Seeing people as they really are

by Brant Arthur

It’s late at night and the laptop battery is running low. It’s the time when the mosquitoes come out and I catch them with my bare hand. They are easy to spot against the white-washed mud walls. I am writing from rural Andhra Pradesh in India. I’m spending about a month doing an internship as part of my Development Practice degree. It’s a small village, both closely knit and divided.

A month is far too short of a time really to get anything done or even to properly get to know everyone. If I had prepared this blog in advance I would have confidently written that the kids are lovely, and far more welcoming than any of the adults. It is true. These kids only care about things like whether or not we can “Sing a song” or do “One dance, just one dance.” Especially Shrikanth—he’s always saying that, while pulling on my hand and pleading with his little six-year-old voice. We dance, we sing, we teach them many silly things like how to do the Boogaloo and have thumb wars. To be honest, we wouldn’t get much done if went outside to talk with the little ones every time they come around to say hello or ask if we’re eating tiffins.* For the record, we are usually “eating tiffins,” but only because it’s fun to say.

It must strike them as kind of odd that we close our doors for most of the day. Like the rest of India, where trains and buses have doors that never close, this village has doors that only close when it’s time to sleep. People breeze in to talk with us and one ten-year-old makes a habit of checking our rice barrel to see if we’ve been eating enough. It’s important to make sure that everyone is eating enough.

Perhaps this “checking up” on everyone is part of what holds this village together. It’s a fairly diverse village for India, with sizeable Muslim and Hindu populations along with some Christians. On top of that, the village is divided into colonies for each caste, with some of the boundary lines being quite obvious. Yet, with all these divisions, there are no secrets in this village and people seem to treat each other with a decent sense of tolerance. In short, things still work here.

At this point I feel some need to find a moral to this blog (if blogs are supposed to have morals), but the truth is that I haven’t quite figured everything out here. I can say that the children are genuinely kind to us and not just because they want some favor or because their parents told them to come over and talk with us. Yet I know that this warm relationship with the adults in the village will take longer.

Similarly, I’m amazed that the village works in the face of all these divisions, but am secretly scared that it only works because of these divisions; that things like caste are actually structures used to avoid more difficult things like accepting everyone with equal amounts of love.

Perhaps the most heartfelt thing I can say about my time here is that I want to work on seeing people as they truly are—without any labels are judgments. For me, that means seeing them spiritually, as God made them. My hope is to help people feel that they themselves are capable of improving their own lives because they are perfect and gifted.

I’ll be here for a while longer. I’m working on a website for the organization I’m working with as well as studying information and communication technology in rural villages. My wife, Bronwen, is studying rural conflicts and the Gandhian approach to reconciliation, which talks a lot about Truth, Love, God and the caste system, so this kind of stuff will probably work its way into whatever I write in the future.

*an Indian term for snacks—fun to use in conversations.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Relationships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.