Bottle caps and Other Reminders
In Bangladesh, when you are visiting as a first world creature, it’s hard to not look like a tourist, no matter how hard you try. That is not hard to understand, especially once you realize that Bangladesh is even further down the socio-economic ladder than third-world. It’s more like fifth. The poverty is unimaginable. Its neighbor, India, looks like Disneyland by comparison. So even if you are visiting that place for the sake of something as high minded as learning about sustainable development, you still look the same - a tourist.
Because Bangladesh occupies a river delta and the typhoons rage in from the sea of Bengal with ever increasing vengeance, the people are perpetually in a state of rebuilding – their simple homes, roads, and rice paddies. They move more dirt in baskets on their heads than anyplace else on earth. The primary goal of such earth moving is simple - to raise their altitude above sea level, raise the height of their villages to avoid the ravages of flood and disease.
There is no lack of non governmental organizations in the land. They are needed. But the more one sees the more one questions the level of their impact. If there was ever an example of wasted resources and effort, Bangladesh might be it. What difference does it make if we distribute seeds after the latest flood, sponsor the health clinic in the midst of such dense population, or start some income-producing micro-industry? All of those efforts represent the proverbial drop in the bucket.
If one is to keep hopeful in places like Bangladesh it will not be because huge strides are made on any front or because the whole place is changed into something that more resembles our own way of life. That is not going to happen, or happen in the ways we imagine they should. Even so, the aspirations of both Bangladeshis and those who care about them include things like adequate nutrition, clean water, health care, family planning and education.
One day my guide and mentor took me into the slums of the capital city, Dhaka. The purpose of our visit was to witness the strides that were being made in literacy education. We walked through the shanty town of hovels, little huts of corrugated metal and scraps with dirt or woven mat floors. The slum lords charged as much as they could for these shacks where the sewage ran through the streets.
As we arrived in one of the clearings in the middle of the slum three chairs seemingly appeared out of no where. And we, the special guests, were invited to sit and observe the children at learning. A crowd gathered around us, watching with great interest. Who were these strangers?
The children brought out little hand-held black boards and traced their letters and numbers with slivers of chalk. One little fellow recited verse from their poet laureate, Tagore. Questions from the teacher were matched with answers from eager faces as they raised their hands for recognition.
And then several shiny objects appeared, passed from hand to hand, one at a time through the crowd, from the back toward us in the front of the circle. As these mystery containers arrived we realized what they were – three cold bottles of 7-Up. Where in the world did they come from? In the middle of the squalid heat, the air dead and crowd pushing in, the condensation of the cold bottle against the hand felt like winter in summer. One man stepped forward and popped off the cap and I slipped it into my pocket. And just before we indulged in our first sip, the doctor with whom we were traveling leaned over to me and said, “Enjoy it; this bottle of 7-Up represents one day of wages for them.”
It would be easy to rationalize that those watching us enjoy our frosty beverages were simply used to the heat and didn’t get thirsty like we did, or that we had a long, arduous journey to get there and so deserved it or that it would be rude to refuse such extravagant hospitality. Whatever we told ourselves, however much any of this might have been true even in part, the truth was that that the people who watched us drink were just as thirsty as we were. The difference was that they would not drink a drop.
The awkwardness of a moment like this is hard to describe. It is something akin to feasting at a five-star restaurant while a homeless man forages through the trash can outside. Or you sit down at a meal with family or friends and the food arrives for everyone…except one. Evidentially their order was held up in the kitchen or took longer to prepare. “Oh, don’t wait for me,” she says. “Go ahead and eat before your food gets cold. Mine will arrive soon enough.” But we wait anyway. How can we possibly eat in front of someone who has not been served?
But there are lots of people who have not been served. They are just not sitting at our tables. Those moments, whether at the home dinner table or in a slum in Bangladesh, are just the conspicuous ones. We eat and drink and consume in the presence of others all the time; it’s just that we don’t see them. We people of bounty, either blessed by ample resources or prospering because we or our ancestors took what belonged to others, feast while others starve. In multitudes of ways we consume a far greater proportion of the world’s natural resources or energy or products than our neighbor does. For many in the global neighborhood there is a positive correlation between our excess and their want.
Self-conscious stewards of life on this planet are called to live more simply, consume less conspicuously, reduce our carbon footprint and create an environment that is sustainable not only for us but also for our entire eco-family. This is the beginning and the minimum, but there is more.
The world is not like a reservoir that holds a finite quantity of resources. It is not primarily a question of moving things around, transferring goods, people and resources from place to place, from one bucket to another. That is so the old physics, the view of a static universe. Today, with the new physics, we understand the endless, quantum dimension of energy that far exceeds our imaginations. And the new physics describes a world much closer to the one understood by the ancients, our ancestors living by faith: The fishes and loaves are not redistributed, but multiplied.
The truth is that the young person in the slum in Dhaka who learns to read and write may someday read a story to their children that inspire them to greatness unknown. This young person who heard the story may share an unimaginable dream of peace and well-being to a friend who becomes a partner in solving the great problems of the day. Perhaps clean water comes into that slum and along with it a viable sewage solution. One of those children finds an education and goes on to be a doctor, bringing health to thousands. But how could it have happened without the literacy education in the first place? One act of love can affect an entire energy field and life is changed forever in a million ways, present and future. Bread is multiplied and shared, one hand to the next.
What that means is that the entire future of the world sleeps dormant inside the loving imagination of each person. And somewhere in the great Mystery, a presence abides and waits for the unveiling, the release of this unlimited power into the world. Like some 7-Up bottle cap, floating around inside the hidden universe of a pocket, it bears unending testimony that the impossible is not the impossible.
