Mumbai and the Matrix (includes images)

TEAR Fund’s Easter Focus for 2010 has been empowering women in the slums of India, specifically focusing on the work of our partner, Saahasee in the Bhiwandi area on the outskirts of Mumbai. Recently a group of our advocates had an opportunity to visit that project. One of the them was Carl. This is Carl’s reflection on that visit. It includes a gallery of his images at the end of the article.

In March I had the privilege of going to India with a team of staff and advocates from TEAR Fund NZ. Part of the itinerary included Mumbai, situated on the coast of India. Mumbai is has a population of 14+ million people and is a city of polar opposites with the flashy multi million dollar Bollywood industry alongside millions of people living in extreme poverty.

As we arrived at the train station Mumbai was waking up; quite literally hundreds of people were either asleep or picking themselves up off the train station floor. Watching people wake from the gutter and seeing the garbage and smog was unsettling. Our group hailed a couple of taxis and entered the city. By this stage we had been through two slums and seen poverty in Delhi and Nagpur…however Mumbai was different. Something about this city disturbed me.

It was time to head to Saahasee, a TEAR Fund partner in Mumbai.

We were welcomed at Saahasee By Eddie, Poonamnaibr, Saurabh, Iiajha and Eoonam, an amazing and pioneering team who are transforming lives within slums and breaking generational poverty cycles. Saahasee’s misson statement is based around this quote:

Have courage we often say to one another, Courage is a spiritual virtue. The word courage comes from the Latin word ‘cor’ which means “heart”. A courageous act is an act coming from the heart. The heart however is not just the place our emotions are located. The heart is the centre of our being, the centre of all our thoughts, feelings, passions and decisions. A courageous life, therefore, is a life lived from the centre. ‘Have courage’ therefore means ‘let your centre speak’. – Henri Nouwen.

The reality of this statement began to set in after we visited Bhiwandi in Mumbai, where Saahasee is working.
There was a lot of apprehension in my heart surrounding this part of our journey.

Bhiwandi has a population of 450,000 people (80% Muslim) and is jammed into a 2km radius on the outskirts of Mumbai. To my western sensibilities it felt like an oppressive and unhinging place. Water is in desperate need there.

The Government is supposed to send water tankers every day to supply the needs of the people, more often it turns up twice a week. Men, women and children can wait for 5 to 8 hours to fill up their containers. Tensions run high; people have been stabbed, trampled and beaten in the frenzy to get water. A little child was crushed under a water tanker’s wheels the week before we visited.

Out of the 50 Non Government Organisations (NGO’s) that were stationed in Bhiwandi 49 have either been asked to leave, or abandoned post because of the intense hardship’s faced there. Saahasee, TEAR Funds partner is the last one to remain facing impossible odds while moving forward. Its members are very courageous. In the Bible God calls Joshua to be “Strong and very courageous” for the massive task ahead (Joshua 1:1-11). Before Saahasee many of the women of Bhiwandi wouldn’t even leave their front door, Now they are showing great courage and changing lives in their community.

When we first entered Bhiwandi, I stepped out of the vehicle and literally felt the ground shake beneath me. “I don’t want to be here…I feel very exposed, watched.” We hiked up a mass of steps and met with a small team of women at the top the slum.

Eddie (Director of Saahasee) took us to a cliff face that overlooks acres of industrial looms, The sound coming from the looms is intense and reminded me of the roar of surf on the NZ west coast. Inside men work all day in dangerous conditions, the sound is deafening. From there we walked down to the next meeting point within a small house where the roof is lined with asbestos and the temperature is nearly 50 degrees.

We were warmly welcomed by the ladies from Saahasee federations and they collectively said “we have been waiting a long time for this moment”. Their hospitality is amazing. In some of the house’s we visited later on, women had made the team gifts and provided food and chai with their precious water.

These women form groups that become federations then special interest groups are formed tackling issues like community health, water and sanitation, girl child education as well as issues like drug and alcohol abuse. Credit groups are birthed with each member saving as little as 1 rupee per day. This money goes into trust banks that can be loaned out at 2-3% interest for micro enterprise, debt management, house repairs and education. This happens in direct opposition to the loan sharks who charge upwards of 150% in interest.

Phil, Bruce, Saurabh and I met with a lady in a tiny blue house in the slum just bigger than our bathroom; she was threading beads onto string 10 – 11 hours per day. She gets paid 30 rupees for her effort, which is the equivalent of $1. When asked what that would buy at the market she replied “half a bag of sugar or a small amount of milk” Her husband works all day at the looms and if the power stays on he is paid 100 rupees or $3.30. All I could think about for the rest of the day was how little this family earned and how hard they worked.

So what does all this have to do with that philosophical and reality questioning film, The Matrix? Up until Mumbai, my world view was packed neatly in a box. After Mumbai, after walking through Bhiwandi seeing poverty and hardship, my box was violently shaken and all the contents were thrown around the room.

In “The Matrix” Morpheus, the one who knows the nature of the reality much of humanity is experiencing asks Neo “do you want to see how deep this rabbit hole goes?” Neo is pulled from his relatively safe world generated by the Matrix and sees that people’s lives are solely being used to generate power for the machines that rule the world.

Neo’s mind starts to spin from this new revelation; he becomes violently ill when he discovers reality. I felt like the character Neo, overwhelmed, angry and shocked at the appalling conditions these people had to endure. My own life came to mind, how easily my family and I had access to water, food and resources in comparison with those in the slums.

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again. – Maya Angelou

Partnered with TEAR Fund, Saahasee walks alongside these women and communities and helps impart courage. Please consider supporting this campaign that will bring lasting and tangible change in slums like Bhiwandi.

To give your financial support to the work taking place in Bhiwandi, call TEAR Fund on 0800 800 777 or visit www.tearfund.org.nz