage on the streets will be picked up by kids as young as three, to later be sorted for recyclables by kids of every age. And professional beggers start almost from birth, as infants are loaned to begging women to elicit sympathy until the kids are old enough to walk around and pull on shirts with pleading eyes.

Figuring out appropriate responses to child labor are some of the “big” questions we find ourselves dealing with here. Whether to give to a begging child, whether to buy clothes in part made by a 12-year-old, and what to say to parents who are barely surviving even with the help of their working children are difficult scenarios to work out answers to. But I'm glad that we can be asking those questions in a context where those who face the consequences of our choices are right in front of us. In much of the rest of the world, millions of people every day are buying cell phones assembled in Chinese factories, eating chocolates or coffee made with cocoa and coffee beans from African farms, buying clothes and toys produced in Southeast Asian sweatshops (made from cotton grown in central Asia), eating beef, sugar, and tobacco made on South American plantations, wearing jewelry with gold and diamonds from African mines, and in general taking advantage of cheap child labor across the world, without ever meeting one of the kids who helped get that product to them at such a cheap price.

Visiting the neighbors

Our neighbor Pappu to his wife: “Sometimes Jon gets 10 rupees of subsee/poori for breakfast!”

Wife, appearing shocked, “10 rupees for breakfast! Really?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I guess the food is cheap here for them?”

Rose, “Yeah.”

10 rupees is the equivalent of 18 cents. 10 rupees of subsee/poori buys 4 pooris, each made with a piece of dough the size of a plum, and about 10 ounces of delicious potatoes and chickpeas. While the subsee/poori man does good business in 5 rupee and 10 rupee increments, most people in our neighborhood are limited to tea and dry biscuits for breakfast. A typical budget for some families in the slum is only 100 rupees a day. Our current budget works out to around 400 rupees a day, not counting trips outside the city, language school, or and health insurance, and there are only 2 of us!

A candle on Christmas Eve

My candle had melted down to a two-inch tall mess, and a lot of the mess was on my fingers.  I thought it was too pathetic to give to anyone, but a young man took it from my hands.  He then bent down and handed the candle to a two-foot tall boy.  The boy's eyes lit up like you wouldn't believe.  He stood oblivious to everything around him, his whole face smiling, looking with wonder at the little flame in his little fingers.

As I looked down, my whole face smiling, I envisioned an out-of-body experience where I saw the scene from above.  Immediately above I only see myself, singing Silent Night, and a tiny boy in awe of his candle.  A little higher up and there are a hundred people standing together, nearly all poor, nearly all Muslim, standing in the cold with their little candles and singing (or just listening...mostly listening).  Higher up and you see the whole slum, tin houses and brick houses and tarp huts, desperately poor and regular poor mixed together, with a strange constellation of lights moving together about its alleyways.  Higher still and you see a city of three million people, lights on in some districts and blacked out in others, full of old money and new money and no money, where the most powerful people in the state live in gigantic houses and fancy condo complexes side-by-side with the poorest slums I've ever seen.  Higher still and you see the largest state in the world, two hundred million people and counting, one percent of whom are celebrating like we are celebrating that night.

I couldn't get any higher than that.  But back down on the ground, I looked at a little boy with a candle lighting up his face and wondered at it all.

Scenes from a new city

While two of my friends were talking to each other, I noticed a monkey sitting in our doorway, chilling. None of us had noticed, but he really didn't look like he was up to any mischief, or anything much at all.  That's the third time a monkey has come inside in the last two weeks. Some people think they're pests, but I'd rather live in a neighborhood with monkeys than one without.

Three days ago I passed a dead man on the side of the road. That was the second dead body I've walked by this week. I'm pretty sure that this one was a homeless man who'd died after going to sleep on the road. The other one was a train accident victim. After less than half a year in this country, I've seen several times more bodies than I'd seen in my entire life to this point.  

We were only in our potential new neighborhood for about two minutes before a woman invited us inside. Her 16-year-old daughter made chai while her 17-year-old son told us he was studying design. Their hospitality was so sweet. The bottom floor of the small two-room-home was decorated like other Muslim homes...but when the son showed us his room on top, it had a giant stitching of Jesus's crucifixion on one wall and of Sai Baba on the other wall. He told us he had made them himself, and if we gave him a picture he'd make one of us too. We were profoundly confused.

As we walked through the crowded market in front of our new neighborhood today, there were people who stood out from the crowd. A man whose arm ended in stumps sat cross-legged on a rug. Two boys, each with only one leg, held a blanket between them as they called out mirroring chants. A small widow with her face entirely covered lifted up her hands without a word. A blind man made his way through the crowd as his son led him. A child called out to passersby from the ground while his brother lay unresponsive in front of him, a small circle of blood leaking through the bandages that encircled his head. I don't want them to have to live this way. The more you learn about their lives, the worse you feel. But what do you do about it???

On Thursday I took a walk alongside the river to spend some time in nature. I saw five different species of frog. I saw more human excrement than most sewer workers see in a year. I photographed a dozen species of butterfly. I watched kids who should have been in early elementary school collecting trash to recycle. I was invited to sit for cups of chai by two different groups of guys, was fed two samosas, and had more friendly chats than I can remember.

It's a beautiful place. And if it doesn't make you want to cry on a daily basis, then you know you're starting to get numb again.