Day 10 - AM: Food for thought

We are getting ready to head out to the village.I've been up for a while, I was catching up with Ian last night. Check out his latest blog here.

I sit here thinking about how I spend my days here in Kolkata. It is much different from the immediate gratification that Ian is able to accomplish in remote villages of India. The progress I am working towards is incremental. It is teaching the massis, the teachers, the parents of other kids with disabilities in India. The thing that baffles me is that the end goal that both Ian and I have is the same, and yet we both are setting out to achieve that goal in two very very different ways. Which one is better? Which one is more sustainable? Which one is more meaningful? The answer: they both are.

The girls I am working with this week are afforded so many opportunities that other kids with disabilities in India are not, and yet they are still limited and hampered by their community, by the culture, by the walls society has put around them. In America, we talk about these walls as well as a hinderance to people with disabilities, but let me tell you, those walls are NOTHING in comparison to what exists here. Everybody is afraid to ask the question of, what happens when/if they finish school? Do they have a life after? Do any of these kids with disabilities ever become adults? Meaning, do they ever become an integral part of society and life? The sad realistic answer is that very few make it.

On a personal note, one of my hopes on this trip was to figure out how India can be a part of who I am. I still don’t have an easy answer to this. What I see here day to day, I want to take these kids with disabilities out of their home country and bring them somewhere else in the world where they can have opportunities. That is not a solution; it’s a bandaid fix that also creates a whole mess of other issues. But for some, they are so limited by their surroundings, it is impossible to thrive in such an environment. I’m still thinking this one through…

I don’t understand the deeply rooted remnants of the caste system. I say this because there ARE people of higher classes who have disabilities. Disability is not linked to socioeconomic status in its entirety. In fact, the former ruler who lived in City Palace was disabled, so then why is there such a huge disconnect? Food for thought…

Change is slow. That makes it frustrating. Sometimes I wonder if what we do each day really does make a difference or if it would be apt to change for the better over time anyway and that maybe we’re just hindering the natural process of discovery. I’d like to think that isn’t true, but sometimes I do wonder. But for now, I’m going to go with the fact that small incremental change is worthwhile. I’d like to think that the smiles and progress that I’ve seen are genuine…I think they are.