Things you see in pictures are true. They are not photoshopped and edited or taken at the exact right time. This is what is going on around the world. When I saw the dirty and dusty children in Kumbhalgarh, India, working and begging in the streets, it made me realize how lucky I am, to have nutritious food, clean water, a house, an education, and many opportunities for fun extra activities, such as art and sports. Many children don’t have these opportunities.

In Kumbhalgarh, the children slept on the streets in the evening and begged for money in the day. That was their life. They knew they were unlucky to be born into poverty, and they knew they couldn’t change how their parents treated them. They haven’t realized just how unlucky they are. This is their life. They have never known anything different.

A child in Kumbhalgarh and I could have switched places when we were born. I could be living the life they are in right now. They could be living my life on the other side of the world, feeling so fortunate for their great house, family and friends, and being able to go to bed every night knowing they will be safe when they wake up the next morning.

Me to We

I got to see how one humanitarian group, called Me to We, is trying to help. My family and I connected with this group because I went to an elementary school involved with the Me to We program. This kind of school encourages kids to make positive changes locally and globally. At Ohlone, fourth and fifth graders organized bake sales and fundraisers to raise money that was sent to the Me to We organization. These experiences made me realize how hard it is to make money.

My class was able to attend a large gathering of schools and donors for an inspirational “We Day.” At “We Day”, lots of children and adults gathered together to learn how to help other children around the world. Listening to those speakers telling stories about people who had so much less than me helped me realize how lucky I actually was.

Me to We has 5 main goals to improve communities

1. Clean Water and Nutritious Food – Helping people grow more productive and nutritious food and finding or building wells.
2. Shelter- Building homes for indigenous families.
3. Health Care – Getting access to Health Care
4. Education – Helping children go to and stay in school
5. Opportunity – learning skills that can lead to good jobs and a sustainable life

Kumbhalgarh

At We schools, we are educated about how unfortunate some children in different parts of the world are. Although we are told and shown through videos how much less privileged some children are, nothing beats observing it in real life.This is why I think it is good and completely life-changing to see other children’s lives firsthand.

In October, my family and I visited Me to We in Kumbhalgarh, a small rural village in Rajasthan, India, and saw how Me to We is pursuing their 5 goals there. We got to meet several families and their children and we also helped build a girls’ bathroom at their school.

We saw details of how the organization’s goals are important for very poor, indigenous people. Me to We focuses on families who are native to the land and who are not part of mainstream culture. They mostly focus on the mother in the family. Indigenous people are often the poorest and most needy, and the women usually lead the family.

Clean Water

When we were in Kumbhalgarh, we saw many children who looked very unhealthy, whether they suffered from diseases, disabilities, or malnutrition. One disease many children get in Kumbhalgarh is tapeworms. Tapeworms eat the very few nutrients available to the children which causes the children to slowly starve. Tapeworms occur because of poor sanitation and hygiene: children drink water from wells that are open to runoff from the fields. People in these villages are not accustomed to using toilets and they also don’t have access to toilets many times – they just do their business in the fields – so when it rains, their waste gets carried off by the rain water. When a child gets tapeworms, the worms will come out in their waste. When it rains, her poop will get washed into the water well that children drink from. When other children in the village drink the water, they will get those worms in their stomachs.

Dirty water led to malnutrition, which led to other problems, like getting sick and not doing well in school. It’s hard to think when you are hungry and hard to learn when your brain is not fed. Many children were getting sick from dirty water because they did not have the resources or habit to filter and boil the water.

Me to We provided families with stove tops and pots to boil the water and spent many hours teaching the mothers and children to use them every day.

Nutritious food

Helping people grow more productive and nutritious food
If you look on the cluttered streets of India, you will probably see many children appearing dirty, sick, and starving. Children that belong to tribal families often suffer even more and have worse health because their older relatives think of food as something to make you less hungry, but they don’t necessarily consider it as a nutritious form of energy. The people of Kumbhalgarh only get vegetables 3 out of 12 months a year because there is a very short period of time when the weather is right to grow wheat and corn, the local crops. So in the other 9 months, they mostly eat bread.

Malnutrition hurts people’s health in different ways. For example, cuts and scrapes affect children’s bodies more because their immune systems are so weak. A lack of protein in children’s diets leads to iron deficiency, a common problem in Kumbhalgarh not only because meat is not widely available but also because the local religion doesn’t allow them to eat meat. In order to be healthier, bigger, and smarter, people need enough nutrients in their food. In Kumbhalgarh, nobody has enough land to grow enough food for their families. Also, the food they are growing does not contain adequate protein and nutrients. Many times malnutrition leaves children with mental or physical health disabilities, and they are not able to get help. This malnutrition results in smaller brains and mental illnesses which makes it harder to learn. Teachers in India often don’t have much sympathy for a slow or tired child, and the child may get hit or sent out of the classroom because of something they cannot control.

