Finding my Outside Edge

I am a hockey player!

When I say that out loud, it makes me feel significant. I’m not a professional or semi professional player. I didn’t play hockey in college or even in high school. In fact I learned to play only six years ago when I turned forty.

I grew up in a family that played hockey, or at least the males did. I spent my youth at the rink watching them play. I like hockey rinks. Every time I walk into one I feel adrenaline seeping into my veins. I count the seconds until the cold still air fills my lungs and envelops my body. I listen for the familiar sound of people’s voices reverberating off the arena walls, the shouting of coaches from the bench, the flapping of sticks on the ice and the tremendous boom when a puck hits the boards.

I used to wonder why I loved a sport I did not play. There were no girl’s hockey teams when I was a child. Girls were figure skaters.

When I put hockey skates on for the first time, after accepting an invitation to join a group of women I had seen learning how to play at a local rink, my life on the ice as I knew it changed forever. My feet flew out in front of me and I landed on my seat. Very few figure skaters know that wearing hockey skates is like strapping cellophane to the bottom of your stocking feet and walking across a rink. Hockey blades curve up in the front and back into a hint of a half moon, unlike flat stable figure skates. There is nothing on a hockey blade that will save you once your body weight shifts past your center.

The women around me on the benches in the locker room laugh when they remember their first time on hockey skates. The humiliation of it is part of our rite of passage.

Our locker room is a sacred place. When we walk in, we leave our mundane lives at the door. While we dress to play, our obligations stay crouched outside waiting anxiously for us to go back to them. In here and out on the rink, we are not wives, mothers, bosses, sisters; we are hockey players.

The first time I came to hockey practice I was nervous. I lumbered in with an old duffle bag that I had found it in our luggage closet. It was filled with my husband’s smelly equipment. I bought my own gloves, helmet and skates but the shoulder pads, pants, shin guards and elbow pads were all his. I was not sure which order to put them on even though I had watched my brother do it for years. Inevitably I put the skates on before the pants and then I could not pull the skates through the pant legs. When I was finally dressed my outfit floated around my 5 foot, 4 inch frame, making me look like a pubescent male going through a growth spurt. The pants we so big I looked as if I had put on 100 lbs. I glanced around at the other women in the locker room. They too were struggling with the gear, some more than others. We all looked ridiculous.

Years of nurturing young children had just about taken the competition out of me, but once I started to play hockey it came back with a vengeance. We don’t check in women’s hockey, nor would we want to, though sometimes we unintentionally collide. I like being part of a team pushing the puck up the ice to the goal, shouting out encouragement to the others. When the coach described new plays, it took me awhile to figure out how to make my body do what my head understood. But the anxiety was good as it fed my resolve to get better.

The hardest part of learning to play hockey was overcoming the fear of falling. For 40 year old women who are just discovering that their bodies are not impervious, the fear of falling becomes a huge liability to improving.

There was a drill I hated. It involved doing turns on our outside edges. It looks easy enough as you leaned sideways, balancing on your right skate, with your left skate lifted behind you. The purpose of the drill was to learn how to use the power of your outside edge to propel you forward. I, however, was terrified that if I leaned too much into my outside edge, my skate would slip out from under me, sending me careening across the ice on my shoulder. Day after day, night after night I worked on it. I would laughingly say to my coaches that I was sure I bought skates that did not have outside edges because I could not do the drill, so would they mind excusing me from it. They were not amused.

But I knew that if I did fall on my shoulder, I had a shoulder pad to protect me. If I fell on my hip, I had those big pants to cushion my fall. So what was I really afraid of?

It took me until my third season to answer that. One day during practice, Coach noted my hesitation on the outside edges and stopped me.

“Come here,” he said. “This is what I want you to do now.”

He demonstrated a cross over start from a sideways position. Then to get himself facing straight down the ice he crossed his back foot over the front foot and pushed off with the outside edge of what became his back foot. Once on his way he took two strides, a sharp cut turn and repeated the same exercise coming back using the other outside edge.

“Now, you do it. Keep going until I blow the whistle for you to stop.”

Never, I thought to myself. I’ll fall. I’ll die.

I’ll die? What was I saying?

I looked at Coach. There was no leniency in his stare, no way out. There was no doubt in his eyes either.

So I got ready, skates parallel, took a breath and lifted the back skate to cross over the front one. Nothing happened. I went nowhere. The skate just came down pathetically on the ice.

“You didn’t push off with the outside edge,” said Coach. “Do it again.”

Of course I had not pushed off with my outside edge. I had no intention of using my outside edge. Didn’t he know that my skates didn’t have outside edges?

“Again!” he ordered.

I set up, bent my knees and lifted my skate. This time I tried a little. It was scary, a bit wiggly, but something definitely happened.

For thirty minutes he did not let up and each time I tried I got bolder. I practiced the step all week and when I returned to morning practice seven days later I was ready for the wrath of Coach. He was ready too.

If I tell experienced hockey players that it took me a season of hard work to gain my outside edge they would laugh, so I don’t. What I really gained though was not my edges, but courage. The hardest thing to overcome was not learning how to use that outside edge, Coach knew that, it was overcoming my fear of failing. Fear of failing had stopped me from trying.

Despite my love for hockey arenas, I know that the best place to play the game is outdoors. When the sunlight filters through the lead colored branches of the hibernating trees and casts a lavender glow on the snow, I pick up my duffle bag and head out to the neighborhood rink. It sits quietly nestled in between a primary school and a lonely frozen baseball diamond. Low in the sky the winter sun glistens off the ice and warms my back with a light touch as I lace up my skates.

I often come here to practice on my own. It’s a never ending quest to get better even though for a 46 year old mother there is no recognized end game. There are no Olympics and no National Hockey League to qualify for, no trophies or awards in sight.

I’m not so afraid of falling anymore. If I land on the ice it is because I am working hard at something. I am, after all, a hockey player.

A shortened version of this essay aired on Chicago Public Radio on February 22, 2010. To listen click here: http://www.wbez.org/Content.aspx?audioID=40182

Eight Forty-Eight – For the Love of Hockey

Posted on WBEZ, Chicago Public Radio, on February 22, 2010. 

Last night USA’s hockey team posted a huge five-to-three win against the Canadians in Vancouver. Back home in Chicago, local writer and hockey player Nan Doyal also won a big battle recently against her own fears. Nan Doyal is a freelance writer, who plays right wing for the Glencoe Mother Puckers.

Music Button: Pat Benatar, “Hit Me With Your Best Shot”, from the CD Pat Benatar’s Greatest Hits, (Capitol)

Listen to podcast:   Eight Forty-Eight – For the Love of Hockey.

A Barefoot Profile: Bambi Freeman

“A meat chicken has a short life,” said Bambi Freeman. “It only lives about six weeks before it gets too fat and falls over.” The chickens in the large pens were busy devouring the bugs and grubs that hid in the greens beneath their tubby white bodies. It had been an unseasonably cool summer in Vermont. But the grass was still growing and the sheep and the chickens were happily putting on weight. The old world guardian dog who kept an eye on the flock was content. No heavy hot weather, laden with humidity and bothersome flies. The weeks had been filled with cool days which rolled into even cooler evenings, punctuated once in awhile by a spray of warm sunshine that lit the verdant hills and illuminated a brief but transparent blue sky overhead.

Bambi raises egg chickens as well as meat chickens. In fact every Thursday I make sure to stop by and pick up a dozen fresh eggs from her. She saves them for me and refills the same cardboard carton that I bring back week after week. The egg chickens have a slightly better existence than the meat chickens. For starters, they live longer than six weeks. They are also less constrained as they cluck and fuss and run freely around the barnyard and the vegetable gardens. Bambi leaves the radio on in the barn all day. She says it keeps the hens company. She claims that they are particularly enthusiastic about the Boston Red Sox. I can imagine a row of fecund hens gathering around the transistor listening intently to the games broadcasted from Fenway Park, their heads bobbing up and down and then cocking from side to side as their favorite players run the bases.

