Outsiders – Written by a member of the Servants India Y-Team

The follow reflection was written by a member of the Servants India Y-team.

Around our little perch, rockets explode, shaking our thin brick walls. The smoke is so thick that you can’t see where any of the sounds are coming from, but the crackling and booms coming from the narrow alleyway below sound like they could be directly under our floor. All of this is punctuated with children’s shrieks. But this is not a war; it’s Diwali, and it’s being celebrated the same way it has been for years and years. It’s the same with the festival of Moharram. Deaths, births, weddings, fights, crises, hopes and disappointments come and go, but like a primordial clock ticking, the calendar always swings back around to this day, and everyone puts up the garlands of tinsel and beats the drums and cooks up enormous pots of food over wood fires in the alleyways right on cue. The celebration goes on, come what may. 

There can be something comforting and inspiring about this: the discipline of setting aside times for celebration and following through with them knowing that the bad things in life are going to carry on anyway so the party should, too. 

There can be something deeply discouraging things about this: the way that outsiders and interventions come and go and yet everything stays the same. 

This week, there was an ill-thought-out “medical camp” in our slum that was sponsored by a well-intentioned organization with a hotline people can call to report children who are in distress (abused, abandoned, etc.)  The staff came to offer free medical care for a day and to distribute literature about their group’s services for vulnerable children. Of course, none of the people they were targeting could read the flyers they handed out, and their free medical camp only played into ideas of scarcity as people lined up frantically, regardless of whether or not they were sick at the time. Most of our neighbors have very little understanding about what makes them sick, or about how medicine works—but it does work, sometimes. And who knows when you’ll fall ill again, and whether or not you’ll be able to afford more medicine when it happens? Might as well get some free stuff now to have on hand. Many young children were even lined up to see the doctor all by themselves—which is absurd. How can a five–year-old accurately describe symptoms, understand a diagnosis, or remember which pills to take when and for how long? Medical camps like this one also discourage parents from taking their children to one of several private clinics or public hospitals nearby, and serve as a stop-gap method that delays the real change that is so badly needed to make the existing facilities work. 

Nonetheless, one of the staff members’ only job was to run around photographing impoverished children receiving free medical care, and I’m sure that will be quite moving on the group’s website, or in their newsletter, or whatever. But because there’s no follow-up to these kinds of feel-good projects, Child Helpline won’t realize that their credibility in this community was completely destroyed within a few hours of their leaving. Someone had an allergic reaction to one of the medicines she had received from the doctor, and as I rushed to the ER with this panicked woman who was struggling to breathe, her sister was announcing to every person we passed on our way out to the road: “Throw all your medicine away! Those people gave us bad medicine—look what it’s doing to her!” And nearly everyone did—thousands of rupees of medicine, thrown away. And trust of this charitable organization was turned to suspicion and anger, just like that. 

But the conundrum didn’t end there. Because when we arrived at the ER and showed them the medicine that she had taken right before beginning to feel mental confusion and her throat and airways tightening up, the interns who were staffing the place without supervision from other doctors promptly gave her an injection that caused a second reaction and sent the woman panicking and literally running out of the hospital, refusing to accept the oxygen mask they wanted to give her with medicine to open up her airways. The medical students assumed that she must be a mental patient and sent her home with a couple of antacids and some pills for anxiety.  I’m ashamed to say that I was inclined to agree with them about anxiety being the cause of her irrational behavior—until we were walking out of the hospital, when I got a second look at the box of medicine she had taken and it dawned on me that the drug they had injected her with was the same one that had caused her allergic reaction in the first place. Having disregarded what she was telling them, the staff at the ER had made the sloppy mistake of trying to “treat” her by giving her a second dose of the medicine she was allergic to. 

At 3 a.m. the next morning, when one of our neighbors caught a young teenage boy in the act of breaking into his house to steal, a crowd of angry people quickly formed, mostly people whose homes had also been recently broken into, and we were woken up by the ruckus. There has been a string of such nighttime thefts in our community lately. People here own so little that they are hit hard by the theft of a cell phone, a wad of cash, or merchandise for a small store they run out of their home.  And our neighbors’ poverty ironically makes them especially vulnerable to thieves.  Even though rich people own more that’s worth stealing, they have the means to protect it with guards and gates and high, sturdy walls; the poor may or may not have a door on their shack, or the ladder or staircase going up to the roof may provide a way into their rooms from above. In our neighborhood, most people’s homes are packed so close together that many of the roofs are connected, and without access to bank accounts, a lot of people store their life’s savings in their homes. 

So all of that pent up fear and anger about the multiple robberies of the past two weeks was directed against this boy. He was certainly a child in distress, but we feared that the hotline staff’s presence might just stir up more wrath from the community since the memory of the “bad medicine” they had handed out was still fresh on everyone’s minds.  And we knew from past experience that it was a coin toss whether police would escalate the violence or restore peace. Following our desperate attempts to intervene and to reason with the crowd, and a few other voices calling for restraint, another neighbor who felt conflicted about the direction things were headed eventually did call the cops. But the boy was pretty roughed up and humiliated by the time they arrived, and just as everyone had predicted, they did nothing to help. After hauling the kid off to the station, they demanded a bribe from the man whose house had been broken into, and when he refused they simply let the thief go without even filing a report of the incident. 

It’s no wonder that people take the law into their own hands when there’s no higher authority to appeal to for help. And I shudder to think what kind of situation this poor child is going back into… probably back into the custody of adults who force him to risk his life to steal for them by climbing into houses at night, through the holes too small for them to fit through themselves. The police are as much to blame for this situation as the thieves themselves.

The next day, fears of theft continued but everyone went on with life as usual, and people prepared for the festival. They beat the drums. They hung up decorations. They held a community event in the square where the thief had been tied to a pole and interrogated the night before. It seems that the outsiders who interact with our community—the social workers, the loan sharks, the politicians, the police—either come in with open contempt for the people here, wearing contempt and indifference on their sleeve, or else arrive as “helpers” harboring a more subtle form of disdain that manifests as pity and condescension.  It’s as though none of these people speak the language of the locals, even though their attempts to communicate are made in Hindi. Meanwhile, the people who live here know that they can’t trust doctors, or charities, or government officials, or police—but for them this is nothing new. They’re used to that. And so they don’t set much stock by what any of those people say. The only people they can depend on are each other. They stick to what they know, and nothing ever changes.

Being outsiders ourselves, but wanting to carve out a completely novel role for ourselves, leaves us with a very thin place to stand. We have white faces and foreign passports and Hindi is not our first language, so we will never be able to dissolve into our neighbors’ society as completely as we would like. But it’s clear that whatever slow change we hope to catalyze, we won’t be able to do it as outsiders—or at least, we will have to be a very different kind of outsider than people have encountered before: the kind who are interested in listening and learning from people on the inside, and the kind who are willing to stick around long enough to become quasi-insiders ourselves.