Journal 9-16-2010

Journal 9-16-2010

Today we had most of the morning free. I spent almost the entire time reading my book “the girl who played with fire.” At about 11:00 a woman who was a former social worker came to talk to us about the slums in India. This was of particular interest to me because I had just finished reading City of Joy. From our discussion with her it became obvious that slums have changed dramatically since the time of the City of Joy. Various government projects from housing to food programs have drastically improved the lives of millions of Indians who still live in slums. Eventually we broke off the discussion to go eat lunch.

After Lunch we piled into a hired car and went to go visit a slum. The slum is called S.M. Nagel. As we pulled off the main road we saw this.

It was an extremely colorful view of buildings that were incredibly clean. This type of a view is very rare in India. We were also greeted by some children who greeted us with the familiar phrase “Hello, what is your name?” (this is like the mantra of the Indian youth, they are constantly saying this to us). One boy shook my hand, kissed it and then proceeded to press all the buttons on my watch. We followed our guide through the slum which was actually quite clean. We stopped at an unmarked doorway and stepped down some awkward stairs into darkness. Immediately something was thrown at my chest. As my eyes adjusted I realized we were being greeted by about 10 women, who were throwing jasmine flowers at us. They then gave us jasmine necklaces and smeared yellow powdered paint on our faces. After we had been given a proper greeting they brought us further inside what was some sort of community center built by St. Andrews church.

We were beckoned inside and asked to sit in chairs, while the women of the community sat across from us on the floor. We thought this was odd so we tried to sit on the floor also but they made such a fuss that we gave up and sat in the chairs. Some of the women did a welcoming dance for us, and one woman with only a few teeth sang a song in Tamil.

After the singing and dancing we let the women ask us questions about life in the United States. They asked about marriage, household practices, homes, food, size of families and many other things. Then it was our turn to ask questions. I don’t know specifically what questions we asked. However, we quickly found out that the biggest problem for this group of women was abuse from the husbands who seemed to come home drunk on a regular basis. One woman told us, in the slum, 90% of husbands get drunk then come home and hit/beat their wives on a regular basis. This was shocking to hear! I had been under the impression that the largest problem facing the people living in the slums was related to the availability of jobs and food. As it turns out, alcoholism is the biggest problem. Husbands spend a significant portion of their wages on liquor reducing the amount of money left to devote to food for the family. This forced families to remain in poverty and prevented families from having enough money to eat well. We continued to ask questions, then after a while we were asked to sing. We did a good job this time. I forget what we sang but we did well, and closed with Um Ya Ya. Then the meeting seemed to be officially over. We ended up taking pictures of tons of little kids that swarmed us.

Then they grabbed the camera and took a some pictures of us.

Our experience in the slum was really eye opening and completely changed my view of India’s slums. The people living in the slums are an incredibly close community. They were the must gracious hosts that we have had so far. They also seem to be the most open and friendly of the people we have interacted with. Although the people of S.M. Nagel still have significant problems their lives have been drastically improved by government projects in the recent past.