The Slum

The slum is a hard, draining place to work. I love the work we’re doing, but I must admit, I don’t look forward to going there every day, and usually I can’t wait to be done. It’s a maze of trash, open sewers, filthy dogs, tattered clothes, and hard, weathered faces. The flies are almost unbearable in some places, and it’s hard not to lose it when they’re going from raw sewage in the gutter, to a pile of cow dung on the road, to your face. The stench is so strong sometimes that it almost knocks you back. Especially in this heat and humidity, it’s more than unpleasant. At the end of the day, we come home to our air conditioned flat and go immediately to the bathroom to scrub the slum from our skin. There are some things, though, that don’t just wash off.

Like the little girl today, malnourished and covered in flies, with a mother who didn’t know how old she was, how old her kids were, whether or not they’d been immunized, and who doesn’t take them to the doctor – ever – because she’s afraid of it. During the interview, Charu turned to us and said, “It’s a terrible situation. These children have no reason to be alive, it’s only that they happened to be born. The mother knows nothing at all and doesn’t even concern herself with them. What are they to do?” Or the 12 year-old boy the other day with sores all over his legs and arms, being grazed constantly by flies, carrying around his baby brother. Or the little girl tidying up a pile of rusty nails, or the toddler in the doorway playing with a kitchen knife. Or the group of children we saw yesterday, playing and cooling off in the open drain. And the group of 40 people who have to stand in line every morning to use the single toilet they share, or the woman who only goes to the bathroom once a day, when it’s dark, because that’s when it is safest for her in the open field they use. And the man who has had diarrhea for months and doesn’t know how to read the instructions on the pills and ORS packet he got from the clinic. And the wives who don’t want to have any more children, but who know (and tell us, with a bashful smile) that it’s not their decision at all. We can scrub the dirt and stink and filth off our bodies, but this part of the slum stays with us. For this part, I go to the gym…though the treadmill is a fitting metaphor for how fruitless that escape attempt can be.

In one area we visit, the slum owner – a man they call “The Don” – lives in a huge, beautiful house with balconied windows overlooking his land. This man looks out his windows every day and sees people living this way. And he does nothing to help improve these squalid conditions that he willingly and knowingly rents out. I don’t understand how someone could just allow people to live like this. On the other hand, I suppose, it’s a home. And the conditions, as horrid as they are, are better than some alternatives. At least they have a roof over their heads and a relatively safe place to sleep. At least there’s water and at least there’s electricity. At least here, in the city, they can find work and food. At least they have each other. At least they are still alive. These are the things that show in the smiles that greet us and the faces of the kids who run around us, laughing and playing like things couldn’t be better. It’s not that they don’t know what a better life looks like – they see it looming above them on the other side of the wall. (That is what makes Delhi so different from the slum areas I visited in Tanzania – people could go most of their lives there without ever having to see anything different. But here, it’s right next door.) It just isn’t their reality, and things really could be worse. For some of them, this is the better life.

This is not, of course, an excuse to just shrug our shoulders, throw up our hands, dismissing hard truths as “ignorant bliss” – “Oh, but they look sooo happy” – and say this has nothing to do with us, there’s nothing we can do. Because no one wants to live like this, and no one should have to. It’s something to keep in mind, though, when I feel utterly disgusting at the end of the day – to acknowledge the reality, scrub away what I can, and take in what I can’t, because it’s the stuff that doesn’t wash off that we’re here for.