Bambi Freeman is a farmer and has been for more than half of her life. Originally from New Jersey, she found her way up north in the 1950′s to ski. She met her husband here, settled down, had children and started a farm. At 70 years old, she now lives on her own in the loving company of four dogs, two cats and a myriad of farm animals. Twenty years ago, Bambi’s husband suddenly left her after learning that she had an aggressive form of Multiple Sclerosis. Despite no previous symptoms, she woke one morning in the mid 1980′s unable to move. Rendered virtually paralyzed she could not continue to work her farm. Without her husband to help she was unable to sustain it and had to sell her animals. Her husband had taken the farm equipment, but left her the land. What followed, she told me, were years of hard work to get her body back. Despite expectations that she would never work again, Bambi persevered through rehabilitation and learned to move her limbs by looking at them and willing them to function.

Gradually she rebuilt her farm, buying an old tractor, a relic of sorts, from a fellow guest at a friendly dinner party. Then she brought back her animals and bred them. Today she is best known for her lamb, but her organic, free range chickens are pretty spectacular too. She also mentors other women farmers, many of whom are struggling as single mothers, just as she did at one time. She helps them learn how to grow food and raise animals. Working the land to feed one’s family is a very empowering experience, she has said. Particularly for people who feel helpless. It is the ultimate in self sufficiency. No one can take that feeling away from you.

The first time I met Bambi Freeman was in the dentist’s office a number of years ago. She works there during the wintertime when her farm activities slow down. The job provides her health benefits, a necessity in her condition. Several Christmas seasons ago, I ran into her behind the cash register at a local ski lodge. She sold me a pair of cross country ski boots. But this summer, when I saw her at a local farmers market I learned about her real vocation: farming.

Late one afternoon in August, just as the sky was once again filling up with turbulent thunder clouds, I pulled into Bambi’s farm in a friend’s truck to get a load of sheep manure for my own garden.

Bambi came out to greet us from the front door of her crooked little house. She offered to show us around before we had to take our truck around the back entrance to get closer to the manure pile. As we carefully followed her strong limping frame I noticed we were caringly being herded by an Australian shepherd named Roy.

Up on a distant hill her herd of 100 or more sheep grazed under the watchful eye of her youngest guardian dog. She explained how that dog’s sole purpose was to care for the sheep and that he would live his whole life up there on that hill with them.

“Have you ever lost a sheep to coyotes”, I asked, knowing that there were packs marauding the area.

“Not a one,” she said confidently. In addition to the guardian dog, she had also designed and installed an electric fence with precise distances between the horizontal wiring to keep the furry hunters out and the little lambs in.

We drove our truck around to the back entrance of the farm as Bambi had instructed, making sure to lock the gate behind us so the animals would not get out. Next to the old barn was a pile of manure which stretched out about ten yards. It was mostly sheep manure, Bambi told us, but there were also other things thrown in like an old chicken carcass. She was quite sure though that the chicken bones had already been licked clean by one of the dogs.

The scene behind the barn belied an ecosystem until itself. Two of her old retired farm dogs regarded us curiously while standing at a distance. There were sheep here too, grazing on the blades of grass that had sprouted everywhere. They took no notice of us as we pulled up in our truck. The backside of the barn was open and the scent of wet hay and mud with a hint of sweet manure wafted towards us. I could hear the muffled radio music in the distance. The cool evening air carried the prelude to the storm.

Bambi crawled up onto an old red tractor, started it up and thrust it into gear. As it lumbered forward into the manure pile she released the bucket on the front end and it plummeted into the black morass. With the dexterity of a surgeon she filled the large claw and lifted it up overhead. Delicately so as not to lose a drop, she drove the tractor to the back of the pickup and released the contents of the bucket into the trunk. With a big grin she looked over at me and ordered “Go into the barn and get a pitchfork.”

I nodded and turned towards the barn. From the back side it was much bigger than I had originally thought. Where was I to find the pitchfork? My friend followed me and we explored inside while Bambi continued her work in the dirt. Finally we found a wall of pitchforks near the blaring transistor radio. Which one to use? They all seemed to be covered in cobwebs. We grabbed two and went back out to the truck.

I was not sure what I was supposed to do with the pitchfork, but decided to climb up over the back of the truck into the bed of manure. My hiking boots sunk in the gooey black mass and as I looked down to find a clean spot I noted that I was surrounded by living moving bodies: worms. Bambi was just returning with another load and I shouted out, “Bambi, there are millions of worms in this manure,” She chuckled “Yup. But I won’t charge you extra for those.”

I waited until she had turned away again before I drove the pitch fork into the manure, trying to even it out in the back of the truck, but to no-avail. My inexperience gave me away. The clumps slipped through the fork prongs, my brow and neck broke out in a sweat and the final humiliation was when the fork fell off the long handle. My friend, who raises horse, looked on and laughed. She jumped onto the truck just as Bambi returned with another load. I managed to stick the fork back onto the handle in time and we both set about pulling the sticky manure out of the bucket into the truck bed. Bambi just smiled and nodded but said nothing.

With gusto she made several returns to the pile and with our help she worked more quickly. Finally I told her I thought we had enough. She nodded and shut off the tractor engine, gingerly dismounting from the tiny red metal seat on which she had been perched and limping over to where we stood. She looked back at her tractor once more before turning to face us.

“They want me to install a safety bar around the top of this old thing in case it rolls,” she laughed. “This old thing is never going to roll. They just don’t make tractors like that anymore. You know I can drive this one on the open road and it gets going as fast as a car.” I thought that sounded rather treacherous: Bambi on a tractor on the open highway.

Over the years Bambi has learned to live and adjust to the disease that plagues her. She says that warm humid weather is particularly tough and makes it hard for her to move. But she is certain that it is all the hard work that has kept her alive and healthy. She could not have done it alone though. Recently a local Rotary Club in partnership with a local Church raised money to build a stairway with railings inside Bambi’s barn so that she could more safely access her hayloft. Other volunteers in the community solved a serious water drainage problem which was causing ice build up at the entrance to her home and her barn. She says that the help from her community have ensured that she can continue to farm longer now.

Bambi makes her living selling her chickens, eggs and every part of her lambs. Her vegetable gardens yield a harvest that is converted into preserves and jellies. In the spring she sheers her Shetland sheep and prepares the wool for sale. She has cooperated with other sheep farmers and when they could not get enough money for their wool created an effort to ship it to Canada to have blankets made on the Hudson Bay looms. They were shipped back to Vermont and sold.

Bambi used to sell exclusively from her farm. Customers would come to see her to buy her meat and eggs. But now she travels all over the area to a selection of weekly farmers markets where she meets her regular customers while at the same time attracting new ones. She says that it makes much more sense, “After all, if you can’t bring Mohammed to the mountain, you have to bring the mountain to Mohammed,” she added. The result is that Bambi is ruthless with her time, between chores on the farm, cultivating and harvesting, sheering, slaughtering and getting to market there is very little time for anything else during the year. But she is never shy to make a sale. She was ready to bring me a mountain too if I wanted it. When she heard I would be travelling back to the Midwest in a few weeks, she said she’d put together a cooler filled with lamb and chicken for me to take with me. She’d take cash or a check. I said I would consider it.

