Commentary

Unlike my visit in 1997 to this clinic, I don't have a laptop, so I haven't had the chance to keep a journal or polish up a bulk e-mail to my friends.   My, I do want to take the opportunity to share some of my observations:

Maybe those of you who have traveled to countries whose cultures are very different than ours share my view: being in a different culture is exciting. I find myself constantly surprised and often confused. "What are these people?" or "What the hell is that?"  Yes, it's at times frustrating. 

There's a mythical swan in India: it has such a good power to discriminate, that if you mix water with milk and then serve it to the swan, it will drink the milk, leaving the water behind!  That's somewhat akin to what one has to do when in India.   A lot of things are just a pain in the neck.  The infrastructure is falling apart.  The poverty makes lots of things difficult.  Cultural and communication barriers are sometimes slow things down or stop them from happening.

But.... but ... Mixed in with all the difficulties, I find   a beauty in the people. We in America are all immigrants over the last several millennia.  We even call our country the "melting pot."   India, in contrast, has been a native culture here for literally thousands of years.  This continuity alone, I  believe, gives the people a sense of belonging, of being in the right place.  The gods they believe in aren't wrathful in the way our gods are.  And I believe being an indigenous culture, there's  a richness, a complex tapestry of  tradition and history that we can only begin to glimpse. Because of all this, the children frequently, I believe, grew up feeling more that their culture had a rightful place in the creation... that they were part of a great goodness.  How does being part of countless generations living in the same place, worshipping the same gods and living the same traditions as your grandparents of 2000 years ago affect a society or the children that grow up in it?  I believe it creates a security, a safety, a sense of unchangingness that relaxes the children.  Children and adults laugh more, it seems, here.  (Maybe it's just that I'm the first white person they've ever met and I'm acting silly, sometimes unknowingly and sometimes deliberately?.

I find myself in wonderment, feeling like a ten year old, not fully understanding all I see here and wondering if it can ever be understood without growing up in it.  Part of the exhilaration felt traveling is the constant challenge to understand.  Everything is seen as if through the eyes of a child: new, unknown, sometimes threatening, more often interesting.

I'm aware of the risk of projecting my ideals onto the unknown culture and romanticizing it. But I also find myself asking myself: "What can I learn from this experience, from the differences and the commonalties between my culture and these peoples'."  Do they have something to teach? Can they discern the differences between our cultures?

I find myself always alert, watching... And India rewards my efforts...

The analogy that comes to mind here is one of walking through a beautiful, wrecked palace. This is the Indian culture, metaphorically. The walls are fallen in many places. In fact, the whole place is falling apart. Some people are chipping away at the painting, some mourning it's loss, some are ashamed of it and want to sell it for a cell phone.  But, sometimes there is a wonderfully beautiful painting on the wall, partly destroyed... mostly ignored by passers-by.  And when I see such a scene, which is frequently here, I'm stunned at it's beauty and freshness.

Yes, the developing world... in fact, the entire world faces big, big problems. The demands of the growing population will continue to erode India, probably, in my opinion, irretrievably ...  perhaps destroying it.  The newspapers write of the current program to eradicate polio. It's an eye-opener to be reminded of the diseases that we have eradicated. Some doctors go on strike to refuse to administer the vaccine, alleging that for many children, this is their 12th dose, far to many. The price of diesel fuel on which the cars and trucks run was increased last week (after the elections!) by 40% by the government (which distributes the gas.)  The truck drivers are on strike to complain of the increase. The state I'm in, Kerala, has abundant, monsoon rain...  but the cities are running out of water. Last week they had to shut down the main water system because a huge valve had failed.  The valve had been installed wrong.  Probably no one will get fired, not the inspector, not the crew, not the manager.  Corruption is rampant; ineffective bureaucracy runs everything.  India has 200 million people who are starving. (I've seen almost none of them, most are not in this part of the country though.) 

The Pope is coming to India. He has agreed to meet with some Indian traditionalist groups. They are planning to protest the aggressive religious conversion programs that his Christian church runs. India is a country of great tolerance, but the feeling here is that the conversion programs are frequently deceptively run, disguised as solely humanitarianism, doing good deeds like feeding the needy. Even Mother Teresa's work is called into question.  In India, people's whole lives are woven around their religious belief systems... in a way that I'm not sure we can really appreciate.   When their belief systems are manipulated, it tears the very fabric of their culture, destroying a heritage that is ancient, leaving people without the touchstones around which their inner life has developed.  Many people, including me, feel that the conversion programs are actually committing violence to the culture.  Given their dogmatic beliefs, I understand why certain religions are oriented towards conversion programs.  While I'm hesitant for a government to restrict these efforts, at the same time India has to protect itself from the cultural destruction that has befallen so many other societies at the hands of Western religions. 

As is India, so many other developing nations are slipping into increasing poverty... with increasingly large separations of the haves and have nots. And as we loose these cultures to poverty and Westernization, we irretrievably loose a rich heritage... one that we can learn from...  In the same way the the loss of the rain forests of the Amazon means loosing forever drugs that could be an enormous benefit to our well being.. so, too, in my opinion, the loss of non-Western cultures is a loss to humanity...

The arrow points to Cochin, from which I'm 20 miles inland.