Me to We has introduced more productive modern agricultural ideas that taught better farming practices, such as crop rotation, proper fertilization techniques, higher protein crops, and planting techniques. The indigenous people of Kumbhalgarh had been using their irrigation techniques for centuries. They worked. However, some changes can help a lot. The farmers were still using a plow design that was 4,000 years old! Just switching to a modern plow design that turns over the soil can improve their yields drastically. Modern hybrid seeds are more productive than the ancient seeds that the farmers had. However, the new seeds are not a perfect solution. Over time the modern seeds will become less productive, so then the farmers have to buy new seeds. Me to We helps educate the family on how the seeds would give families more food from the same amount of land. Me to We buys starter seeds for the family and helps them learn how to make money from extra products. This way they can buy new seeds every 5-6 years when the productivity goes down, and also have more food to feed their family every year.

Health Care

We observed in Kumbhalgarh that almost everybody has some health condition, whether it is physical or mental. When unhealthy children get a minor virus, such as the flu, they can get very ill and even die because their body is already weak from malnutrition and dirty water. Though healthcare in India is free, many people do not get it solely because they do not know it exists.

Me to We helps by just informing the families where the nearest clinic is. In rural areas, this is harder because it is so far away from the nearest clinic. Sometimes they help people learn how to get to the clinics, and when to go. When a woman is pregnant, sometimes the clinic will travel to them.

Education

We visited the local school in Kumbhalgarh. They had 4 classrooms for 300 students, with about 70 students in each classroom. The walls were crumbling and they had no bathrooms – only a recently installed pit toilet.

Me to We builds schools with help from volunteers and donations. They work with people in the community and check in on families to make sure their children are going to school. Me to We also provides books, pens, and uniforms for the children.

When we visited, the We program was in the middle of building the school’s first toilet. The school realized that when girls hit puberty they usually dropped out of school because there was no toilet with privacy. Me to We started helping by just digging a hole in the ground. I helped build a foundation for a private girls’ toilet. We put rock after rock and heaping spoonfuls of “masala” cement. (In India, masala is anything that is mixed. Masala tea, masala cement: mixed herbs, mixed sand, same thing.)

By helping build a bathroom for that small school, we hopefully helped the girls ages 10-14 continue to go to school to further their education. Children in India go to school for an average of 12 years, as well as having a 62.80% literacy rate(World Factbook, CIA), but in Kumbhalgarh, the average years of school is much lower, an average of 6-8 years.

Opportunity

The We organization tried to focus on helping families stay together and become sustainable in their villages instead of moving into Western civilization, such as big cities. They started achieving this by teaching the families useful things to make everyday life easier, such as boiling water so they don’t get sick every week. They taught them skills that would be helpful in their community that could lead to a sustainable life. They also taught them how to grow more food on their land so they could sell some in the towns.

How does Kumbhalgarh symbolize the rest of the world?

This year, we are seeing children around the world. Most of the children I have met were smiling and seemingly happy, but not everyone has the same things. Some children, like us, have clean water, nutritious food, doctors, schools to go to, and opportunities. Others have much less. They speak different languages and laugh at different jokes, but they all have the same needs. They need to be healthy, and they want to learn things and accomplish things in their lives. Me to We may not have all the answers, but they provided a good outline of what people need to live a happy and healthy life.

Sources

1. The World Factbook
2. Me to We

We were recently at a place where we worked on a Me to We project. We helped build the foundation of a bathroom for a school that had previously had one hole in the ground for the whole school to use. We only used rocks, and cement. We didn’t have any gear except for gloves and trowels. But, we still got pretty far in the span of an hour.

The rocks we used had been found for us. The sat in a huge pile and we brought them over to the hole we were working in. We slathered cement over the rocks, then added them to the top of the foundation. Then we repeated. We would pour cement in the holes that were left in-between the rocks. Even though we were doing the same things for an hour, we didn’t get bored of it. In the end, we had made the foundation taller.

We had a lot of fun building the wall, and helping the kids at the school. If you travel through a place that has Me to We – or any organization – that you can help with, definitely give it a try. Helping these kids have a bathroom was a once in a lifetime experience. Even though this will probably be the only time I will touch cement in my life, it felt so good to help make these kids’ school better.

As soon as we land in Delhi, we can immediately tell it is going to be a different experience. Delhi is the capital of India, and we will stay here for only one day. From our hotel, we can see two amazing and beautiful temples. The weather is very humid, about as humid as Hawaii, but so, so smoky.

A bus meets us at the gate of our hotel. Our guide tells us we are going to Old Delhi, and he reminds us we are in New Delhi right now. As soon as we arrive, we are already overwhelmed. There are people scattered everywhere – up and down the streets and alleyways. We immediately realize this is going to be a very different and interesting experience. We get out of our van, a little nervous.

