There are no children here

Life is so damn beautiful sometimes you tear right up.

All day today I was focusing on work challenges and getting plans together to go visit the Taj Mahal this week. After work I got one of our drivers to take me down to a shopping area where I was going to pick up some shirts from a tailor and traffic brought us to a standstill about ten minutes into our drive.

So as the car is stopped on the crowded street like the ones you can see in the videos on my previous posts I look out the right side window, the grass covered median sandwiched between 8 lanes of traffic a few feet from the window glass.

Now you learn immediately in Hyderabad that poverty is real, it is common, it affects all ages, and it is just as sad as you had hoped it wouldn't be.

Frankly, it is a huge moral dilemma that I need to share with you at length another time because it has been tugging at me every time I am around it. I only bring this background up now for the purpose of telling that what I am about to write is coming from someone with two straight weeks witnessing tragic examples of poverty.

Well outside of my car are about nine little children on and around the two foot high median. Now the oldest child had to be 6 or 7. Two were babies, one was in the arms of a tiny girl, no more than 5 herself and this little girl carried this baby with the familiarity of your aunt who has carried all of the kids in the family a thousand times. Amidst a crowd of children so small and vulnerable that you wouldn't consider them safe together inside a parked minivan for twenty minutes, it was the second baby that took my heart with her.

Before I took this trip I would easily point to a crying naked child as the icon of third world poverty. But one part of that image is inaccurate and made for an American audience. You see the commercials that show a crying child want your empathy, and to your typical frumpy suburban housewife in Des Moines that calls the 800 number, the visual of a lil brown kid from a far away land crying in tattered rags on some decrepit street tugs at her heartstrings and frankly, I am glad because the group she sends the check to will make better use of the pennies-a-day donation than the typical array of Hot Pockets her money normally funds. But we are sympathetic because we know a child cries when they are upset, scared, or hungry so it registers quickly that impoverished children should be distraught and commercials depicting this resonates well with that reasoning.

Now I can list a thousand reasons why that little girl should have been balling. This is a helpless young life amidst perilous conditions; standing unclothed and dirty, with no foreseeable future other than to continue meekly begging from motorists like the children surrounding her, teetering on a patch of concrete at night in the middle of a city street with no supervision. This was her life.

Real tragedy is the child who is not crying because this is her reality.