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The Beginning of a Beautiful Frenzyprint story

August 09, 2011

Deep Jyoti India
Anoop Jain

First, some contextual cow dung, you know, to fertilize the narrative. Spent the last two weeks sleeping on planks of wood in 100 degree heat with a couple hours of electricity everyday and no running water. We were sharing a plank of wood on the side of the road. Our plank of wood then got moved to an old abandoned storage room. Dimensions of said room were 8 feet by 8 feet and our roommates included tropically sized cockroaches and toads. We followed the monsoon on a 24 hour train ride from Bihar to Delhi where we waited with it patiently at a bus stand for 4 hours before beginning our ascent in to the foothills of the Himalayas.

Clean out your ears for this next part. Slurp slurp slurp go the noodles. Burp burp burp go the monks. He he ha ha ho ho go the children. Splat spalt splat go the banana peels. Pitter patter pitter patter goes the rain. Whoosh whoosh whoosh goes the water filter. And as I sit here avoiding the monsoon and postponing my next diarrhetic attack, I can’t help but smile.

It’s hard for me to describe how I feel. It’s bitter sweet. Let’s start with the sweet. A week ago we started serving meals to children at our tutoring center in Bihar. The weekly meal schedule is bananas on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, a healthy porridge on Wednesday, and lentils and rice on Saturday. In the first week we served about 600 bananas, 150 bowls of porridge, and 150 bowls of rice and lentils. We even employed a mother of one of our students, Santosh Kumar, to do the cooking on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Her family is extremely poor. We spoke with the father. There are 6 family members in total. They earn maybe 400-500 Rupees a week (about $10). By hiring the mother to cook meals twice a week, we are increasing their family income by 200 Rs a week. We hope that this is a step in the right direction.

Then we got to Mcleod Ganj. How am I supposed to describe how I felt when I walked in to our finished soup kitchen for the first time? How am I supposed to describe to you how I felt when I saw real life refugees walking through the doors and being served huge portions of vegetables and noodles and tofu and salad and clean water from our brand new water filtration unti? The meal plan here is 90 Rs per week ($2), or 15 Rs (25 cents) per day. Many of our refugees actually qualify for free food, so they don’t have to pay anything. I sat and ate on a table in the corner looking out of the newly installed windows that look up to the 15,000 ft snow covered peaks. I glanced over my shoulder and saw all the refugees eating, and my body was covered in goose bumps.

Now for the bitter. If I am honest with you, then I must say that I have never felt so overwhelmed in my life. I came to India feeling as though public health initiatives were vehicles for social justice and liberation from harsh social realities. I will agree that to a certain extent they are, but I may have greatly overestimated their powers.

Bananas and noodles swamped in vegetables and steamy tomato broths are a step in the right direction. But I look at Santosh Kumar. I could feed him a banana a day for the rest of his life. But would that help him break free from a broken educational system? Would that help his father earn enough money so that when they need to go to the hospital they could afford to? Would that improve the teacher-student ratio at his school from 1:100 to something a bit more reasonable? You know the answer to all those questions.

So then what the hell are we even doing here? It is extremely self-satisfying to think that The Banana is the next great social liberator. Or that access to medicines or adequate health care will transform the lives of entire communities. They can, in certain individual cases. But we have to proceed with caution. Because believing in that is what keeps us going. It gives us the goose bumps and that warm fuzzy feeling that lines our insides. But it is that very belief that I think can also be so unbelievably crippling for the people we work with, because our solution for improving a particular social reality might be overly simplistic. And while I subscribe to Occam’s Razor as a personal philosophy, it might not be ubiquitous.

To affect true transformation is a multi-dimensional effort. And it is that very realization which is so daunting. I would be a fool to think that some fruit and vegetables are going to free refugees and villagers from lives of oppression and suffering. It is going to take partnerships with educators, doctors, engineers, and mental health professionals, to really change the overall disposition of the people we are working with. I think that we should view our food programs as one of the many building blocks that are essential for helping those with a need become empowered enough to construct a life which makes sense to them. Nothing more and nothing less.

Before leaving the village, Santosh Kumar told us that he is currently ranked 7th (academically) out of a class of over 100 students. Every time I start to feel overwhelmed, I am going to think about that. Because even though he still defecates outside and his father doesn’t make enough money to take them to the doctor, I know that we are starting to slowly plug the gaping holes in his life. Santosh Kumar is the seed of something beautiful.