I spent the entire day today in a village in Batam, conducting interviews on behalf of a charity NGO that builds houses for slum-dwellers and homeless families in Batam. We're doing an impact assessment of their efforts.
For a city boy to go into a village is no small thing.
What strikes you first is the lack of roads. Yes, the ride in was bumpy, but everywhere you step is dirt and mud. The second thing is the number of livestock running around and that faint smell of waste/defecation everywhere. But what really gets you is the hospitality of the people.
All I had was a translator attached to me and I was going house to house asking about how having a house affected the lives of these people. Yet, I was offered shy smiles, handshakes followed by a touch of the heart, glasses of water (which I dared not drink because of my Singaporean fear of unfiltered water, and yet these people have survived for generations like this), and well-wishes as I got on my way from each house.
The answers I got were astounding.
How do I reconcile that this place, just an hour's ferry ride away, has so many people who were simply delighted to have electricity, and shelter from the elements? That the greatest thing that can happen to a person (getting a home), is something I was born with? It also strikes me that no matter how much I try my best to understand them, and no matter how much I tell myself what I'm doing is good for them, at the end of it all I'm going back to my clean big Singaporean home with running water and air conditioning.
Gandhi said that "A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave." These are brave people I saw, people who love each other and have faith in their communities. Young men my age, using their savings to study for a degree from the Open University, even though they're living miles away from the world as we know it. People who opened their hearts to a foreigner who comes from a world so different from theirs.
Sorry about disrupting your post btw OL, my experience today has changed me slightly inside and I think we all need these experiences once in a while, if only to grow into a more enlightened person.
AH
2 comments:
Additionally, the young man studying for his degree in the Open University asked me for advise about conducting research in the field. Because he wants to do his Masters in Development, and learn to serve the villagers' needs better.
Sitting on a makeshift wooden railing outside a make-shift home, with a foul-smelling drainage canal right behind me and a couple of roosters running about and mud on my shoes, I gave the first real lecture of my life.
AH
Your post is very much in the spirit of what I was talking about.
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