As we talked the thunder was beginning to grow in the distance and roll towards us. It was gaining momentum as it only does in the mountains. My friend and I decided it was probably best we get going and seek shelter. Bambi nodded and smiled at us as she stood in the middle of her open field unfazed by the impending onslaught. Another threatening storm was hardly worth an acknowledgement in her world. There would be many more to follow.

Journal Entry: May 18, 2009 – Buriram Province, Thailand

A Day with Mechai Viravaidya, at the Opening of the Lamplaimat Pattana Middle School

 

It was well over 100 degrees in the shade and the sun was brutally beating up my white skin. But Mechai Viravaidya looked as cool as if he had just walked out of air-conditioning. The trim, pressed, 67 year old man with a thinning head of hair greeted the children of the Lamplaimat Pattana School with a grin and a twinkle in his eye that he had reserved only for them.

Mechai Viravaidya with students of Lamplaimat Pattana School

The evening before he was not interested in carrying on a conversation with me or anyone on his team for that matter. He did not smile and he was consumed by secret thoughts. He did not even engage in polite small talk. At a certain point I wondered if he was mildly deaf as he had that look on his face that people sometimes get in large groups when they are hard of hearing.

But this morning he was another man. After thirty years devoted to eradicating poverty in Thailand Mechai Viravaidya was launching his most ambitious project yet. He was going to make sure that what he had started so long ago would be sustained for generations to come.

 If any of us doubted his ability to deliver, we did not even whisper it. For we all knew better. Mechai had already accomplished the impossible.

Mechai was born in Bangkok to a Thai father and a Scottish mother. He had always been regarded by some in traditional circles as an odd character, a bit of an outsider. Even his Thai half was infused with Chinese ancestry. So as someone who did not quite fit the idea of Thai society, it should have been no surprise that for most of his life Mechai pursued solutions to problems which were unconventional and often even scandalous among Thailand’s prudish elite. His parents had both been doctors and his mother, with whom he had been extremely close, had infused him with her belief that those who were fortunate enough to have more had an obligation to help those with less. Mechai had taken these lessons to heart.

Today he is known throughout the world for curbing the population explosion in Thailand which in the 1970′s was one of the greatest obstacles to successful economic development. As a young employee of the National Economic Development Board, Mechai began introducing the birth control pill into villages and rural communities. For practical purposes, he renamed it the family welfare vitamin as it sounded much less onerous and it also disassociated it with intimate physical matters. Against great objection he managed to have the pills distributed at the community level instead of through the traditional bottlenecks of doctors and clinics. This enabled more people to access birth control and it reached into the far corners of rural Thailand. Within a few decades the population growth in Thailand had dropped from 3.3% to 0.5% (the average family went from 7 children to 1.5 children).

 In time, because of his familiarity with the reproducing behaviors of individuals, Mechai became acutely aware of the threat of AIDS to the Thai population in the 1980′s, particularly among the poor rural girls who were often sold or sent to the cities to work in the sex trade. While members of the government discouraged publicity about the disease, as many of them were part owners of brothels themselves, Mechai managed through resourceful and belligerent means to launch a massive education campaign about the disease and set about distributing hundreds of millions of condoms to the Thai population. By 2003 Thailand experienced a 90% decline in new infections and the World Bank attributed Mechai’s work to the prevention of 7.7 million new cases of HIV/AIDS in Thailand.

 

Mechai has always rooted his work in his life’s mission of eradicating poverty. Once HIV/AIDS was under control he set about building micro financing programs to encourage the development of small enterprises in Thailand’s rural regions. In the neighboring villages around the Lamplaimat Pattana School owners of small silk weaving, dried fruit, organic fertilizer and animal feed enterprises now could afford to educate their children where before they had had no hope of doing so.

Mechai believed that education was the antibiotic for poverty. He also knew that the first thing a villager did when he had enough money to spend beyond subsistence level, was to send his child to school. On paper, the Thai government was supposed to provide education to all children, but in reality this was not the case.

With money he made from selling the family property which had been left to him by his parents, Mechai invested in the building of a new school in one of the remotest, most desperate provinces in northeast Thailand. It would be a test case for a new education model for Thailand’s poorest. Mechai provided the capital investment, but the school sustained itself annually through small businesses that it had started and were run by teachers and students.

On the day of my visit, Mechai wanted to show me one of the classrooms where a self directed curriculum development was taking place. He led me to a room filled with about 20 students sitting on the floor.  Mechai’s animated face which until now had been reserved for the children was suddenly turned on me as he translated what the students were saying. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the chatter but he was insistent that I understood what was taking place before us. His cool brow beaded suddenly with a sprits of perspiration. The teachers looked on smiling. Most of the class was good naturely shouting out instructions and ideas to the two students who controlled a white board and everything that was written on it.

 

In the hallway outside the classroom, Mechai wanted to show me the work that was being done on computers. There were no text books in this school. Text books were expensive and only taught subjects in one way. But more importantly, textbooks did not allow for self directed learning. Mechai wanted the students at this school used the internet to learn in a more opportunistic and engaging way than a book could ever offer. Through the internet they would also learn from the rest of the world and since most of them were now learning English, even more of the world was open to them.

Students learning with computers

 When we had finished touring the classrooms, Mechai charged ahead to a common room where there were several things on display. I assumed I was expected to follow, so I hurried after him. He motioned for me to join him and we both surveyed an exhibit of the school uniform. The students had designed the uniforms themselves he said. He also quite proudly pointed to a bottle of biofuel. The students had pressed the seeds of a plant whose name I did not recognize and created oil which was used to run the tractors that belonged to the school.

 

When I later asked a couple of parents what their hope was for their child who was attending the school. They said to me that it was their wish that they would grow up to be good people, who helped their communities and families. It was strange that none of them said they wanted to their children to be rich and successful. I wondered if secretly they did and were not telling me.

But then again, Mechai’s intent with this school was not to teach individual achievement at the expense of all else. He was trying to cultivate a new morality, one based on economic independence, but also social co-dependence.

In appreciation for all that was being given to them, the students of Lamplaimat Pattana School devoted hours of their days to serving the elderly in their community, helping them with chores, cooking for them, fetching necessities. They would be dispatched to work on community projects and perform community services in their villages and others. They would also devote time to caring for orphans, those children who were even less fortunate than they were because they had been left without families. They understood that others had given so that they may have this opportunity and that as part of a greater society, they were in turn were to give to others.

Mechai saw the future of philanthropy being reformed first through children, through teaching at a very young age the importance of human interdependence for survival and for elevating each other out of poverty and destitution. In a sense it was a school where the concept of paying forward was at the very essence of its purpose. Over time as children grew up and then re-enforced this with their children, a new approach to serving humanity would emerge. This was Mechai’s dream. He did not believe that writing a check to a charity was good enough; it perpetuated the dehumanization of poverty and suffering. It created a distance between people; it abdicated responsibility for altruism to someone else. Of course, for those who had never written a check before or made any kind of donation, he said this could be a first step. But eventually he wanted to see more and more people reach out a hand and give of themselves not just of their possessions.

As I sat for a minute’s rest, the sweat pouring down my back in rivulets, I watched Mechai rush off to meet the builders who were responsible for completing a new recreation center for the school. They already were behind schedule. Mechai made his way deliberately, but also pausing gently to greet the many children, parents and teachers who were wandering from building to building at the Lamplaimat Pattana School. They were all admiring the new structures that had just been completed.

Today Mechai was celebrating. It was the opening day of the new middle school and 30 children who had completed six years in the primarly school were about to begin a new school year in 7th grade. We were there to send the students off with our good wishes. We were also there to celebrate Mechai’s dream of sustainability. Only now it was no longer just his dream. Today he had entrusted it to the next generation.

Who is a Slumdog?

