Stutzfamily blog thingie

One of the toughest things for the kids to get used to is the poverty. Mumbai is an enormous city, and India is still a very poor country, and people from all over head to the big metropolis in the hopes of building a better life. Unfortunately for them, most end up in the sort of filth and squalor pictured here, where children with their heads shaved for lice squat in the street, surrounded by garbage, to relieve themselves. This was taken out our bus window one (typical) day heading home from school.

There are quite a lot of beggars throughout the city (duh), and they do seem to spot us fairly easily (duh) and head right over to us (duh). Breck has been having more of a difficult time dealing with them than Alea. There is one particular corner on the way home from school at which we get our windows knocked on quite often, and he dreads going to it. “I hope there are no beggars today” has become a refrain from him when we leave school. He asks us why they come asking for money, and I hope our pitiful explanations are adequate.

His class has been spending some time recently going into some of the roots of child labor and poverty, but this seems to upset him even more (there have been a couple of nights that he’s asked to sleep with us because of some of the things he has seen in class). It is such a pervasive fact of life here, wrapped up with so many ‘tinderbox’ issues ranging from alcohol to infanticide to abuse, that it is difficult to judge where to start and where to stop when trying to explain something that Alea and Breck see every day but have no context for understanding.

Breck has become more adept at using his ignoring skills when beggars approach him, but unfortunately this translates into him sometimes brusquely walking past other people who are genuinely interested in just saying ‘hi.’ It is interesting to remember that there are a lot of people in this country who have never spoken to a ‘white person,’ and many who have never seen on in real life. We don’t want him to ignore all Indians, but he is such a sensitive boy that it is a very fine line for us to walk in terms of helping him judge when to engage and when to ignore. This is such a ‘teachable moment’ for us while we live here; I just hope we are helping him understand things in a way that won’t haunt him for life.

(And just for some background information, we were told before coming - and have had it reinforced while here - that most of the street beggars are basically “pimped out” to local thugs who take the money they manage to earn. We’ve been encouraged to give food to them (but nothing that can be resold, because it will be and the money find its way into the boss’s pockets) and to contribute money to organizations that can better place it in the hands of those who are truly the needy.)

Who says Mumbai has no wildlife? In addition to the rats we’ve seen running along the sidewalks (for which there are official city jobs dedicated to killing them) and the raven/crows that eat everything the rats miss, Bombay is home to tons of different kinds of animals. Our experiences this weekend centered around 3 specific types.

On Saturday morning, I had volleyball practice and a school meeting, so Susan was at home with the kids and decided to go swimming. There really is no way to describe the fish experience any better than in Susan’s own (edited) words:

At 1:30 today, the kids and I went to the Kiara pool after notifying the guards in the morning that we would be using it. The pool was in miserable shape: debris floating on the top, leaves littering the bottom, and refuse I don’t care to identify swirling in the depths. The kids immediately jumped in and began to clear the pool. Leaves and sticks and bugs accumulated in a pile as they pulled things up from below. A scream shattered our industry as Breck dragged up a dead, decayed fish. He flung it to the side and scrambled out of the pool. I hauled Alea out and went over to the guard ( who had been enjoying watching our labor for the past ten minutes) and wanted to know how a dead fish could have landed in the pool. He raised his hand to the sky and said, “It’s the trees.”

Not a great way to greet the weekend.

Sunday morning dawned as perhaps a better day, but then two mating falcons began screeching at each other in the tree branch right outside our window. Normally I like watching and listening to these large birds of prey, but not at 5:30 on a Sunday morning!

And finally, that afternoon, we were ‘invited’ to adopt some neighborhood puppies. We have a tiny apartment, and I don’t want a dog ripping our stuff apart, and Susan is very responsible about wanting to care for an animal, so the NO answer was easy to give. But Breck still had a ball rolling around with three of the 5 that are available, even though he got a little nip from them.

So there are our animal stories from this weekend - which was definitely a “2 rather than 3″ sort of weekend for us. Only 35 more days of school until summer!