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Get some perspective
Saturday, 17 September 2005
In developed countries, we tend to forget how lucky we are. Growing up in a place of order and plenty blinds us to the reality of the situation most of humanity faces. Sure, we see it on TV, but it's not until we witness the deprivation of the majority that it really hits home.
This reality shock came to me when I was twenty-one and I went on a seven week trip to India. I'd never spent much time in the developing world before - and the sheer chaos I witnessed hit me like a blow to the head.
Traffic and crowds were everywhere, with little respect for the rule of law. Rivers of sewerage flowed below packed bridges, with people washing themselves in the filthy water. Paraplegic street children crawled on the ground, tugging at my legs to give them a few coins.
Family after family was left living in the street - having to deal with little food, burning dried cow pats for heating and dealing with sick children with no hope of receiving medical care. Beggars cut off their own limbs, just so they'd seem more pathetic and therefore earn a little more money.
Policemen openly beat homeless people in front of me. And the lucky among the poor had such terrible jobs as breaking down piles of rocks into gravel to be laid on the road, because employing them to do that was cheaper than buying actual gravel.
Such shocking sights weren't rare. They were everywhere I looked. It bought home to me the true meaning of the word "poverty" on a scale that most Australians couldn't even imagine.
"How did these people manage to create such a cruel and chaotic world?" I asked myself when I first arrived. It seemed as if an artificial version of hell had been created just so I could witness it.
Gradually, however, as I spent time in India, the truth dawned on me. It isn't they who live in an artificial world. Their everyday problems of hunger, disease, violence and poverty is the reality of the human situation. That is life.
It's us who live in a false reality. The relative order, wealth, health and safety we have has been created out of the chaos that is the real world. The abundance even the worst off of us has access to is artificial. Chaos, poverty, violence and death is humanity's lot in life and has been since the beginning of time.
Witnessing such an environment made me realize just how lucky we in the developing world are. Compared to a hungry paraplegic street-child who has to crawl around begging for money in the streets of Delhi, any problem I may face is trivial.
On the day I arrived back from my seven weeks in India, I remember watching a television show set in middle-class suburban America . In it, the teenage lead was complaining about how difficult life was because his girlfriend had broken up with him and he wasn't doing very well in school.
As I watched his miserable face, I thought "My friend - you have no idea what a real problem is".
In your life you will face adversity, but get some perspective. You're almost certainly much better off than you think.
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