I have spent the last 8 days in Delhi, India – an incredibly busy and crowded city, with beautiful people, stunning monuments that are older than the “birthday” Canada is celebrating this year, ridiculous traffic, some green spaces, and much poverty.
I have traveled to many countries, and poverty looks similar everywhere. It breaks my heart. Also familiar is the way people walk over, around and through the poor.
Living quarters – under the highway in Delhi.
And, sadly, I am reminded that every country seems to have a people they point to as “less than” – less deserving of respect, consideration, time, compassion. In Delhi, my experience of this came from the driver of our car who, at every opportunity, told us in no uncertain terms that he considered the Bangladeshi immigrants who come over the border to be the lowest of the low. Assertions he made evenly and calmly, as if they were indisputable facts; as if he had been saying these things his whole life. Maybe he had. And was sharing this with us as if providing a service.
His comments reminded me of how easy it is to vilify a people – with our without personal experience – and to pass this intolerance, disdain, and hatred on to others. How easily we can accept someone else’s belief and even carry it forward without any experience or reason to back it up – often without thinking. Often thinking we are justified in passing along ‘the truth.’
But the truth is subjective.
And as we drove by homes made from weathered plastic tarp, fastened to chain link fences under highway overpasses, children sleeping curled up on concrete blocks as traffic zipped by, I wondered what horrors these people left behind to make this life seem better?
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