Day Nine

We got to sleep in a bit today as we skipped the work site this morning and went on a tour of a nearby children’s home. This is a private facility supported by donors for caring for a variety of needy children. The home was founded in the seventies to house children who’d been abandoned. Many of these children have developmental or physical handicaps so the home includes orthopedic services and other forms of medical care. I prepared myself for the worst, assuming it would be even more heartbreaking than the children living in the squalor of the slums. But what I found was a storybook facility designed for children at every turn. The first thing you see as you’re about to enter is a bassinet nestled in an alcove in the property’s guarding wall. It’s not exactly inviting, but the message is clear. All children are welcome and no questions will be asked. As we posed for pictures next to it, we were warned not to touch it as it’s attached to a sensor (and monitored by a guard through a small window in the back of the alcove). Walking through the gate, we entered a courtyard, lush by Delhi standards. On each side, little buildings make up a compound, connected by paths. To the side of a large lawn is a nice garden that was built by a british team as part of some reality TV series that sounds a lot like “While You Were Out”. We toured the whole facility, but only a few of the daycare rooms were in use. The children sat on the carpet in a loose circle and recited little poems for us, under prompting from their teachers. It was adorable. There were a fair number of toys and games stacked on shelves and arranged on the floor, but mostly the children sat quietly, eyes agog at us. The behavior here was a stark contrast to that at the slums. There, we’re treated like exotic visitors to be touched and queried, whereas here I felt like an intruder disturbing their quiet little world.

We walked from one building to the next and saw where the babies and infants are kept in cribs. We saw the bunk beds for the older children. We saw the handicapped children laid out on blankets in the sparse sunlight, under the watchful eyes of a few nurses. The children live here from the time they arrive until they’re twelve or thirteen when they have to be handed over to a government run institution. During that time, the hope is that they will receive enough of an education, or treatment for their disability that they can survive in the harsher environment. Ideally, they are adopted (and thousands of children have been). Priority goes to Indian parents living in India, but many children are taken in by parents from Europe. We were lucky enough to see a couple taking home an Indian boy who looked about two. I think they were British.

It’s all a little confusing. Here’s a situation by all accounts horrible. Children abandoned by their families because they are too poor to feed them. That means these families are worse off than the ones in Bawana. Yet through private donation (and a pittance from the government) this organization is giving these children a better life and a chance for a future. It must be a situation where the small minority that’s horrendously needy is cared for at an acceptable level, while the great throngs of people who are only horribly needy are left to fend for themselves. It makes sense on some level, but is frustrating on others.

Bawana was founded as a colony about ten years ago when the government passed some new initiative to clean up Delhi. That meant finding homes for the squatters living by the river in makeshift communities. To ease the effort of moving so many people who have so little to lose, the government sold them tiny plots of land in Bawana for a quarter of their value. The whole thing reminds me of “District 9”. I would assume the film was based on this if I didn’t suspect this sort of thing happens to undesirables all over the world, and all throughout time (Trail of Tears, anyone?). Ten years later, we have Bawana: a hodgepodge of buildings loosely tied together with various forms of infrastructure. We’ve got open sewers, electricity strung randomly from house to house, goats in sweaters. It’s chaos. I think back on my time in Irvine, California (the largest planned community in the world) and feel that somewhere these two extremes must meet in the middle and offer a picture of what success looks like. If we know what it takes to make a community work, and we recognize the overall economic benefit of avoiding slums and all the problems and costs they bring, how can we miss an opportunity to start from scratch with something more likely to succeed than Bawana? Basically, Habitat is subsidizing the shortcuts made by the Indian government when they relocated these people in order to clean up Delhi.

With such productive thoughts in mind, I head back to the worksite. It’s become clear we’re not contributing to the build as much as the laborers. Maryann partnered up with the mason and laid a significant amount of brick, but the rest of us stood around and sometimes passed bricks into the house. That was pretty fun. I wish I knew some assembly line songs. It’s our second to last day, so I’m not surprised there’s less for us to do. We knew the project would continue on without us when we left, so there can’t be work left over that they’re counting on us for. Habitat is big on insuring no reliance on our help is fostered in the community. We’re here to lend a hand and contribute as a partner, not to take over and fix things.

After our bus ride back to the hotel, my team and I head over to the Park Hotel to take a yoga class. I wish we’d found out about these before. They begin just after our work day ends, and while I’m too sore to do a good job, trying to hit my poses feels great on my tired muscles. The setting is ideal. We’re on the third story of the hotel, on a tiered sundeck overlooking the swimming pool. Cushy yoga mats are all laid out for us in the dimly lit darkness. The instructor has a strict lilt to his voice and he begins the class rushing us through a dozen sun salutations. I’m winded as we go the mat and he pushes us into ever advancing poses. When he realizes that my teammate Katrina is insanely flexible and well practiced, the rest of the class is about him seeing how contorted he can get her. The rest of us struggle to keep up, coming no where close. When she stood on her own head, I knew I was out of my league. Halfway through the class, I looked over to another part of the hotel and saw a few monkeys sitting, watching us perform for them. A staffer quickly chased them off. I wonder if he had not, would they have joined in?

After some lengthy showers under the endless hot water afforded by the hotel, we hiked over to a pan asian restaurant called Q-ba and ate an eclectic mix of foods we’d been missing (I had lentils again). We sat outside and looked out on the Delhi night. A single firework went off over the presidential palace and kept us waiting for another. We got back to the hotel around 10:30 making this one of the latest nights I’d been able to keep awake for since arriving in India.