Sights and Sounds of the City
"Find if you can a more uninviting spot than Calcutta . . . the place is so bad by nature that human efforts could do little to make it worse, but that little has been done faithfully and assiduously."

Calcutta is image overload. Upon stepping onto the street I am immediately bombarded with images. Worn rickshaws in various states of disrepair (and the drivers themselves in various states of disrepair). Women in brightly colored saris. Bollywood movie posters. Chai tea stands with old tin pots and little single-use clay cups. Portraits of Hindu gods Kali, Krishna, Shiva or Ganesh, with garlands of bright yellow and orange marigolds strung over the portraits. Children giggling and playing with their made-from-things-they-found toys. Haggard street dogs snoozing on the street. Men bathing near a community water pump on the sidewalk. Hawkers selling everything from plastic squeaky toys to jute bags to cheap shirts for 100 rupees (about $2; one noteworthy t-shirt remarked "1999: What A Year!"). Men clearing their sinus passages and spitting. Indian flags. The ubiquitous grungy, dreadlocked skinny white guy traveler with a giant backpack and smoking a cigarette. Garbage in big piles on the street waiting to be picked up by who-knows-whom or to be rifled through by ragpickers. Rickety public buses with conductors shouting out the destination for those would-be passengers who sometimes have to take a running jump onto the bus. Food vendors selling baskets of fruit and vegetables, next to large black tin kettles oiled up to cook fresh chapati or other breads.

I hesitate beginning this particular dispatch with Trevelyan's quote, as Calcutta does have its nicer areas. As I am among the poor and the volunteers, though, I rarely pass through these areas. One can see some trees and perhaps better kept, cleaner streets. Out in the suburbs the houses are quite charming and the neighborhood is quieter. In the city it is congested, dirty, polluted and loud. And the beggars . . . they are everywhere. The women hold their babies and beg for milk. The children beg for chocolate, or for some rupees. The men reach out their hands or forcefully follow me calling, "Sister, Sister, rupees." The women are even more forceful and have the most pitiful, desperate looks on their faces.

The onslaught of poverty is unrelenting. I walk three blocks from my hotel to Free School Street, and I am offered a ride to Mother House by no less than four rickshaw wallahs (the drivers, the "human horses" who manually pull the rickshaws: some are wearing sandals, some are barefoot). Immediately across the street from my hotel on the street live about four to five partial families and their extended relations and friends (many relatives are back in the village waiting for these people to return with seriously needed money for food and supplies). The children run around in torn, ill-fitting clothes, and they're often smiling and entertaining themselves, waiting for a volunteer to stop by and play, which we do several times a day. There is one old woman who has made her sari from a burlap sack. People are younger, sometimes a lot younger, than they look, as living on the streets with exposure to the elements and worrying about where the next meal or medicine will come from takes a toll on a body. The heat is sweltering, the humidity is ghastly, and I understand that during monsoon season, the two-month long rains flood the streets dredging up unimaginable sludge in which people must walk . . . and the poor must live.

This is Sudder Street, Free School Street, AJC Bose Street. These are the daily beaten paths of Missionaries of Charity volunteers, comparatively rich Europeans, Americans, Australians and South Americans who are constantly approached by beggars for spare rupees, empty water bottles or a shopping trip for food. If you are a poor beggar and can get to one of these places where access to foreign volunteer visitors is abundant, then you can probably do quite well . . . this area is the motherlode. But I think about the overwhelming majority of Calcutta's destitute, that they cannot make it to these locations. They live in slums, they live at the train station, the dumps, the outskirts. The poorest of the poor are the ones you don't see every day. Some of them have six to eight mouths to feed; some of them have only one as they have no family. Some of them are literally rotting away in a pile of garbage or in a back alley. By the grace of God, we'll see the sick ones arrive at Kalighat for treatment.