When director Danny Boyle accepted the award from the American Academy of Motion Pictures (The Oscar) for best motion picture he thanked the people who had helped him make this glorious moment possible. His dream had come true at last. He had once told his children that if he ever won the award, he would jump up and down like Tigger (in Winnie the Pooh), and so he did just that as he took the golden trophy in his hand for his role in creating “Slumdog Millionaire“. He graciously thanked his family and the many others who had worked on the film and then in closing briefly thanked all those in Mumbai who had helped him make this film and even all those who did not help.

As he left the stage I thought to myself what a missed opportunity it had been. A man had realized his dream at last in front of all of us and when all the world was listening to his voice in those few magic moments, he chose to focus on his own life, not that of those in the slums of Mumbai about whom the story had been written. Given the global controversy over the film’s alleged misleading depiction of the slums and the people who live there I was surprised and disappointed that Mr. Boyle did not use the open microphone to express more than his reason for his bouncing “Tigger dance”.

The week before the awards ceremony I was back in the slums of Mumbai again. For the past four years I have been a frequent visitor there as I connect and reconnect with the slum dwellers I know whose life’s work has been to fight for their rights as citizens, raise their voice for better infrastructure and the basic services that other city dwellers enjoy, while at the same time taking responsibility for bettering their own living conditions in the face of continued neglect and disregard from their government.

On this particular visit I was spending the day with a man I know named Jockin who is the head of the National Slum Dwellers Federation. Jockin, himself a slum dweller, came to Mumbai in 1963 at the age of 17 to find work. He, like so many others, left his rural home with nothing and migrated to the growing urban center of India in search of a better livelihood. The result of this massive migration of people to the cities over the past several decades has been devastating. The cities are incapable of developing fast enough to meet the onset of demand for infrastructure and basic services and this has resulted in an explosion of shanty towns or slums where inhabitants are left to build their own shelter and live in conditions that are sub-human in order to get on with life and find work. While some of those slums have over the years been raised and replaced with modern buildings, new ones are created as people re-settle and new migrants enter the city every day. Today it is believed that 60% of Mumbai’s inhabitants live in slums. A quick glance across the cityscape as one lands at the airport reveals pockets of slums all over the city from hillsides to small clusters wedged between skyscrapers in Worli – the new shiny business district. The largest of the slums in Mumbai is called Dharavi, sometimes referred to as Asia’s largest slum. It is here that many, but not all of the street scenes in “Slumdog Millionaire” were filmed.

The challenge of slums and slum living is not unique to India. It is a growing issue across the world. In the last 200 years the population of the world has increased six fold to reach approximately 6.6 billion. Two years ago the UN announced that the world had passed a significant point in history. For the first time more people lived in urban areas than rural areas. By 2030 it is estimated that over 66% of the world’s population will live in cities and with a population growing by 82 million people the urban population in the world then will be almost as large as the total population of the world today. Unless urban and national governments across the world can increase the speed and efficiency with which they ready their cities for this onslaught, the idea of slums will be commonplace, not exotic pockets of poverty and deprivation about which people make popular movies.

So when a movie like “Slumdog Millionaire” wins an award of such accolade, it is an opportunity for someone to call attention to a phenomenon that is growing around us and to help us to understand what that means for all of us. If its creator cannot do this, then hopefully others will.

I did not like the movie because I thought it was misleading and focused excessively on the negative elements of Mumbai, but I understand why there were many more who did like it. The story was an adaptation of a book called “Question &Answer” by Vikas Swarup. A quick read that delights because it is a testimony to the human spirit and the dream that someone, born into abject poverty and orphaned can rise above it in spite of the odds because of what he has been able to teach himself and because of his integrity and compassion for others.

I asked some of the slum dwellers I met with what they thought of the movie. They had all seen it on pirated DVD’s that had been circulating around their community. The first man I spoke with was a retired bootlegger named John. He had once made his living peddling booze in the slums, but today his business card listed a number of legitimate professions including TV press reporter (he showed me his press badge, nestled in a filthy wallet), a community worker, a chief promoter of one of the developments which had been initiated by the slum dwellers and a general secretary of a local power company. He came originally from Goa, a state south of Mumbai that is known for its lovely beaches. His father worked in the railways and brought the family to Mumbai when his son was only 6 months old. He had lived in the slums ever since.

John did not like the name of the movie. “We are not dogs, we don’t live like dogs. People who see that movie might think that people who live in the slums live like those in the movie. It is not the case” He went on to explain “Here we know what everyone is doing. We live so close to each other that if someone gets in trouble we come to help them because we can hear them. If someone is hungry and has no food, we feed them. We look after each other because we live with each other”.

Later I would have an interesting discussion with a woman from another slum in Bandra. She was busy calculating how much money she had collected from the women’s saving cooperative that she was a part of. When I asked her what she thought of the movie she said that the love story was nice but she did not like the many scenes that depicted the slums as centers of blight and filth. The slums are awful to live in because there is no infrastructure, she commented, but she did not need to be reminded of that in a movie, when she could see that in front of her every day.

The man I was spending most of the day with, Jockin, had lived in the slums for more than 40 years. He had created the National Slum dwellers Association which was a network of community activist in slums all over Mumbai and India who shared what they learned with each other in their constant struggle for land rights and basic services. Word of his work had spread across the world to slums in other countries and the next day he would be leaving for Brazil to meet with slum dwellers there. When I asked him what he thought of the movie he shook his head, ” Who is a slum dog? What is a slum dog? I don’t know. The people here don’t know the answer either. That movie is not about Dharavi, it is not about the slums. This movie is by people who do not know anything about slums. There is nothing to do with slum. It is bad in its conception. We are not dogs here; we are hardworking people who live to support our family and help those in our community who are less fortunate. People come here all the time believing that the slum is a place of crime and starvation. They think people here are lazy, fooling around, picking pockets. These are the notions of people who are not involved here.” He added “”Slum” is human habitation, filled with human habitats. Slum is only a slum because the buildings are built by the people themselves not by someone else.”

In considering what I have learned from Mumbai’s slums over the years and the people who live and work here, I have recognized that my sanitized western perspective had to be adjusted. The slum of Dharavi is a medium sized city unto itself. It has a population of about half a million of which 70% not only lives but also works here. Most if not all are entrepreneurs running some type of business that the rest of the city would not deign to touch. There are over 1,000 recycling businesses here that collect the garbage, old building materials, empty oil cans, plastics and discarded industrial containers from around the city, then clean them up and resell them back to companies to reuse. Dharavi is also the center of leather production in the region. The Tamils who came to Mumbai from the south of India over the past 50 years, brought with them leather making expertise. Now 38% of the leather that in tanned and worked in Dharavi is exported around the world for manufacturing purses and shoes. There are other businesses too. Every morning 3 million little breakfast pastries are made in Dharavi and delivered all over the city so that the Indian middle class and others can enjoy them for breakfast. The domestic help that cleans the homes and drives the cars of middle class Mumbai also reside here. The slums are a vibrant and integral part of the Mumbai economy as well as the greater Indian economy. One cannot ignore that the economic growth of both India and China for that matter, have been built partially on the backs of these urban migrants.

But regardless of their significant and useful roll, slum dwellers and the slums in which they live are an eyesore and an embarrassment to many city leaders who would prefer to pride themselves on clean and efficient, prosperous metropolis’s. Many would just as soon see them disappear completely or at the very least move them all to some remote spot far away from eyeshot. Today the slum dwellers of Dharavi are fighting again for their rights. Several years ago an architect named Mukesh Mehta devised a plan to redevelop this particular slum since its location right in the middle of Mumbai made it potentially a very profitable real estate opportunity.