We go to the main market, which sells trinkets and food. We notice there are no other tourists here. The market is in alleyways which seem to come out of a dystopian movie. Wires hang everywhere, dirt and trash litter the concrete ground, and crumbling apartment buildings are over 400 years old. This is not my favorite market ever, but it is very interesting to see how other people live so differently than what I am used to.

Later, we visit two different temples: a large Muslim temple and a large Sikh temple. The Muslim temple has a nicer vibe, but the Sikh temple is extraordinarily cool because it serves 40,000-70,000 meals a day. We check out the kitchen and it is amazing! The pots could fit 10 people in them. Volunteers roll out hundreds of parathas and throw them on a giant skillet. All sort of people are helping, including old men and moms with children. One toddler helps roll out bread. An old man with an aged beard and a light blue turban stirs hundreds of gallons of lentils, beans, and rice in big steel pots, using a huge metal saucepan as a spoon. We could have hopped in and started cooking as they would not have minded, but we had to go home to get ready for our next event.

We walk back to our car, through the traffic. A homeless family on the side of a busy street enjoys what little they have, which happens to be a game of ‘Sorry,’ my favorite. Delhi is VERY crowded and busy, and everywhere we turn, we bump into someone.

It is very cool to see how so many other people live, but I have no desire to spend more than a day here. When we tell our guide Delhi is less organized than the streets and towns where we live, he says he had just visited Florida, New Jersey, and New York. He explains they were way too empty and organized for him. This makes me realize wherever you grow up is tremendously going to affect how you look at new places because you will always compare them to what you are used to.

This driver is very quiet. The last one…not so much. He honked a lot. There were cows in the road, people in the road, children in the road. Oncoming traffic in the road. And slow people to pass. Lots of reasons to honk.

I wondered how much he was honking, so I counted honks for 20 minutes. Guess how many times he honked in an hour? Really, take a moment. Guess.

285 honks per hour.

There seemed to be some rules, or patterns at least:

• If you are passing someone, honk continuously until you are out of the blind spot.
• If there are animals or children ahead, honk so they don’t walk in front of you.
• If you are driving through a town, honk so people know you are coming.
• If you want to drive faster, honk so people get out of your way
• If someone is driving right at you, honk so they know you mean business. This was quite often since our road was usually only 1.5 cars wide and we shared it with big trucks.
• If you are going around a bend, honk so people know you are coming.

In truth there were a lot of sacred cows in the road, looking for a passerby to make some wind to blow the flies off their backs. We wondered how many cows there were, so we counted these too. Guess how many.

235 cows per hour.

Granted, they were not all in the road. But they could have been.

“It really is a very educational movie,” our hostess said to Rachel when we declined to watch in favor of trying to catch up on our ongoing academics. My rare and hopeful attempts to keep my girls’ minds from wandering too far from the 3 R’s kept getting interrupted by thing more urgent or unique than book material.

“They are waiting for us,” Rachel said, so we wrapped up our thought, slipped into our sandals and headed through the tall narrow double doors that sealed our mud hut from the elements. The sinuous path to the communal area felt farther away on account of the tall grasses that hide it from view, but in a moment we approached Joanna who greeted us. “Oh good, I’m glad you came.”

The few guests at Sarai at Toria were gathered on comfortable couches around a small TV that had been brought in for the occasion. My family joined Karen, a travel writer who was helping contribute to a book on Indian eco lodges. BBC, the film opened, and the sound system was surprisingly good given the relative lack of technology at the lodge.

As the film began I recognized voices. And then faces. Many years younger, but the same ones as our hosts. Joanna and Raghu, our hosts, were not your average hoteliers, nor even your average conservationists, it turned out. They were the storytellers of this film, the main characters who started to teach us about the Tigers of Panna. What were these animals’ habits? Who were their families? What of their loves, concerns, friends and enemies? Raghu unfolded the rich society of tigers to us as a world expert might do. We were staying with scientists, with celebrities, and the most humble sort, the sort who don’t bother to tell you, “this is our film.”

I’m really not a huge nature documentary guy, but…this film. Full of details and drama. And aftermath. Emerald Forest tells the story of a rising tiger population, but shortly after it was released tragedy befell Raghu and the tigers. Poachers hit the park hard, for year after year. Raghu, who sounded the alarm in Delhi, was summarily ignored, and then fired, until almost every tiger was dead. Authorities offered innocuous excuses and covered up the atrocities while they slowly rebuilt the population with imported animals that are today guarded by camera traps and rangers in watch towers and Jeeps. Authorities have relocated local farmers and their livestock from the park, to protect both cows and tigers from their incompatible ways of life. 

