India Chronicles. Not a letter, just a thought on a rainy day

July 15th, 2014

I’ve mentioned India in the sun. There’s another side of India: the one in the rain.

An eventful day of non-events: we were our way to the bridge camp (the school for labor-rescued girls) to perform an original, thirty-minute, Indian version of the Wizard of Oz, (put together in a mad dash of two days), bags of costumes and props in hand. The bus was late. And then the train was late. Not just late, an hour late. So we were two hours behind initial schedule and our translator couldn’t wait for us any longer at the school, so we had to cancel the show, get off the train, and turn around.

Then it started to rain. POURING RAIN.

We walked to our new stop in the torrential downpour. Costumes and props and bags (and dreams of today’s show) drenched.

In our various hours of waiting along the way, I finished the book 1984. For those of you who have read it—the ending is a terrible, horrible, wretched vision of the future of humanity.

Our whole day having fallen through, my paradigms on humanity questioned, as we were waiting for the train home I felt utterly…deflated.

I decided to get out from under the partial covering and just stand in the Indian showers. As if I don’t get enough looks being blonde and white, I was standing in the rain in a Dorothy costume, my braided pigtails dripping with water. I would have broken into a rendition of “Singing in the Rain” but there was a wall full of Indian people laughing and pointing already, I figured I’d maintain some semblance of dignity (even if my sanity was shot for the day).

We continued to walk through the rain for another 10 minutes to get on our bus; whose windows were open and whose roof was leaking. There was no escaping the rain.

I’m issuing a challenge: picture your typical rainy days—hot chocolate, soup, a good book, warm blankets. I love rainy days. I know many people do, in part because we have the luxury of staying dry. Every day here I am reminded of how much I have, the conveniences I never thought twice about that come with the first world wealth (running water, clean water, temperature-controlled clean running water, public trash cans, waste disposal systems, public-center cleaning, microwaves, stoves, to name a few).

Even the life of a poor college student is incredibly comfortable in comparison to everyone we work with here, and the majority of the world.

But in this moment, getting soaked beneath the covered roof of a public vehicle, I was struck with the privilege it is to stay dry on a rainy day. I thought, most of the rest of the world lives wet days in rickety, leaky buses. Soon I’m going to go back to my fun, privileged rainy days. 

My bus-riding companion and very wise member of my team, Kennerley, asked me, “So what are you going to do with your privilege?”

What am I going to do with my privilege?

What are you going to do with your privilege?