I wrote the following a while ago and it is a bit long but I wanted to share it since it is so important to me and therefore to what is written in this blog. It was brought back to mind by another poem of Mary Oliver entitled *The Summer Day. The poem ends:
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
So here it is - this week and next:
What
do you think you would do if someone offered you the opportunity to be exposed to the
worst kind of poverty and suffering you could ever imagine? Add to
that exposure to death, flies,
mosquitos and racism? How would you feel?
In 1972 with
an offer of just those things, my friend Sue asked if I would like to
go to India with her to visit the communities of Mother Teresa and
Jean Vanier in order for her to get material for a book she was
commissioned to write. Naturally, I said, ‘Not on your life’!
However, less than 24 hours later knowing, however faintly, that this
was one of those life-changing decisions and knowing that, however
frightening it would be, it was something that I must do, I phoned
her and said ‘yes’, I would go.
So we, and a young woman
who was to take the photos were irrevocably committed to this
life-changing adventure.
In
March of 1972 we boarded a plane at Toronto airport. Outside, there was snow and indeed, the treacherous remains of an
ice-storm. Many hours later after stops
at Rome, Cairo we landed in
Mumbai (it was still Bombay at that time). Here, we changed planes
and began a flight across India to Calcutta.
About
half-way into our flight there was a stop. I cannot now remember the
name of the place but it was a scheduled stop. This was
long before the kind of security we know so well at airports but
none the less, it was my first experience of the new life into which
I was entering for the next few weeks. The plane landed on a tarmac
but not at a terminal. We were allowed to get out and stand on the
tarmac if we wished - which we did. I pulled out my camera and began
to take a photo of this new kind of hot and dry country. Almost
immediately, there was a very frightening and very large gun being
pointed at me and words spoken which I, of course did not understand.
Finally someone suggested I put away my camera - that was the
offending activity. Needless to say, I very quickly did as asked and
all was well. I have no idea what it was that I should not be trying
to photograph but it was the beginning of some very new lessons in
the art of survival.
Finally,
more or less on time, we arrived at Calcutta airport. Here again, we
had to cross the tarmac (this was also before the time of those
lovely gizmos that get you right to the terminal). The heat -
especially in contrast to what we had left behind us in Toronto was
intense though not unbearable. Once we had found our luggage and
enquired about transport to our hotel we began the next stage of this
amazing journey.
The car that took us from the airport was, like much of the transport we had access to in
India at that time, a bit old and a bit rickety but it worked. Here, as we drove
somewhat erratically through the streets of Calcutta we were assailed
by a world I could not have imagined. We drove through streets past
families who clearly, were living on the pavement, past buildings
whose poverty I could never have imagined. We inhaled a smell which I
found throughout the areas we visited which I now identify as cooking
fires (from these same street-dwelling families). There were people
everywhere, walking, riding bikes, driving mostly incredibly old cars. There
was noise such as I had never experienced before: cries, talking,
selling wares, children shouting and animals - mostly cows. The animals were of course, the sacred bovines who cannot be interfered with. As far as I could tell, these animals were free to stand in the middle of the road until they chose to move.
Cars whipped around them, often enough onto the other side of the
road into oncoming traffic until they could move more or less back
into their own lane. The driving was, altogether, breathtakingly
dangerous and yet, I gather, not often fatal.
Finally,
the buildings we passed became a little less poor though many had a
rather neglected look. Many were relics of the time of the Raj and
simply had not been kept up. Then, as we got close to our hotel we
found ourselves on broad boulevards with all the modern shops you
might expect to see in any major city. The bus eventually drew up to
the Grand Hotel - a hotel which in fact, lived up to its name. It was
elegant, old India, even air-conditioned and much appreciated by us.
For by now in an amazingly short time, we had been assailed with
sights and smells and noises and heat as if we had landed on another
planet.
Why
you might ask were we staying in the Grand Hotel when we had come to
experience the poverty, death, disease and general dark side of
India? It had been Mother Teresa’s suggestion because she, rightly,
understood that we would not be able to cope if we lived with her.
The
time we had in that amazing city was full to the brim with the
contrasts of our world: deep unimaginable poverty and suffering and
great wealth such as we experienced in our hotel. It was a shock to
the system of course but all the better for that because that sadly,
is the world we live in. It reminded me of the story of Lazarus and the
rich man in the bible, where Lazarus lived against the wall of the rich
man’s property and was never even noticed. There were Lazarus’s
everywhere we went.
I wish I had words to explain the transforming effect of this journey. For
the first time in my life I touched a literally unimaginable combination
of desperate suffering and joy. Joy? How could that be? I do not
know exactly but I do know that in the midst of the suffering:
hunger, disease, lonely death on the streets, abandonment of children
- in the midst of that we met amazing human generosity and care. We met
people sharing their meager possessions in order to help
another who had less. We met hospitality and kindness. We also from
time to time met people who did not like us because we were white.
This was the first time I had ever experienced the kind of prejudice which
black people and Indians had faced constantly in our North American world. What an
experience that was and it opened my eyes to yet another human
reality that should not be but sadly, is.
I
do not want this to make light of the suffering which is real and
horrible and wrong but I knew that one of the most transforming parts of this
journey was that I learned first hand some of the wonderful goodness
of human beings in the face of terrible adversity. This was the
beginning of a transformation in myself and in the direction I would
take with the remainder of my life. I learned something of what the
poor have to give to the rich and about what are the real riches of life. Time
and again we met people whose misery should have crushed them and it
did not. It deepened my faith and my hope and made me want to spend
the rest of my life trying to find that core of joy.
*Mary Oliver: New and Selected Poems, Beacon Press, Boston, 1992