Without consulting the slum dwellers themselves Mehta approached the government and devised a scheme whereby the slum would be divided up into parcels and auctioned off to various developers from around the world who would be required to build some low income housing in exchange for having the right to construct brand new building for commercial and high end real estate purposes. The plan proceeded as such for awhile until Jockin and his associates caught wind of it and raised the roof, exposing it to the world for what it was: a corrupt scheme to make millions at the expense of the poor (who had been rightly given the land originally by the government and had been paying lease fees on it ever since).

That the slum needs to be redeveloped there is no question. Everyone would agree with that, particularly those who live there. The infrastructure and basic services are non-existent; people live without drinking water, toilets, electricity and proper sewage disposal. Their houses are made by themselves or others who came before them and arranged in a haphazard form around filthy twisting alleys and walkways that make Dickens’ London look like a modern planned city. But if the scheme proceeds as Mehta originally intended, the once vibrant neighborhoods and communities where people cared for each other and worked would be demolished and replaced by high rise residential units, designed by someone who had never lived in a community such as this.

So why should we in the rest of the world care about this? What is happening today in Dharavi is significant for all of us to understand. How the government in partnership with the slum dwellers deal with the redevelopment plans for Asia’s largest slums may set a precedent for how slum redevelopment is handled not only in India but all over the world.

In Slumdog Millionaire, the character played by Dev Patel is empowered to take control of his own life in spite of the odds against him, because of what he has learned on the streets and because of his own strength of spirit and integrity; he rises above it all to find a better life. So too have the slum dwellers of Dharavi learned to build functioning, supportive communities and sources of livelihood, in spite of the odds against them. They are entirely capable and qualified to contribute to a meaningful and sustainable plan for the redevelopment of their city, if they are allowed. If they are not allowed to be part of this process the longer term effect may be more damaging than one could imagine.

Slums can cultivate industriousness, integrity, and a sense of community if those who live there believe they can affect the quality of their own circumstances and be a part of the outcome. But slums can also breed crime, apathy, anger and ultimately terrorism if they are places of hopelessness and powerlessness.

If and when the world is successful at achieving the former for its growing urban centers of blight, then we should all be ready to do a “Tigger dance” in celebration together.

 

February 23, 2009

Journal Entry: February 18, 2009; Bangalore, India.

Dr. Devi Shetty did not answer his mobile phone when I called him. Instead a very pleasant man did and then politely asked me to wait a minute while he handed it to its owner. When I finally met Devi Shetty I realized that this was quite a common occurrence.

I was struggling with a pad of paper and a pen, balancing a phone on my shoulder in the back of a taxi that was trying to maneuver past both a cow and a tractor in Bangalore while Devi Shetty asked me to meet him the next morning at eight and was giving me directions. Then he was gone. I dropped the phone into my lap and furiously scribbled what I thought were the directions to Narayana Hrudayalaya when my driver interrupted and said “don’t worry madam. I know where it is.”

Narayana Hrudayalaya is a hospital founded less than a decade ago by heart surgeon Dr. Devi Shetty. Prior to building this hospital, he had cared for Mother Theresa in the latter years of her life as she suffered from heart disease. I was to discover from our conversations this time that this relationship with Mother had profoundly affected him and had ultimately led him to discover his life’s purpose: delivering healthcare to the poor.

I have visited Dr. Shetty on a number of occasions over the past few years. And in conversations with people I know in Bangalore, I have always asked if they have heard of him. They all have in one way or another. They described him as a compassionate man and speak of him with awe. They call him a good man but also a very smart businessman. Yet even though he is now quite famous, I have found there is very little written about him.

This week’s visit I arrived in the lobby of Narayana Hrudayalaya in the early morning. It had been two years since my last visit here. I was struck again by how not like other hospital lobbies it was. It was filled with people bustling around, talking and laughing while some sat quietly in waiting room seats and stared intently at me as I got my bearings. I looked for the reception desk and spied it almost immediately. For a few minutes I observed the chaos behind the counter. There were about four or five men and women, some seated, some jumping up and down answering phones and speaking with people who were leaning over the counter. I approached a young woman and handed my business card to her saying I was here to meet Dr. Shetty. “For a consultation?” she asked. No, I answered, just a visit.

Within a few minutes a man came to find me and took me at a quick trot dodging around people of all ages, through a maze of hallways and stairways until we ended in a series of quiet rooms that led to a large corner office with glass on two sides.

The room was brightly lit with a view to a garden outside. One corner of it had been cut off from the rest by a wall. On it was a painting of what appeared to be young goddesses running with cows in a field. There was a small door in the wall which led to what appeared to be a sleeping area. In front of the painting was a massive wood desk. A large plastic model of a heart was mounted on a stand and centered on the desk. There was a credenza against one wall with a framed quote of Margaret Mead’s which read “Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has”. Next to it was a photograph of a man and his wife and four children. What caught my eye however was a photograph of Mother Theresa, smiling, with her hands in prayer. Next to that was a small altar.

I made myself comfortable in a chair and was left alone. As the quiet descended on the office, I became aware of the faint sound of a chanting coming through speakers somewhere in the room. It was barely audible but it was soothing. I waited. Some time passed before quietly the door to the office opened and my host slipped in to greet me.

Devi Shetty was a tall and very handsome man. He walked into the room quite deliberately but gracefully and smiled shyly. He was dressed in scrubs with a blue surgical cap on his head and a mask hanging from around his neck. He wore a white doctor’s coat with “Devi” written on the chest and on his feet were slippers. But what was most familiar were his eyes. He looked at me directly and intently but also gently, if that were possible. There was a sort of peace that filled the room as soon as he spoke. I was not entirely sure if it was due to my imagination, the chanting, or if it was the man himself.

“Come”, he said as he led the way to the seats in front of his desk. The door to the office opened and a man walked in with a cell phone in his hand. He approached the desk and hovered behind the doctor. He murmured something across his shoulder to which Devi Shetty responded with a nod. Another door opened and someone else appeared with a tea in lovely porcelain tea cups. They were set down in front of us. Devi Shetty adjusted the model of the heart on his desk to he could see me better. Without much introduction he began speaking almost as if we had somehow interrupted his train of thought that day and he was now letting me in on the running monologue in his mind.

“In the old days in the village there were rich people and there were poor people.” He said. “If you were rich you had a bigger house. But life, birth, illness and death happened equally to all. Now, you can buy life and postpone death if you have money. But if you are poor, you are ignored.” He looked at me for a moment and paused. “You see, everyone is aspiring now to make money and to improve their life. And even if they have not yet achieved it they still have hope and dreams that they will.”

He tilted his head to one side and furrowed his brow as he continued ” But someday they will realize through some kind of event that they will never get there nor will their children and that realization will turn into anger and frustration.” I had not said a word, but I nodded my head slowly. Then Devi Shetty looked me straight in the eye and said “Today’s terrorism is a trailer to the main event. If we don’t give back out of the goodness of our hearts, then we must give back to avoid this from happening.”

I smiled in what I hoped looked like understanding, but I was wondering why he had chosen to share this viewpoint with me in the first few minutes of our meeting.

Suddenly he seemed to focus on my reason for being there, “So it is nice to see you again, and how is your father?” he smiled at me. I replied that we were all well. He then asked me about the book I was writing and I explained to him my mission in doing it. He nodded his head thoughtfully and in agreement.

“Now what are your plans for the day?” he asked. I replied that I had nothing firm planned as I had hoped to spend as much time with him as possible to learn as much as I could for the writing of my book. “Then let me propose that you shadow me today, come everywhere with me and along the way when there are breaks we can speak about your questions,” he offered.