Can't They Just Get A Job?
There is so much suffering here, whether physical or emotional, and so many seemingly intractable systems that perpetuate suffering, or at least don't prevent it. I could point to inadequate health care, corruption, religious caste systems, etc. But it seems to me that a significant cause of this suffering is the lack of value for human life (certainly this lack of value is not limited to just India). In a city of 16 million people, what's one less life? Or ten, or a hundred? And for those who have been deemed less valuable, they simply do what it takes to get through the day. For example, a whole slum is built on top of a public trash dump: the Dhapa Dump provides income, as meager as it is, to its inhabitants. Men, women and children pick through the piles and separate out plastic bottles, foodstuffs, etc. You can't imagine the smells in these Ghettos of the Damned. Yet the people who dwell there go about their days: to us, it is astonishing to see such an existence. To them, it's life. Besides, what other options are there? In America we might draw from our pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality and tell them to get a job. They can flip burgers at McDonalds, we might say. First of all, there are no McDonald's here, and Hindus don't eat meat anyway. Second of all, the poor of India don't wear boots: they wear sandals. Yes, yes, these are smart-ass responses, but they do address the serious, deeper problems for the poor in Calcutta, or most anywhere for that matter. I'll explain.

Working At McDonald's. Unemployment is high because jobs (much less good jobs) are scarce and the population is massive. Jobs require skills, and the only skill at many a poor and homeless person's disposal is the use of their bodies for manual labor. The overwhelming majority of the street people I know cannot read. So, a man can become a rickshaw driver if he's lucky, which during the monsoon season or in the unrelenting heat of summer is a living hell for only rupees a ride. Children could earn their keep, as their little hands are more nimble handling needle and thread in a clothing sweatshop or molding the ends of cigarettes in a factory. No lunch breaks here: kids will work a 12-hour shift in stifling heat and little light, not to mention exposure to hazardous fumes or other less than healthy conditions. I will remember this the next time I find myself about to gripe about my cube or office location at work.

Children can contribute income from begging, and they are effective beggars. They are more street-wise than they should be at their age: they know what techniques work better than others, and lying is no problem. These children do not go to school. Some MC Sisters tried to help a man who begs outside the Mother House by putting his son through school. Shortly thereafter, the father pulled his son out and put him back to begging on the streets, not because he was a mean father but because that source of income was desperately needed by the family.

Most Hindus Don't Eat Meat. In addition to a severe lack of skills, many poor and homeless are ill, whether physically or mentally so. In the book Rich Christians In The Age of Hunger, author Ron Sider concludes, "Poverty means illiteracy, inadequate health care, disease and even brain damage." For example, my friend Protima spends a few weeks begging on Sudder Street, then returns to her village until they need money again. Her husband is suffering from tuberculosis and is too sick to drive his cycle rickshaw. Protima cannot read and has no job skills, so her only option is to beg.

Unfortunately, poverty does often beget disease. Lacking both food and adequate health care, the Third World has high infant mortality rates (hell, Washington, DC has a high infant mortality rate due to lack of food and health care for the poor, too). This is one important cause of population explosions in underdeveloped nations: because many children die in infancy, a large family guarantees support for poor parents as they age. When a poor family runs out of food, the children suffer most. "An inactive child is not as serious a problem as an inactive wage earner," Sider states sadly. Regarding lack of food, death is usually a result of a disease a child's underfed body could not resist. Regarding lack of adequate health care, one need look no farther than the maladies I see daily at Kalighat. For example: less dramatic but perhaps more tragic, millions of people in India die each year from diarrhea. One of Protima's babies died from its body just wearing out from chronic diarrhea. Watching that happen surely nearly crushed Protima. And yet, a person has to move on, continuing the day.

