Thoughts on our Visit to a Slum and the mall

On September 5^th we went into the a “slum” in Bangalore. The smell is hard to describe it almost makes you want to gag and wonder how people can live there. The closes smell I can think of is spoiled milk, rotting food and animal waste. One of the first things we saw was a man sorting trash he was getting the milk packets and if he got enough of them he would get a few rupees. The interesting thing about this , is the man was not sorting trash from the slums but from the rest of Bangalore. The trash of Bangalore is sent to the slums to be sorted. It makes you never want to throw away trash ever again.

There where people staring at us which is something we are slowly getting used to, children running around with no shoes and babies with no diapers. But the people for the most part where talking with their neighbors it seemed like a jovial community. One thing that got me is that people wanted us to shake their hands and a mother wanted me to shake her baby’s hand.

After the slums we went straight to a mall. I’ve never been in a mall as nice has the one we were in. It definitely was a different atmosphere. People didn’t stare at us or ask where we are from or ask us for money.

While I was riding up the escalader and looking at all the things you can buy. I thought about the people who we just left in the slums, how all these material good could maybe feed and clothe at least some of the people we just left. Do they know that maybe three miles away there are people buying their 5th pair of shoes or buying that water filter so they can have clean drinking water? What would they say? What are these shoppers thinking do they think that instead of buying something they may not need to instead use the money for someone who is of greater need.

Maybe in India the people of comfort ignore or don’t want to accept to know that there is another world only a few miles away from them. Or maybe they think that if it doesn’t affect them they why should they care. Why do the people in the slums not complain about how they are living or maybe they only have enough time to care about how they will live.

I think the last few days we got a shot on what we will be experiencing in the next three months