COMPARING OUR LIVES
People are getting tired of not having electricity in the evening and not being able to take a shower and no being able to flush the toilet and not being able to watch TV. We have plenty to eat and drink and comfortable beds and a lot of free time. But people are getting antsy and are ready to go back to normal.
But all around us are people in real trouble, who were caught in flood waters and just escaped with their lives, who lost close friends and family members, whose houses and all their possessions were washed away who are relying on others for a place to sleep and food to eat.
So how can we be antsy and starting to complain?
But then I think of people that I have visited in the last year or two who have one light bulb with electricity, who have to fetch water in a pot on their head from a well to cook with and bathe with and wash clothes with, who don’t have a toilet at all if they live on a little farm and who share a toilet with a community if they live in the city. These people cook over a clay stove, often using cowdung, or wood that they have to gather each day and carry home. They have a change of clothes for each person but no closet full of clothes. The only furniture they have is a string bed or two which the whole family sleeps in and use to sit on during the day.
For these people this is normal. They have much less than we do this week, but this is all they will ever have. And they aren’t antsy or compaining.
When I visit a village house in rural Gujurat I am haunted later, and even more so when I have taken photographs families in the Ramesh Singh Boundary in Varanasi where each family lives in a ten by ten makeshift house with walls and a roof made of plastic and pieces of tin. Everyone is smiling and apparently satisfied. They invite me for dinner and share what they have.
I am haunted afterward because I can fly into Varanasi for a month, live in a comfortable guest house, eat in well decorated cafes and enjoy being immersed in the liveliness of street streets full of all kinds of people and then fly home to Swannanoa. Where I have a house that is too big for me, a marvelous view, two old very serviceable cars, air conditioning and heat and hot showers, safe running water, plenty of food, a very comfortable bed for me alone and a housefull of possessions.
It isn’t right. I know it isn’t right. It isn’t fair. I have done nothing to deserve the comfortable way I live and the chance to travel around the world. And they don’t deserve the way that they live also. They work harder than I do and do so cheerfully.
So this is what I think about when we sit here in the dark, without electricity or water or internet or cell phonnes for a week and feel we are suffering hardship.
As I write this the power comes on and the lights come on and everyone cheers. And it does feel good. But nothing has changed in Gujurat or Varanasi. And I will continue to be haunted.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 