TO LIVE IS TO LOVE

A child is said to be a product of his home. Home is defined largely by the people who raise the child, one’s parents have strong influence on how one turns out as an adult. However after a certain age, the more general social milieu surrounding the child comes into play. The country one resides in, it’s sub cultures, politics and socio economic environment all play into the kind of individual one turns out to be. Having lived in and been exposed to a multiplicity of cultures, I had the unique experience of growing up in a post British colonial culture where roots met and clashed with nativity. The British conquered India where my parents were born. My parents, a rare few to have a western education in a largely eastern, third world culture, put me in a catholic convent at age four. My father was one of thirteen siblings growing up on the mud paved streets of a Punjabi village called Kasur. For the first fifteen years of his life he had no shoes on his feet and did not get two square meals a day. He found his way to a British missionary school and worked all evening as a tea boy in order to put himself through school as a teen. He made it, against all odds and became one of the first Muslim men in the 1930s to graduate from the London School of Economics. Growing up under his influence made me who I am today. Had I not been the daughter of an enlightened man, I would likely not have been exposed at an early age to literature, philosophy, music and all that enhances a young child’s curiosity about the world around her. It wasn’t easy however growing up in an intellectually divisive world. During the day, I was in a different world from the world I faced after school. The Convent of Jesus and Mary, a strictly Catholic school run by British nuns was a small mirage in the desert of an otherwise third world country. We wore crisp white frocks, long white socks, black leather shoes, our hair and nails were immaculate. We spoke, read and wrote in English borrowed from the Cambridge university curriculum and sat for our GED’s through the University of Cambridge, studying the exact curriculum students at Cambridge did. We studied for eight hours a day, and did another two hour of home work at home, from age four to sixteen. It was a very strict upbringing, including the rigors of writing at least six pages of hand written notes daily, in order to have good hand writing. The typewriter hadn’t been made available to us, there was no word on computers. We were taught home economics, taught how to cook, clean, baby sit. We would sing hymns in the morning assembly, go to church for prayers, say grace before our meals. After school was over my Dad, the principal of a men’s college, would drive me back home to our sprawling on campus residence in the city of Lahore. I had a fairy tale landscape growing up on a huge college campus with hockey fields, theatres, parks. We would jump on the trampoline and he would catch me when I landed. In the afternoon I was allowed to go play with the kids in the neighborhood. That is where my world would change cultural code. The sounds of the mosque prayers were loud, the women were clad and rarely showed, the girls were rarely allowed out. The kids I played with were mainly the children of the college custodian staff. They did not have school to go to. No white crisp uniforms. No Cambridge curriculum. What my father did was provide me a huge black board and chalk. My job was to teach the kids at home what I had learned at school that day. This continued for a good four years until we moved and the memories of those experiences are etched in my brain as if it happened yesterday. My comrades were my friends who couldn’t really be part of my world full time. In the day my class mates were from another world. By night the realities of poverty surrounding me transported me to another land. This multicultural exposure caused my child’s heart great angst. I could not wrap my head around the fact that my evening friends were dirty, with no shoes, and many of them had not eaten that day. It hurt me to see them in this condition. I could not relate to it. I was like a little princess in a well of frogs. During the day I was in a more homogenous well. The difference between night and day was also a difference between light and dark. Years later I would read ‘An Area of Darkness’ and had to come to terms with the fact that there are worlds within worlds, and that the line that divides the rich and poor also divides friends, families and cultures. It also determines life and death, and everything in between. To read of poverty or see pictures of it from far away lands is rather different than when you meet in the flesh. When you meet it in the flesh, it stays with you forever.

Decades later when as a mother I moved my own kids to America, I thought I would be sparing them the conflicts I had endured growing up Pakistani. The reality is that there is poverty everywhere, just in different proportions. When I went to study in England for a masters degree, one of the first things I noticed as I got off the train were people sleeping in card board boxes. It shocked me. When I came to the US and began my career as a social worker in the slums of Florida, working with moms with AIDS, I realized that human suffering knows no political or geophysical borders. Every where you live, there are sections of society which are impoverished, lack education and resources, and need medical and metaphysical help. Now in Tracy, I work with children who come from high risk neighborhoods, who have problems with their emotional and physical health, gang kids, substance abusing kids, at risk youth who come from broken homes and live in the projects. I realize my neighborhood when I was four is everywhere I go. Atleast here we don't have fundamentalists to cotend with in the same vein who behead and stone women.

The world is a hard place for kids to make it if they are deprived the chance of a healthy environment. Some foreigners think of America as devoid of poverty but the reality is that according to the US Census Bureau, 35.9 million people live below the poverty line in America, including 12.9 million children. Almost 100 billion pounds of food is wasted in America each year. 700 million hungry human beings in different parts of the world could be fed with the food we throw away. According to the Bread for the World Institute 3.5 percent of U.S. households experience hunger. Some people in these households frequently skip meals or eat too little, sometimes going without food for a whole day. 9.6 million people, including 3 million children, live in these homes. America's Second Harvest food bank, reports its findings, (http://www.secondharvest.org/),that 23.3 million Americans need help getting fed. This figure has kept growing and includes forty percent working families. 33 million Americans continue to live in households that did not have an adequate supply of food. Nearly one-third of these households contain adults or children who went hungry at some point in 2000 - 2009. Poverty is real, even in our back yard.

As a social worker I have come to terms with the bitter truth that one can't really change the world. However it never keeps me from trying, and if I can help change the life of one child, one family at a time, that is where I invest my efforts. Just because one can't do it all doesn't mean one shouldn't do what one can. There is always a little more we can all do for someone in need. My mother always said giving to those in need brings good karma to those who give of themselves. At the end of the day, what makes us rich is not what we collected but what we distributed. My father was born poor, and in worldly terms accumulated very little. When he died he left behind a few copies of the articles he wrote, and a million memories of those he taught and rescued. In my eyes that makes him a very rich man, even though he only owned two pairs of shoes when he died. I hope to live in his shoes and have a rich memory bank when I go. I know he died smiling and lived struggling to make a world a better place than he found it. There is no better way to live than live for a cause. There is no greater cause than doing good. I watched a movie the other day and at the end the broken hero who lost his life in trying to find himself said, and I quote, "It takes a remarkably short time to withdraw from the world. I travelled, till I arrived at a life of my own. What really makes us is beyond grasping, its way beyond knowing. We give in to love because it gives us some sense of what is unknowable. Nothing else matters. Not in the end."