Dying on the Sidewalk

A few weeks ago I was walking home after a long day’s work in the height of the afternoon heat along kilometers of crowded sidewalks.  My fellow volunteer Mary stopped me and nodded toward a beggar lying down in the sun with his eyes closed.  I fought against the flow of pedestrians and knelt down beside him while Mary woke him up.  His eyes wouldn’t focus and he couldn’t talk.  His water bottle was as empty as his change jar and he reminded me of pictures I’ve seen of holocaust victims.  After a few minutes of trying to comfort him and giving him water to drink I looked up and noticed that a crowd had formed around us.  There were maybe twenty people all standing in a semi-circle staring intently at us, some yelling advice in Bangla or asking us if he needed to go to the hospital.  “Where were all these people ten minutes ago?” I wondered.  He was just as needy then as he is right now, but it wasn’t until somebody else stopped to help that anyone noticed.  Since that day I have experienced this phenomenon on a daily basis.

Hindus believe that if a person is a bad sinner they will be reincarnated as a very poor person (those below the caste system) and live a miserable life in order to pay penance for the bad that they did in their previous life.  If they suffer enough they might move up to a higher social class in the next life.  One could see from this belief how it could be considered immoral to assist the poor in any way.  If you relieve their suffering then you are not permitting that person to pay their dues for their past sins.  That could explain how an entire culture can eventually become nearly blind to the hurting, needy people they step over every day. 

When Mother Teresa’s work among the outcasts began it was a very new and odd thing and attracted a lot of attention in Kolkata.  She intentionally dressed and lived like the poor and spent her time helping and loving them.  After a while the Indian population began to donate money to the Missionaries and then they began to volunteer themselves.  Eventually hundreds of NGOs sprung up in Kolkata and spread all around the world.  Mother Teresa helped start a global movement focused on caring for individuals trapped in poverty.

Of course that wasn’t Mother Teresa’s intention at all. She was just following the voice of God and loving those who had no one to love them, but in doing so she not only affected an individual’s life but the entire culture surrounding them as well. Sometimes we see poverty as a giant that can only be beaten using massive political reform and we feel helpless in the face of such a large adversary, but actually if we focus just on loving the people around us we will eventually find we are having a larger impact on more than just those people. At least that is what I hope as I resist yelling at all the annoying rubberneckers causing chaos and getting in the way huddled on the sidewalk around me and someone they normally would have walked right past without a second thought.