The Poor Don't Wear Boots. Not having boots means that few poor people have educations: the illiteracy rate is high. Education can be a huge leg up by developing childrens' minds and preparing them for jobs . . . better jobs. The Missionaries of Charity started The Gandhi School to educate poor children. My friends Clare and Paul teach English and math to 6-8 year olds each afternoon. My friend Trever is putting three of Protima's children through boarding school. Grassroots, personal involvement efforts are working. Formal education is not a magic bullet, however, if it is not coupled with one-on-one encouragement and fostering a child's desire to want more. Sometimes that "more" is just not going to be there. Sometimes those little girls being educated will be married off at age 14 as is culturally acceptable, and will not have a choice but to take care of all the chores and to have babies. For older girls and women, like the prostitutes on Sonagachie Street with whom the Word Made Flesh team have befriended . . . in the very rare case when a woman is able to leave the brothel, what can she do? There is a severe stigma with their history as prostitutes. Non-profits and NGO's are working slowly in outreach to local factories and businesses to develop programs for prostitutes and poor children. Progress is slow, and for every victory there are dozens of failures. But there is that victory.

The thing is, poverty and its relatively hunger, disease, illiteracy, homelessness and unemployment are not unique to India. Frederic Thomas writes, "Calcutta is a cliché of squalor and despair." It's just that in Calcutta, it's all over the place and in your face. Indians are not uncaring. Bengalis in fact are very kind and delightful people (Calcutta is in the state of West Bengal). So calling Indians out specifically is perhaps unfair. Poverty and suffering happen in every country: in the United States 13% of our population lives below the poverty line. Yet they seem to be sequestered into the "poor areas" where they aren't readily seen. Calcutta has the added benefits of pollution and inadequate infrastructure of public utilities and services, which compound the problems.

The Seedier Side of Poverty
"There's more?" you might be saying to yourself. Oh yes, my friend. Poverty is also subject to other sinister forces in Calcutta, as if hunger and disease aren't enough. The Mafia operates out of every slum, some brothels and many individual beggars. Fear and intimidation rob these people of hope. And sometimes of operation of limbs: it is true that some beggars were crippled, blinded or freakishly altered in some way in childhood on purpose. Twisted arms or poked-out eyes lend to greater sympathy and thus more profitable begging. Men and women promise poor villagers that they'll find good jobs in the city for their daughters, only the jobs they have in mind mean forced prostitution. Or, a husband might have to go into debt (or die in debt), and their wives are forced to pay off debts through selling their bodies.

Josh and the Word Made Flesh team invited a few of the women on Sonagachie Street to go see a movie with them, to relax and just be entertained. One of the women was able to go. At the last minute, the "man in charge" said she couldn't go, that she had to work. Josh talked to the man (WMF has actually developed good relationships with the pimps and madams, for lack of better terms), asking how much money he would be losing by letting her go. The man gave a number, and Josh offered him three times that much just to let her go to the movie. He refused; no reason given. I guess having the power over another human being was just too much to give up for two hours.

A list of sinister activities like violent body alteration and prostitution just wouldn't be complete without drugs. A man passes me on the street, usually very casually with his hands behind his back, and upon passing me he quietly says "hashhhhh." Paul and Trever are offered hash and other drugs much more often, and more boldly. Trever has taken to yelling loudly, "No, I don't want to buy hashish from you!" And the men scurry away quickly. Unfortunately, some foreign tourists on Sudder Street think, "Hey, cheap hash . . . all right!" If the demand is there, the supply will continue to flow, I suppose, and drug-dealing will continue to be a viable option. And in desperation, selling drugs can be a profitable way to feed one's family.

Why, God?: The Zillion-Dollar Question
Suffering, prostitution, poverty, drugs . . . evil in the world seems so insurmountable. We accept it, take a deep breath and keep moving. One reaction is to ignore evil. Another reaction is to simply blame God. "It's not my fault," we say. "How could a loving God allow so much suffering?" This question I've heard a million times, and I myself have asked this question, certainly here in Calcutta. After much thought, I believe the question is misplaced. God loves us so much that He gives us free will to speak, act and think. Surely no one resents an independent mind and choices. God does not force our love as a dictator would force obedience: free will allows for an authentic response of love to God's love. Free will allows us choices: that means we can can choose well, and we can also choose badly (whether we know it or not).