I could hardly believe my good fortune. I could only have dreamed of this opportunity. I had met Devi Shetty on a number of occasions and from that I was beginning to construct his life story and how he was now delivering healthcare to the poor all over India. But to have the opportunity to see him actually work was unimaginable.

“You will have to change from your street clothes as I would like you to come to my first surgery with me.” He paused surveying me for a minute, ” Do you have difficulty with seeing open bodies on the operating table?” he asked.

Frankly, I had no idea if I would have difficulty with that or not. I had never seen an open body on the operating table. The last open body I saw was during the dissection of a frog in 11^th grade biology class. But I was quick to answer that I would be just fine.

I was quickly led from the room and escorted by a young woman through a series of hallways and stairways and finally into a small grubby locker room. It was the women’s changing room and in there I found a small group of curious nurses who eyed me cheerfully and asked where I was from.

After changing into dark blue scrubs with “visiting doctor” embroidered on a patch on my chest, I was led again through the twisting hallways until I found myself next to a row of four operating theatres. Through the large plate glass windows I could see each separate operation taking place. There were doctors in masks and scrubs leaning intently over operating tables and bodies cloaked in blue cloths.

I was shown into the farthest room where Dr. Shetty was already busy performing surgery. He looked up as I walked in. “Come Nancy. Come see what we are doing.” I came closer to the table being careful to walk around the machinery and the collection of tubes that seemed to be transporting blood to and from the body on the table.

“This is a four month old child who has a hole in the heart. If he is not operated on before he is eight or nine months he will be inoperable. He will not get better”, he explained. I stood at the head of the operating table and peered over a sheet which had been hung between the machinery and the patient. The entire body of the child was covered in a blue sheet, but there was a square opening in the cloth that revealed a small cavern of human flesh and organs. And right in the center of this small receptacle was a beautiful bright red round heart. It was tiny; the size of a small apricot, but it glistened in the light as Dr. Shetty gently moved it to find the hole in question. I watched as he, with deft and caring fingers, isolated the point he was looking for and began slowly to stitch it closed.

I who had never seen anything like this in person before was suddenly overwhelmed by calmness and then an unmistakable feeling of wonder.

The day progresses better than I could have imagined. We found ample time to talk about his life and his life’s work. While I kept prodding him on personal questions about why he decided to make one decision or another, he gracefully kept trying to deflect the conversation away from himself and onto the work he and his team were doing the people for which they were doing it.

He was educated in India and trained as a heart surgeon in London. After many years he returned to India in part for personal reasons and in part because he was made an offer which seemed difficult to refuse. Had he stayed in London he most certainly would have continued on the path to become a top heart surgeon. His work ethic and skill set him apart from others early on and there was great promise for him. Much against the advice of some of his seniors, he decided to return to India.

Back in India he was surgeon to many wealthy Indian patients, but he also insisted on performing heart surgeries for free for poor children. Over time he became increasingly disturbed by the number of poor children he could not treat, whom he had to turn away because there was no money to fund their operations.

It was about this time that he met Mother Theresa whom he cared for while she struggled with her own heart ailments. While observing him one day working with children, she recognized in him something which she shared with him, saying: “I know why you are here. To relive the agony of children with heart disease. God sent you to this world to fix it”

Perhaps it was his encounter with her, or perhaps he was just open to the message, but soon after Devi Shetty returned to his home state and started building a heart hospital with the objective of being able to provide heart operations for the poor regardless of ability to pay. Of course this was not easy. For how does one build such a sophisticated practice when there is little hope that your patients will ever be able to pay for the services. Additionally there was no notable health insurance plan that would pay for services either.

Today Devi Shetty says that you cannot build proper healthcare from the bottom up, meaning you cannot start with primary care and build from there. You must start with tertiary care (specialties, operations, sophisticated procedures) and use that to help fund the development of primary care (general doctor visits). The money is in the tertiary care part. He realized that if he could operate a tertiary care facility that generated revenues for services, managed costs ruthlessly, there might be something left over to help fund free operations and services for the poor. That is how it all began.

He assembled a team of top heart surgeons in India who shared his vision of delivering healthcare to India’s massive poor population and together in 2001 they created Narayana Hrudayalaya, translated into English means “God’s Compassionate Home”.

Within 4 years their hospital had 500 beds and 10 operating rooms (today there are twice as many in use), 2 cardiac catheterization labs and a blood and valve bank. Two years after the hospital opened, he launched a Telemedicine Network (in partnership with the Indian Space Research Organization) whereby doctors could consult with patients all over India while the results of their angiograms and other tests were transmitted via satellite from one location to another in real time. All for free. Today there are 54 Telemedicine centers around the country and over 18,000 patients have been treated this way. Because many of the peasant farmers in rural areas cannot afford to take time off to visit a doctor in a major center to be tested for heart problems, Devi Shetty launched mobile coronary care units that travelled from village to village offering cardiac panel testing. Over 12,000 people have partaken in this in the past few years. They also deployed Telephone ECG centers all over the country to which patients could go to have tests done as well. Over 100,000 people have taken advantage of this service.

In 2003, only a couple of years after the hospital opened. Devi Shetty created the Yeshwini Health Insurance Scheme whereby for the equivalent of $2.00 a year, an individual could receive health insurance for major and minor surgical procedures and some outpatient services at participating government and private hospitals. Today there are over 3 million of India’s poor who participate in this but it is just beginning to take off. The program is self funding and as such provides the much needed revenues for his hospital as well as others in the network. The program is administered now by a third party and the local post offices have become payment centers and card issuers.

Over time Devi Shetty’s dream grew to include other medical specialties including neurosurgery, pediatrics, orthopedics, eye specialties etc. Within the month, he will be opening a new major cancer hospital as well.

Just before I left for India this time to visit with him, I read that he has plans to create a health city in Mexico to serve those who cannot afford top level healthcare.

I have been fascinated by this man since I first met him and have sought to understand how he has done all this. I cannot help but wonder who he really is and what truly motivates him when times get tough, which no doubt they do and often.

He believes passionately that what he does must be financially viable or it will not be sustainable. He does not run a charity; he does not want to depend on philanthropy to keep his dream going. It is frankly too important to be subject its viability to the ability of a few donors to support.

This does not mean however that he will not facilitate those who do want to donate to the cause. Rather than taking donations for the institution itself, there is the option to donate to the patient directly. It is called “Have a Heart”. A donor can choose to pledge a certain dollar amount (usually $1,000 – $2,000) to pay for surgery for a patient in need. Once the pledge is made, the hospital can call on them at any time for the money, explaining who specifically it is for and what is the procedure. In this way, those who donate, give directly to the patient not to the operation.

The cost of surgical procedures in this hospital are about half of what they are elsewhere in top tier state of the art hospitals in India and compared to the US for the same operation with the same medical equipment and a doctor with similar credentials, it is less than 20% of the cost. How is this done? With a ruthless attention to cost control, lower salaries and sheer volume of operations which helps to spread the fixed costs across more patients, Devi Shetty and his team is able to deliver healthcare to the rich and the poor and not turn away those who cannot pay.

In writing this book, I have questioned many times the motives of people like Devi Shetty who devote their lives to curbing the suffering of others at seemingly their own expense. I wondered as he gave up a potentially lucrative and high profile career in the UK, if he ever regrets it. I wonder too whether he does this because he wants to be famous or if he enjoys the spotlight.

But I know now that none of this is true. He is a man who is so completely fulfilled because he is doing what God put him here to do and he knows this for certain. There is absolutely no doubt in his mind. His view on material goods is that he has more than enough already and that if anything it can be shared further. In fact, most of us would do well to share more of what we have for as he told me, we do not “own these things”, we are merely custodians of the things we “own”. They are not rightly ours and in the end they will all be taken away from us anyway when we die. If only more among us would accept that the “things” we think are rightly ours are really not, but belong to all of us, then perhaps we could solve many more problems than we already have.

