Education through Immersion

My role at Quicksand is to gather and disseminate pertinent information to internal partners, clients and the general public. As such, I’ll be spending a good deal of time in the slums for Project Sammaan to generate rich media and write about the experiences.

I’ve always taken pride in my ability to easily connect with people and adapt to any environment. This job, and this project specifically, presented a golden opportunity to test this perceived strength as the slums here are considered as having some of the harshest living conditions on Earth. I’m from rural America, so this is a daunting challenge indeed.

I traveled to Bhubaneswar and Cuttack in February with fellow team members for my first-ever slum visit.

The first night proved to be a restless one with excitement and anticipation jostling my mind; the car ride to the first site proved even more nerve-racking with thoughts of failure racing through my mind.

We arrived at the first site before 7 a.m. and it was already incredibly hot and humid thanks to the area’s tropical climate.

This slum was actually a series of several communities that abutted each other, with anywhere from 12,000-15,000 people on an area spanning less than 17 acres. It was densely populated to say the least.

We traveled with a local guide who was known in the community so we had a fair amount of access. Still, it was surprising how quickly our presence was both accepted and known.

We were invited into people’s homes to see how they led their daily lives, encouraged to take pictures, and quickly developed a following of several dozen people.

As the lone foreigner in the group that day, I attracted a great deal of attention. I was taken aback at how friendly and welcoming everyone was. It didn’t take long to realize just how naive I was in my expectations of slum life.

Yes, the conditions were not ideal, with refuse and sewage openly dirtying the community, but the people were doing their best in an extreme situation.

I found myself thinking more than a few times about what I would do if I were in their shoes, if I lacked access to running water, clean drinking water and plumbing. They had one community sanitation facility that provided roughly one toilet for every 1,000 people. I grew up in a town of 4,000 and cannot imagine what life would be like if there were only 4 toilets for us all to share. I’d venture to guess that people wouldn’t be as affable as these folks were.

What struck me most that first day was how virtually invisible these communities were. I guess that’s a broader commentary on slum life: their plight is a forgotten one because people either can’t see them or choose not to.

And yet, to a person, there were no complaints. They’re industrious people working with the hand they’ve been dealt. It was hard not to feel ashamed for complaining about any challenge that befell me considering my relatively affluent station in life.

I had a mixed sense of relief and guilt that night as I took a hot shower and slept in an air-conditioned room that was easily the size of two homes in the communities I had spent the day in. My coworkers told me that this kind of thinking is a slippery slope. I agree, but the thought still crossed my mind, and more than once.

It was challenging visiting broken down toilets and, oftentimes, being mere inches away from human excrement, some times whilst it was being passed, but the experience reinforced my resolve in being here and doing this job.

The people I met truly deserve better than what they have and it makes me proud to think that I’ll play some role, if even a minor one, in ensuring that they will.

It sounds so basic, so simplistic, but it’s just totally unfair that people are denied the most basic of amenities; that people should suffer such indignities while others lavish in unnecessary opulence.

I’m so thankful for the experience for I can now put human faces to the work that we’re doing: I can think of the smiling children I met if ever I feel the threat of inertia.

I’m also more than a little relieved to have proven, at least on this occasion, that I am able to handle the conditions of these slums for there’s a whole lot of work to be done, and a whole lot of people that can benefit from it.