So far, the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression has forced some Americans out of their homes, but for most people it’s just caused them to put off a vacation, car purchase, or retirement for a year or two. Meanwhile, a million people in India live like this their entire lives:
It drips on her head most days, says Champaben, but in the monsoon season it’s worse. In rain, worms multiply. Every day, nonetheless, she gets up and walks to her owners’ house, and there she picks up their excrement with her bare hands or a piece of tin, scrapes it into a basket, puts the basket on her head or shoulders and carries it to the nearest waste dump. She has no mask, no gloves, and no protection. She is paid a pittance, if she is paid at all. She regularly gets dysentery, giardiasis, brain fever. She does this because a 3,000-year-old social hierarchy says she has to.
They used to be known as bhangi, a word formed from the Sanskrit for “broken,” and the Hindi for “trash.” Today, official India calls them the “scheduled castes,” but activists prefer Dalits, a word that means “broken” or “oppressed” but with none of the negativity of bhangi. Most modern Indians don’t stick to their caste jobs any more. There is more inter-caste marriage, more fluidity, more freedom than ever before. But the outcastes are usually still outcastes, because they are still the ones who tan India’s animals, burn its dead, and remove its excrement. Champaben is considered untouchable by other untouchables—even the tanners of animals and the burners of corpses—because she is a safai karamchari. This literally means “sweeper” but is generally translated into English as “manual scavenger,” a term popularized by India’s British rulers, who did nothing to eradicate the practice and much to keep it going. This scavenging has none of the usefulness of the usual meaning. There is no salvaging of waste, no making good of the discarded. Champaben recycles nothing and gains nothing. She takes filth away, and for this she is considered dirt.
Also in India, thousands of Christians are being killed, tortured, and raped in an effort to rid the state of Ossetia Orissa of all Christians. I was forwarded this email from a Good News India missionary there:
All our dream centers are under lock down with the kids and staff huddled inside and police outside. The fanatics are circling outside waiting for a chance to kill.
Others were not so fortunate. In a nearby Catholic orphanage, the mob allowed the kids to leave and locked up a Priest and a computer teacher in a house and burned them to death. Many believers have been killed and hacked into pieces and left on the road…. even women and children.
Lord, have mercy on us for ever complaining about anything.