No Picture Day...Mumbai, 12 hours till we run

After a pre-marathon workshop at Asha, I took an afternoon off to rest up for the marathon tomorrow. It’s my first free time since leaving Steinbach and that feels like about a year ago. It’s interesting how constant change and unfamiliarity seems to make time stand still. Constant change and familiarity (like at home) is just the opposite, time races past.
I was too wound up to actually just sit around and rest. Plus, I needed some safety pins for my running bib. I’m running as number 5003 with the subtitle “VETERAN”. Either I’ve been recruited to the Indian Army or they are under the sadly guided impression that I’ve been here before! Anyways, back to getting the safety pins. It was a long meandering walk till I found a small “general store” along the street and picked up a couple of packages of pins (I think all 7 of us will likely need them). I mentally stored landmarks as I walked because I was quickly in unfamiliar territory. On the way back I started to forget my landmarks, but told myself I’d know it when I see it. And it worked, I made it back to the hotel without any wayward incidents (although I kind of hoped I would get lost, just for the adventure - but then I wouldn’t rest…). I passed all kinds of interesting things and my photographer’s finger was on the trigger the entire walk. But I took no pictures. I couldn’t do it. These are people living their everyday lives, not monuments, not sideshows, not performers. For Canadians the pictures would tell a powerful and necessary story, but how do I communicate that as I invade their personal space?
Instead, I just walked up to people and talked to them (well, o.k., I was brave enough two times). There is a slum area just a few hundred meters from the hotel. I stopped in front of a roadside stand where a fellow about Luke’s age was setup with an ancient sewing machine. The stand was about the size of the little shelters that farmers in our area setup at the end of driveways for their kids to wait for the school bus. Except it was made from about 10 different materials of various types and shapes and leaning together at crazy angles. As we briefly talked (it was difficult as his English was almost nil), I thought how vast the chasm was between us and yet how small. As small as stopping to care. Stopping to take interest. Stopping to see him as more than a quaint picture addition to the thousands of images I already have. It’s really the same at home. How many unseen neighbours do I have? The Dutch Connection trailer court is not unlike some of the sites over here. It’s nicely tucked away though, out of site, not lining the road beside a nice hotel. We’re very sly at home, oh so careful about protecting ourselves from our own visions of poverty. And so quick to blame people for their circumstances.
Jesus follows the Beautitudes with the passages on being Salt and Light (check out Matthew 5 for a change). After blessing the poor, the meek, the hungry, the thirsty and the mourning, he tells the rest of us to make a bloody difference. It’s no coincidental alignment of scripture. I feel like He’s walking right beside me on this trip and “gnarking” me the whole time (something my Uncles used to say when they got fed up with me nagging them to drive the tractor on my summer farm visits – probably some low-german derivative twisted into English…).
Immanuel, Asha Resource Centre Manager, closed his presentation at the workshop with the story of the starfish. You know the one. The moral being that throwing just one of the millions of starfish washed up on the seashore back into the sea may seem pointless, but it makes all the difference to that one. It’s true of course and a very appropriate description of the work of Asha and Ten Thousand Villages. So many lives have been changed and in some cases a cycle of poverty has even been broken for a family or a small community.
But I’m a macro-economist. I don’t fully buy it. It makes all the difference to the one but it doesn’t end the cycle. It doesn’t change the absolute certainty that the tides will continue to form and millions will continue to die. I think we need both. We need the fair traders who will work at the micro economics and affect change in small increments that occasionally become larger agents of change. But we also need the Ghandi’s to affect system change. Jesus was very personal in His ministry, one on one. But in the final gesture, He sacrificed it all to affect global change. Maybe, we all just need to realize that He’s done it by living like we believe it. And maybe Canadian Mennonites need a new Anabaptist Ghandi to stir up our placid and comfortable lives. I’ve been wearing my “make poverty history.ca” white arm band from Ten Thousand Villages for about 6 months without taking it off. It feels like an empty statement here in India. I feel like I should throw it in one of trash filled gutters running all over this neighbourhood. Wonder if Bono has ever been to India?
Well, see you at the finish line!