And Raghu and Joanna support their conservation efforts in a more indirect way. I was told by another guest that they lost their scientific jobs, their funding, and the tigers they loved. But they did not lose their love of these large and graceful cats, and now they share it with unwitting guests like us who happen upon their graceful Sarai at Toria, an oasis in the jungle. With good food and a gentle nudge to watch an educational film and drive around the park with one of their expert guides, they have made a bit of an activist out of me, a guy who never really cared about tigers until now. 

We leave Panna today but our stay here will stay with me. I will spend my days thinking and hoping for the tigers. Hoping they survive a few more generations. Hoping that they outrace the poachers in a world where human competition seems to consume any animal unlucky enough to be both slow to reproduce and a bit too valuable to our destructive species.

People said it would be overwhelming. But words are just a poor representation of sensation. I can’t explain what it’s like to smell that many smells at the same time. I can’t explain that a single smell, like the one from the tree outside our room, smelled like horse manure to me, but like perfume to our hotelier. I can’t explain the visceral sensation of being surrounded by blaring horns in a crowded auto-rickshaw in a crowded intersection in a crowded area of a crowded city. I can’t explain the awe and mystery of seeing so many different people and feelings and sensations at once.

I can tell you about the streets. How I saw people get hit but not hurt. How our rickwhaw driver caught tangled with a man pulling a hand cart through the street, where everyone was moving at a slow walking pace. How the street is shared by pedestrians, auto-rickshaws (basically the tuk-tuks we saw in Thailand, but much cleaner and quieter, required to burn compressed natural gas), bicycle rickshaws, hand rickshaws, cars, trucks, bicycles, scooters, motorcycles and the occasional ox-cart.

In Old-Delhi they protect you from the poop on the narrow street by covering it with a thin veil of newspaper, and you are grateful when your awesome guide Gagan pulls you aside so you miss it. The street is narrower than most sidewalks you have known, and it is shared by school children coming home and motorcycles honking and zipping past. Electrical wires are slung between anything that will hold them overhead, like a mess of spaghetti thrown at a child’s messy room. Or perhaps a yarn fortress woven by jubilant four year olds playing fairy make-believe. It’s a mess, but it works. Everyone has power. There are no electical fires or calamities. And people are calm and kind.

The sidewalks inside and outside Old Delhi are packed with people shopping for Duvali, the festival of lights, which will begin in about a week. The air is full of smoke from the surrounding farms who are burning their stubble to prepare for next season’s planting. And from the cars. And from the fireworks whose sale and purchase has just been banned in Delhi, much to the sadness of dozens of merchants who sit on the recently emptied sidewalks with downturned heads and sorrowful expressions below signs “no cell phones” in hopes perhaps of a contraband sale. The retail stores couldn’t be smaller, and they compensate with bling and flare. One nut shop (among dozens of seemingly identical ones) is little more than a large set of wedge-shaped counters facing the sidewalk. The three workers who are packed like tree monkeys into the wedge wrap trays of nuts in yellow cellophane in preparation for gift sales for Duvali. The shoppers stream past. 

“How do people choose where to shop?” I asked Gagan, as we browse tea and spices in what might be the world’s finest spice shop. “Oh, you know, price, quality…maybe where they have always shopped.” So, the usual. Same as home. But with 16 million people in Delhi, there seems to be infinite choice, and infinite competition. It might explain how the food is some of the best I’d ever tasted, from the buffalo raita at lunch to the sesame candy from the street vendor in old Delhi. And how a single day seems to have filled my mind with a lifetime of senstaions. And how Gagan might feel lonely when he goes to a place that is not bustling with so much activity that it literally pushes you from all sides with all 5 senses.

​I am…sitting on a swinging couch next to the cleanest river in India.

I see the bright risen sun through the tree arbor. I see layers of pastel hills and river reflections muddied by the damp humidity. I see my daughter slumped in a caned recliner writing in her own notebook.

I hear a dozen different birds in the trees around me. Crickets chirping in the head-tall grasses that line the pathways to our cottage. Calls of the birds that fly downstream. The whiteness of the waterfall who hides behind the tree trunk.

I taste the grit of a morning french press coffee lining the back of my bottom teeth. 

I smell Indian humidity, thick like a whipped buttercream fog. I smell fragrant plants bursting from the jungle that hosts lives with whom I’ve never been acquainted.

I feel hot and sticky and sore from a restless nights sleep, awoken dozens of times by the fast and unbalanced fan who droned throughout the hours. I feel tired of wearing the same shirt that is acceptable but not ideal for the Indian air. I feel challenged by the various needs of my family, all with their own challenges and frustrations and desires and all looking to me for guidance. I feel lucky to be here, knowing that my best memories are often hardest earned, the challenging parts where I solved a problem or suffered through a struggle, and I hope, hope, that we are stronger and wiser and grateful for this chapter when we reflect on it as older selves.