I asked Josh if he ever gets angry with God after one of his daily walks down Sonagachie Street (one of the red-light districts in Calcutta), seeing the prostitutes with few or no options, some of whom were sold into the sex trade against their will. Josh had a tough childhood with a remarkably dysfunctional family life . . . we're talking a field day for Oprah. As such Josh easily has a case for being angry for a situation he didn't choose, and for a situation many of these women didn't choose. "No," he says, "I'm angry at the sin nature of the world and of people." He's mad at the things people do to others and the choices people make, whether they want to admit these choices are in fact evil or not. So just as he can see God shaking his head sometimes, he can see Satan smiling.

We think about God, but how often do we consider Satan, a very real and powerful force bent on our distraction and destruction? I don't want to think about a Satan figure; I don't even want to believe that he is real. Kevin Spacey's character in the movie "The Usual Suspects" tells a police investigator, "Satan's greatest trick was to convince the world he doesn't exist." While I can readily and palpably see God here in Calcutta, in equal measures I see the waste Satan has laid. Not believing Satan exists just because I don't want to believe I could ever be used by him, or because I don't like to think about it, is just kidding myself. There is evidence of people's sin nature and bad choices all over the place in Calcutta (and in America, for that matter). So I wonder to God, "Why are things the way they are with sin and suffering . . . how did we get here?"

In Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, the author writes a curious dialogue about power and freedom. The agnostic brother Ivan writes a poem called "The Grand Inquisitor" set at the height of the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisitor, a cardinal, recognizes Jesus in a crowd and throws him into prison. There, the two visit, and the Inquisitor accuses Jesus of forfeiting to Satan the three greatest powers at his disposal: "miracle, mystery and authority." He should have followed Satan's advice and performed the miracles on demand in order to increase his fame among the people. "Instead of taking possession of men's freedom, you increased it, and burdened the spiritual kingdom of mankind with its sufferings forever. You desired man's free love, that he should follow you freely, enticed and taken captive by you."

Philip Yancey, author of The Jesus I Never Knew, thinks a lot on Dostoevsky's book and writes at length in response:

"I believe God insists on 'the miracle of restraint' because no pyrotechnic displays of omnipotence will achieve the response he desires. Although power can force obedience, only love can summon a response of love, which is the one thing God wants from us and the reason he created us. For God, preserving the free will of a notoriously flawed species seemed worth the cost. God made himself weak (in the form of Jesus) for one purpose: to let human beings choose freely for themselves what to do with him. I never sense (in the Bible) Jesus twisting a person's arm, rather, he states the consequences of a choice, then threw the decision back to the other party. Jesus' resistance against Satan's temptations preserved for me the very freedom I exercise when I face my own temptations. Jesus knows first-hand what I'm going through, because he too was tempted, and he too suffered. I pray for the same trust and patience that Jesus showed."

Gary Haugen is the president of International Justice Mission in Washington, DC, and previously worked in the UN genocide investigation in Rwanda, and in the US Justice Department civil rights division. This guy has been to the most remote parts of the world and has witnessed poverty and horror beyond our imagination. I recently read his book Good News About Injustice, and he offers some interesting insights along the same lines as Yancey:

"I believe the reason these offenses occur is because people choose to indulge their selfish and brutal urges to dominate the defenseless. For most of us these latent urges are kept in check by various social and cultural restraints, but we should be under no illusions about what exists at the human core. Perfectly ordinary human beings are capable of atrocities. In Rwanda, to say nothing of Eastern Europe during the Holocaust, the killing was not performed by specially trained pathological killers but by ordinary people: farmers, clerks, school principals, mothers, doctors and mayors."