He is absolutely convinced that in his lifetime we will solve the issues of affordable and accessible healthcare in the developing world. Unfortunately there is no evident solution for the problems of healthcare in the developed world he notes with a sad smile (at least not one he is going to tackle in this lifetime).

As far as fame, he shuns it. He has tried to convince me to write about his hospital, not about himself. But I have demurred saying that it will be through knowing him as a human being and not a God, that others will be inspired to do something similar.

He too hopes this will be the case.

Journal Entry: February 17, 2009; Mumbai, India

I was back in Mumbai. It had been almost a year since I had been here. It looked the same for the most part but I knew it had changed. While I was gone it had been rocked by an awful terrorist attack. Even for a city that had experienced numerous violent incidents, this time people told me, was different. These terrorists hunted victims and killed indiscriminately. There was no mercy. Not that there was every mercy in terrorism, but historically the incidents had been mainly bombings which while they killed many, did not seem to have the same element of deliberateness that the November incident had.

As soon as I arrived, I headed straight to Dharavi to meet Jockin. The streets of Mumbai were as I remembered them, filled with people and moving vehicles. There were street children racing in between cars, jumping over the meridians in the road, laughing, shouting and hanging out. The pavement dwellers cuddled to the side of the road, eking out a living and a life on the streets. Their homes and shops spilled onto the roadways in colorful rivers of fabric and goods as black and yellow taxis raced by nearly missing their children who played on the edge. Life was continuing here as it always did. The traffic snarl carried people from north to south and back again along the crowded roadways. Air conditioned sedans transported business people to meetings, upper middle class housewives to yoga classes and foreign visitors to fortress like five star hotels. The late morning sun was melting into mid-day and a film of moist dust was settling on the millions of bodies mulling through the streets. And all around me I could feel it again, the heartbeat of this fantastic city as its rhythm filled the air and vibrated through each and every one of us who bore witness to it today.

As I pulled up to the new building that the slum dwellers had recently constructed I met with a collection of men hanging around outside. They peered curiously into the car as I opened the door to get out. One of them smiled as he recognized me. He remembered me from before and I, him. I asked where Jockin was and he pointed to an open doorway. I picked my way across the rocky, trash strewn roadway in front of the building and stepped up into the doorway, discarding my sandals at the door before I entered.

Jockin was seated cross legged on the floor by himself busily answering the two phones that he held in his hands. As soon as he hung up with one, the other started to ring. As soon as he picked that one up to speak, the first one started to ring. He’d finish his call and pick up the next one, put the phone down until it rang again. Sometimes there were too many calls and he just had to hit the “ignore” button. I sat patiently for a few minutes watching him. He glanced up and me, then peered over his strong glasses and smiled, then answered another call.

Eventually there was a lull in the phone calls and he greeted me properly, saying he was ready for me to spend the day with him today. That was a relief. I was not even sure I would find him here or that he had received the message that I was coming. I wanted to include the stories of his life and his work in the slums in my book. I had been inspired by him and the others who work with him in the Alliance, from the moment I met him four years ago and he shared part of his story with me. Here was a man, an old slum dweller (as he called himself) who had made the world sit up and take notice of people whom they would rather forget, ignore, hide or move. And not only that, in the process had empowered hundreds of thousands of slum dwellers to take responsibility for improving the conditions of their own lives while at the same time learning to ask for what was rightfully theirs as citizens. His work had not only helped people to change the lives of the poor in Mumbai as well as other cities in India, but now it had ignited the confidence and creativeness of slum dwellers in almost every other continent. He had helped to discover solutions to many of the problems of urban poverty that had stumped governments and large aid organizations for decades.

He explained to me now that he had one small problem with our schedule today. He had to go to a meeting with the people who were bidding on the project to re-develop the slums. He had to be there so that he could hear what they were thinking and also so that he could give input from the slum dweller perspective. This was a closed door meeting and so he could not take me with him.

So what to do until he returned? I suggested that it had been awhile since I had strolled through the streets of the slums. I wanted to see if and how they had changed since my last visit.

Thinking this a good idea, Jockin picked up one of his ringing phones, hit the “ignore” button and proceeded to call an old friend to ask him if he would take me around for an hour.

Jockin’s friend arrived slowly. He slid through the door, his filthy bare feet padding across the floor towards me. His hooded eyelids lifted ever so slightly to take me in with a glimmer. His name was John. He was a retired bootlegger, which meant that at one time he had made his living selling booze in the slums. Today his business card listed a number of legitimate professions including TV press reporter (he showed me his press badge, nestled in a filthy wallet), a community worker, a chief promoter of one of the developments which had been initiated by the slum dwellers and a general secretary of a local power company. He came originally from Goa, a state south of Mumbai that is known for its lovely beaches. His father worked in the railways and brought the family to Mumbai when his son was only 6 months old. We stood together as Jockin took his leave and discussed for a few minutes where we thought we might want to walk. We set off along the busy, dirty street that delineates the world of the slum called Dharavi and the rest of Mumbai.

We began to chat as we walked. John launched into a convincing monologue that he was a good and honest man and that he did not cheat people or steal. After awhile I began to wonder whether I should be worried about this or whether he was trying to reassure only himself of it. Regardless, I figured he was probably pretty street-smart by now and I am sure that also included a healthy dose of cheating and stealing to make a living even if he knew it was wrong.

Initially it was clear that John did not know why I was there or that I had been there countless times before. He was doing Jockin a favor. He prodded a bit, but was not interested enough to pursue it. John, I was to learn, had been very close to the filming of “Slumdog Millionaire”. He had lent his one room shack so that the kids could make costume changes on site during filming and he had seen the kids and others make money and gain favor from the experience. I suspected he was wondering how he too could get a piece of the action. Perhaps “Slum Tours” was a new business opportunity. What did I think?

Privately I was very bothered by the idea, but I asked him how people would feel if busloads of tourists arrived to stare and take pictures of them. He shrugged and looked away. Maybe he did not know.

I on the other hand I was not so interested in seeing the deplorable conditions of the slums. I had had my fair share of days walking through waste strewn alleys, hopping over raw sewage and stepping across mountains of garbage. I explained to John that today I wanted to visit some of the businesses in the slums to see how they were doing.

So off we went, leaving the relative peace of Jockin’s building and walking at a quick clip out into the streets. We crossed two lanes of aggressive traffic and thankfully reached the other side unharmed. Continuing along, we paused briefly to check out a line of little businesses on the side of the road. My suburbanized Western eye took a minute to adjust to the filth and chaos and to look beyond it. The sun beat down on us and I was covered in sweat. The dust and dirt churned up by passing trucks, motorcycle, carts and cars filled my nostrils. There were people everywhere, bumping into me, staring at me. There were no sidewalks. I was quite certain we were going to be hit by the passing traffic. The cacophony of honking horns and shouting voices was deafening and yet I was aware that all around me was a vibrant micro economy churning out a day’s work. In front of me there were several crooked and dilapidates buildings housing a number of businesses with open fronts to the street. One stacked what looked like old timbers and beams in front of its open door. John explained they had collected old building materials from all over the city and were taking it apart and recycling it and would sell it again to those who could use it and make a small profit. Next to them was another workshop whose front was completely obscured by stacks of silver oil tins. These tins, rectangular in shape, all about a foot or so high, were arranged neatly one on top of each other and they gleamed in the sunshine. They had been collected from garbage bins and various drop offs all over the city and brought here to cleaned and restored to as good as new. They would be sold again to vendors who would fill them with oil and distribute them back into the market. Another workshop was busy packaging up soft plastics in large bags. Wedged in between all of them was a small stand which sold a variety of sundries. John excused himself to buy a pack of cigarettes.

