Every Little Thing

The universe always gives us what we need, whether it seems like enough, or not, whether we like it, or not, whether we know it, or not. The universe gives us what we need, but we are not always grateful.

Recently as I watched a boy, about ten years old, wandering the street outside my apartment in Bangalore, India I became infinitely grateful for every freedom, every comfort.
He was exceptionally dirty; in clothes an American child might be asked to wear to help-father-clean-the-garage. This is normal here though - children covered in grime at ten a.m.
He stood in the sun looking down the road, shading his eyes with his hand, and then turned his gaze to the garbage heap at his side.

He stepped onto a few cast-off stones from an adjacent construction site and crouched down to inspect the refuse.

One white plastic shopping bag, freshly deposited, bearing the name “GIFT EMPORIUM” looked promising.

He picked the plastic apart delicately with his fingers and the bag spilled open, apparently revealing nothing of interest. He was about to turn away when he shook it one last time and out fell another plastic bag, tied at the top - this one, yellow with red Kannada script, was held up with little brown fingertips and curiosity. The second bag would prove to be much more generous - as from among the refuse he came out with one pen and a small, very crumpled notebook. He held the pen up to glisten in the sun, examining it like a found diamond, and tested it on the wrecked paper. Apparently satisfied with the working order of his find he jumped lightly from his perch and started back down the road in the direction from which he had come.

Suddenly he noticed a woman walking her puppy. She was dressed in 'traditional/modern casual wear for the Indian woman' in pure white - a startling contrast to the boy’s dusty ensemble. He responded to her presence with near terror - immediately scuttling toward a nearby wall, hiding the silt prize against his ragged shirt as if he expected her to demand he give it up, as if she had noticed him at all.

He scrambled up the side of the wall which bricked off an active construction site, handing the pen and pad to a woman carrying the dirtiest little person very-much-in-need-of-a-bath-and-a-pair-of-pants I have ever seen.

Behind her, a wiry old man scaled the wall of the half-finished apartment building and she turned to watch him work, waiting for the older child to cross over.

In that instant I realized that these people belong to eachother, they are a family - and they are here to build houses like the one I peer out at them from - houses for other people. Houses they will never have enough money to occupy themselves. Houses for people like me, and the woman dressed in white. Houses full of unused, wasted, bought-and-forgotten things while their children pluck through the garbage for souvenirs.

This boy and his family are part of the background noise in every neighborhood in India. They will work twelve hours a day in an assembly line of human labor on the growing mass of stone habitat; mixing the cement by hand and carrying it in buckets on top of their heads in sun that beats down a sharp 42 degrees. They will sweat and strain and bleed; most of them barefoot; and they will laugh together with satisfaction that at the end of the day they've each earned 100 rupees; about two U.S. dollars. And at night they will sleep on the ground, after cooking their dinners on an open fire at the edge of the road, beside their home: a structure made up like a tent.

The more fortunate families have a blue tarp, or at least a piece of tarp, stretched above the cardboard and corrugated metal piecemeal walls. The better families have an extra chunk of metal for the roof. Their homes sport dirt floors that will muddy thickly with rainwater more than once this month. Their bathwater comes from a stream pumped from the site's water lines and won't phase their hardened bodies in the least, even at six a.m. when the water can't be much warmer than freezing. Their babies, and children who aren't old enough to work, play with the cast-off sticks and stones (and other people's garbage).

I understand now that I have wasted so much time being ungrateful for what I DO have. No matter how uncomfortable I may ever be while traveling in the third world, the fact remains that I have the luxury of travel in the first place. The cost of my flight alone is enough to pay two workers' salaries for one full year. And, I can afford to leave anytime I want.
But dust, lack, and toil are reality here for the majority.

It was a crime against the human experience and the spirit of adventure to have slipped into my disgruntled coma.

Now, I appreciate every-little-thing I have. I am grateful every day for my life, at the basest levels. Because good times come easy and there are people suffering more than I, and I can still hear them laughing.