July is Monsoon season in Karachi. But I've seen my first rain here only today. People love cloudy days here (they actually say "what nice weather!" and "Zabardast!" when it's cloudy or rainy because the sun is like death-by-heat). And I must say, my own spirits feel lighter with the rain. Gotta remember that when I go back home!
I just started reading a fantastic book -it's so funny, and the descriptions of people and attitudes and realities, although it is set in India, is very similar to what I have been experiencing here in Karachi. It's called The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga -it won the Man Booker Prize in 2008, and is written wittily, with personality and love.
I'm also in the middle of reading How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman -also excellent, albeit in a different way (obviously... one can't compare fiction and non-fiction)... it's kind of like reading Atul Gawande's books, but with the added component of advice for both patients and doctors to engage in a partnership in the clinical setting to improve the quality of health care -really wonderful!
Anyway, I've had some time to reflect upon my reflections over the last couple of weeks, and I also realize that a lot of you are working professionals under crazy time-pressures, so these 6-8-line summaries are for you:
Thoughts on the Extreme Poverty here: visiting these slums for the study, I've realized that the kind of life we're all born into is really more about luck and blessing than anything else... so i feel both grateful for the blessings in my own life, and have an even stronger conviction that those born into more privilege have a duty to ameliorate the lives of people who have almost nothing materially, intellectually and sometimes even spiritually... in the poorest of slums, they are often still 'unconscious' -addicted to drugs, hypnotized by unbearable heat and the burden of too many children, suffer ill health... the resilient ones do the best they can anyway with the little they have, while others have become utterly despondent...
What's the nature of my actual work: for now, i spend part of the week in the 10 different towns that are the field sites for the Complementary Feeding study (urban slums and slum-slums), and the other part of the week doing office work (currently working on a presentation on Comp Feed that the department may or may not share with auditors, and also helping one of the supervising doctors prepare for a presentation she has to make in Dhaka for the World Bank in a bid for funding for another nutrition intervention in Karachi, relating to early childhood development...
the Spiritual experience: khane here is really just something else completely... everytime there's ginan, i find myself weeping away... i just get so moved by it here... and working in the poor towns of Karachi is also a spiritual experience because you really realize that harjaga bache he bache (everywhere, kids are kids) and mums are mums, and there's a lot of love and a lot to love, despite being appalled by the disparities, and the resilience -especially the kind we see in the urban slums -is truly inspiring -these are very, very strong women... and many are intelligent and innovative too... they just didn't luck out in having the opportunities that we were fortunate enough to have... masla hai, lekhin shukti or khushi hai also...
so really, the lesson here is just love. but the very big kind. epic big. all encompassing, buckets-full.
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