In Dharavi, known popularly as Asia’s largest slum, there are over half a million people living and working. The place is the size of a medium sized city unto itself and it is only one of a number of slums in Mumbai. It is estimated that 60% of the people living in Mumbai, live in slums. In Dharavi 70% of the people who live here also work here. Most if not all are entrepreneurs running some type of business that the rest of the city would not deign to touch. There are over 1,000 recycling businesses here like the ones I saw on the side of the road. As our journey took us deeper into the heart of the community, I noted more and more recycling efforts in all sorts of unimaginable materials. Dharavi is also the center of leather production in the region. The Tamils who came to Mumbai from the south of India over the past 50 years, brought with them leather making expertise. Now 38% of the leather that in tanned and worked is exported around the world for manufacturing purses and shoes. There are other businesses too. Every morning 3 million little breakfast pastries are made in Dharavi and delivered all over the city so that the Indian middle class and others can enjoy them for breakfast. The domestic help that cleans the homes and drives the cars of middle class Mumbai also reside here.

Our walk took us off the main road and down some twisting stone steps into what looked like a cave. I almost slipped and fell on the grime. We walked by a few open doorways while women in colorful dress holding babies regarded me with avid curiosity. The cave opened up into sunshine again and we were standing atop a sewage drain pipe which had been transformed into a sidewalk of sorts. On either side of the pipe were piles of garbage and human waste and a trickle of water that looked toxic. It was had a sort of purple hue to it. I was almost knocked over by three little children who barely came to my knees but were able to navigate the narrow top of the pipe walkway better than me. John was far ahead, much defter at balancing on this structure than I would ever be.

I rushed after him, careful not to fall and eventually found myself in a narrow alleyway that twisted and turned its way through haphazard, leaning, and unrecognizable structures. These were all homes and I was now walking through a neighborhood. The alley underfoot was muddy and covered in trash. I passed a woman crouched next to her doorway washing clothes in what looked like a tiny little canal running down the side of the way. Next to her was a young man, most likely her husband, fully dressed but also covered from head to foot in white sudsy soap. His big wide white toothy grinning face looked up at me in a welcoming way but also with what seemed like great amusement that I had caught him in his bath. I guess it was an efficient way to bathe – clean body and clothes all at the same time. Though most likely he was compensating for the lack of privacy. In these narrow streets where people live cheek to cheek, there is no privacy for bathing, for intimacy or for relieving oneself.

Eventually we spilled out onto one of the main interior streets of Dharavi just as the Muslim call to prayer began. The street began to empty of its men folk and as we passed the another narrow alley that led up to the mosque I took in its lovely ornate form, white walls and mint green trim. Outside there were rows and rows of shoes arranged in order. As I stopped to observe I felt a nudge from behind and swung around to find a goat. There were several on the street but they seemed to just blend in with the chaos. There were small trucks parked in the middle of the street that motorbikes and small open cabs had to make their way around. Everywhere were people moving together in one direction or the other. There were children running around between our legs and young men in their twenties loitering. Some became particularly curious about my presence there and started to crowd around me asking me questions in English. There were a few women in black chador, only their eyes visible taking in my presence with a glance before moving on with their chores. There were old men wearing dhotis. There were women who walked by in bright colored saris and sparkling jewelry who stopped to talk to my companion, flirting with him and chatting him up before they moved on.

As the morning wore on, I recognized again that familiar but oh so rare feeling of being left entirely to my own business. Unlike other parts of Mumbai (or India for that matter), here in Dharavi no-one harassed me, begged for money from me, grabbed my shirt to get my attention, jeered at me. Here in the slum, people were busy living their lives, doing their work, caring for their families. Their interaction with me was mild curiosity, but otherwise they just accepted my presence as an outsider and went about their daily routine.

Jockin Arputham would remind me every time we met that the slums are a community just like anywhere else. “The only difference here is that we have no running water, no sewage thus no toilets,” he would say. “What services we get are siphoned off from those delivered to the rest of Mumbai because the government, when they relocated us here, did not build the necessary infrastructure needed for decent living.” Now the houses and structures are so crammed in and crowded they cannot possibly retrofit the infrastructure without tearing the place down.

Jockin migrated to Mumbai when he was 17 years old from the south of India. His story is actually one of “riches to rags”. Born to a well off family in Tamil Nadu who lost its fortune, Jockin at a young age went to work to support his family. He worked as a carpenter and at any odd job he could find. One day when his uncle returned home from Mumbai telling stories of the city of opportunity, Jockin decided to leave the south and ride the rails north. A single young man with no family along, Jockin found it easiest to live on the streets. He picked up any work where he could and at night he wrapped himself in the saris that were left out to dry in front of people’s shacks and went to sleep. He bathed in a local restaurant for a small fee. He made his home in a slum called Janata Colony where he stayed for the next 6 years until it was demolished by the city. But it was not until he got married that Jockin finally built a home for himself and came in from the streets to live under a roof.

In the early 1960′s when Jockin was still new to Mumbai, he would work all day and then finish in the late afternoon. One day as he was sitting observing some young kids playing he began to chat with them. Lively conversation turned into singing and within an hour Jockin and the young kids were singing and dancing and having a wonderful time before they all dispersed for home. The next day after work, Jockin returned to the same site and not only the same children but more were waiting for him. A few days later the crowd of children had grown to 200 and Jockin now had to organize them into groups to keep the fun manageable.

As the days turned into weeks, the number of children who joined kept increasing and Jockin organized the children into more groups and started competitions to see who could make the best performance. There were judges and accolades. Gradually the mothers of the children began to show up to see what their offspring were up to each day and eventually they asked Jockin if he could do something for the children. So they started a school. It began first with classes in writing and math for the youngest children, but over time it grew to include older children. As the number of children increased, volunteer teachers came to lend their time to teach the children. Soon there were more than 50 volunteers helping the children and after a few months there were 3,000 slum children coming to school. There was no fee for the school but people contributed what they could. A church donated powder milk for the children to drink after school.

Then one day, about a half a year after the school had started, Jockin who had been increasingly frustrated with the conditions in which they all had to live and seeing the potential of this group of children and mothers to come together and make something happen, realized that that the same energy could be channeled to make small changes to their slum. One of the problems with the slum was that there was no municipal service to remove garbage and the place where most of the trash was dumped was right next to the school. On a Saturday they all came together to discuss ideas on how to best get rid of the trash that had piled so high and had become a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Jockin and the children decided that they would organize a “garbage picnic” whereby the children would come with their school bags and collect trash, wrap it in newspaper and then as a group walk over 3 kilometers to the municipal office to deliver it to the doorstep.

This small act of civil disobedience caught the attention of the municipality and when they came to the slums to see the perpetrators, Jockin showed them the garbage problem they were dealing with. The slum dwellers agreed to organize garbage collection within the slums if the municipality would provide the truck to collect and take it away.

For Jockin this incident was the turning point in his life. From this point on he became first an activist for the rights of slum dwellers and then eventually the rational voice who represented them to government and international aid agencies.

When I visited with him this time I explained that I had come back to see him because I wanted to write his story and that of the slum dwellers. I wanted to help the rest of the world to see the work he had done here and how he and others had become an integral part of a new and sustainable solution to urban blight.

Jockin, ever as gracious as he is stubborn, smiled at me and nodded. He patted his hand on the floor next to him and said “come sit here, right next to me”. Then he turned to his people and asked for the next problem to be presented.