Haugen goes on to say this about our role as people relating to God as we see bad things like poverty and suffering:

"Viewing a world of injustice from a seat in the grandstand, we may be tempted to shake our fist at God, demanding to know why he's not harder at work blowing those mysterious winds to save someone. Over time I have come to see questions about suffering in the world not so much as questions of God's character but as questions about the obedience and faith of God's people. Gradually it has occurred to me that the problem may not be that God is so far off, the problem may be that God's people are far off. Through whose hands does God reach out to meet the needs of those who are poor and suffering injustice? Ours. We are God's hands of mercy and love. Through supernatural intervention God could meet all of these needs, yet he has given these tasks to his people. He gives us the great honor and privilege of being his instruments. How pathetic it would be if God said, 'Seek justice, defend the orphan and plead for the widow - and good luck to you out there!' But sometimes we act as if that's precisely the way he works, suspecting that he calls us to a grand, utterly impossible work in the world and then doesn't bother to show up. But this is not true. Jesus promised that when he left the Holy Spirit would come and we would receive power - witnesses to his love, his mercy and his justice (Acts 1:8)"

So, how could we as people build these societal systems and willingly (or unwittingly) allow evil to prevail through corruption, addiction, selfishness, greed and violence? Can we be Good Samaritans? Where are we when others suffer? Where am I?

In Calcutta and all over the world, the Missionaries of Charity are exercising their free will and choosing to live a life serving God by serving the suffering poor. Mother Teresa said it well, after being asked how she is able to serve the poor. "I don't understand the question," she said, "I'm simply loving my husband." I've never heard someone refer to God this way, in the context of a deeply committed love relationship. She responds to God, she walks with Him. Practically speaking, this intimacy came from loving and serving the poor and the sick.

Mother Teresa showed up and chose to be an instrument for good. Gandhi showed up. Countless black and white men and women in the Civil Rights era showed up. Groups like International Justice Mission, Friends of the Children, Doctors Without Borders, Salvation Army, Word Made Flesh . . . they showed up. Countless others in your community and mine who will achieve no fame or award . . . they showed up, too. These people knew/know what it means when Haugen says it's a "great honor" to serve the poor, the sick, the forgotten, the oppressed. In all of my reading and hearing stories of these individuals, it is clear this kind of service is not easy: yes, they saw innocent people die, some from injustice or murder or from just getting sick. Yes, they questioned God and cried out to Him often, not knowing why these people "drew the short stick." Yet these individuals understood they could be part of God's plan to help His people, and they found in the sometimes pain and struggle of service great fulfillment and even joy.

I realize that the free will we have is a frightening gift. I see we as people have choices and on a daily basis make bad choices, whether relatively harmless to downright evil; whether as a result of being fooled, of an honest mistake or of a calculated choice. Sometimes I feel I suffer from too much freedom. God, why can't you just overwhelm me? It's that pesky free will, isn't it? For as much as I enjoy and even demand it, it sure can stink sometimes. I still pray for God's miraculous intervention in situations, and sometimes I'm disappointed. But sometimes his response is far greater than I expected. I recognize I've only explored one aspect of an enormous topic of "why people suffer," and man, is it a hard topic. These notions alone are not enough to comfort a dying person at Kalighat. Yet this angle is an important one that calls me to action for what I am able to do and can be responsible for. Now that I've been studying and thinking on our human condition of free will and choice and how it relates to why people suffer, I believe my next subject of study is God's compassion: that He cares deeply about those who are suffering and does in fact respond. Sometimes we don't see it on this side of Heaven.

If God wants to use me to be his "instrument" like I think He does, how then shall I live today? What choices will I make? I can see God shaking His head at the bad choices I've made in the past, choices to let "road rage" take over, to be nasty to the telemarketer who calls me during dinner, to gossiping about or making fun of a co-worker . . . or worse choices like getting behind the wheel though I've had too much to drink, pretending the poor beggar at the traffic light doesn't exist, or lying to a friend to save my own skin.

I recognize I must be in prayer every single day to stay close to God and as a result, to choose well. I wonder how this time in India will affect how I spend my time, how I manage my money, and what activities I choose to participate in. So that is my lesson, and my homework when I arrive back home to Texas.

"Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, 'Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,' but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?"