Journal 6

Today I am reflecting on my experience driving and walking down the streets of India. The women and children tapping and banging on the windows, begging for money or food, is an uncomfortable reality here. It breaks my heart to watch. The drivers tell me that I shouldn’t roll down the window, and it takes everything in me to turn my head away. I knew about poverty in India before coming here, but nothing can really prepare you for seeing it in real life. Seeing people living on the streets, seeing children who are not in school but instead begging on the side of the road calling out to you, is something that has really stayed with me. It brings tears to my eyes even writing this because I know that many of these people simply cannot provide what is considered necessary in Canada for their families, things that we often think of as basic human rights. I feel helpless to it. I also feel guilty because who am I to wander through someone else’s streets, looking for my next souvenir to bring home to my comfortable life in Kamloops, while people are suffering all around me? Who am I to call the driver to take us back to the hotel, where the sheets are clean, the water is hot, and I know I have a safe place to sleep that night? I feel uncomfortable with how easy that is for me when that same sense of safety and comfort is not guaranteed for so many people here. When the odds of being born in Canada into a middle-class family are so much greater for me than being born into a life of poverty here, why is my luck greater than theirs? I know this is privilege, but is it also luck? Maybe it is both. I did nothing to earn the circumstances I was born into, just as the people I see on the streets did nothing to deserve the circumstances they were born into. And I also know that people in Canada suffer too, and that hurts me as well because I can’t realistically help everyone, so I feel stuck.

I don’t think I have an answer for this yet. Maybe that is part of what I am supposed to sit with. I don’t want to look away because it is uncomfortable, but I also don’t want to turn someone else’s hardship into a lesson for myself. I think all I can do right now is acknowledge my privilege, sit with the discomfort, and let this experience change the way I understand poverty, inequality, and the life I have been given. I think being uncomfortable is a good thing for me, and it teaches me lessons for my future practice in social work.