A Trip to India
A few months later, I had the opportunity to visit some villages in Rajastan, India shortly after the Ahmedabad earthquake. Thirteen timezones away, it was about as far away from my home and lifestyle in California as was humanly possible. My guide on this trip was Dr. Vinay Laxshmi, an English-trained physician who had returned to Mt. Abu, Rajastan, as part of the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University. Her dedication to the poor villagers was complete and unmistakable.
I had been pestered by many other children on the streets of India, and was expecting to fend them off when we walked into a schoolyard. Vinay, wearing a spotless white sari, floated like an angel held to earth by the children flocking about her, grasping for a finger to hold. I plodded through the dirt and dust, but the overflow of happy children spilled over to me.
My heart melted as a young girl’s hand closed around my finger. I looked down at her, and she responded with the most loving, happy eyes. Tugging me across the schoolyard, she overflowed with the authority of innocence. Despite the poverty and adversity, I saw the same vitality and jubilation I saw in my granddaughters’ eyes.
She led me to the lunch area, where the children sat, patiently waiting in lines with their bowls. I had the honor of serving them each a ladle of milk. As I did, each of them looked up to thank me with their eyes in the Indian custom of drishti. After about three of these encounters, I was having difficulty keeping my tears out of the milk. They were tears of the joy I saw reflected in their uplifted faces. But they were also tears of recognition of the power of generosity and compassion.
Some things we can receive only by giving.
They were also tears of recognition of how much more wonderful the world would be if everyone could feel this way. What if, as the Dali Lama suggests, we would measure our wealth by our ability to give? What if the world could see that even in the most dire circumstances, happiness, love, and peace can happen?
I possessed unimaginable economic wealth compared to these people. The teacher would have to spend three month’s salary to buy the sandals I was wearing. Yet these people were giving something to me. Was there some way to communicate this personal transformation to the rest of the world? Surely this transformational energy was the stuff to change the world.
Tears of joy soon turned to tears of sorrow at the next stop of my tour-turned-pilgrimage. A young mother was holding a two-pound, two week old premature baby. Vinay stood on one side, trying to get the parents to bring the baby to the hospital for free medical treatment. The Father stood on the other side, glowering at us. He was opposed to trying to save her life, because she was a girl. Girl-children are liabilities. Having two daughters and two granddaughters, I was speechless at the implications of his behavior. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the click of my camera shutter marked the beginning of GivingSpace.
The mother held her baby as if it were a statue. I had thought that maternal love was a hallmark of humanity, yet somehow it had been drained out of her. She was merely doing a duty. What she was doing to her baby, she was also doing to herself. I imagine a little bit of her died later that afternoon when her baby died. What happened to me? Could I witness these scenes in the grand drama of life, and then file them away as hit-and-run touristic souvenirs?
No, they were they calling me to Do Something.
Were those young girls in the schoolyard doomed to have their vitality and jubilation drained out of them, or was there some hope that things could get better? Was there some way that I could provide that hope? In my professional and personal development over the past 30 years, was there something that I learned or obtained which could be applied to this situation? If so, was there something that I could share with the world that could help humanity?
I visited Vinay’s office the next morning on my way home. I gave here 10 pounds of stuff in my luggage that I thought would be valuable for local people, which didn’t seem so valuable to me any more. I gave her some money to buy fabric for women to sew into clothes to sell, and she said, “This is all very good, but you need to do something more with your thoughts. Think of something big, really big.”
Not used to being told to think bigger, I had plenty of time to think on my 48 hour trip home. I wished that people in rich countries could see what an incredible opportunity they have to be generous. A vitamin tablet for a few cents could restore a child’s eyesight; for less than the price of a cup of coffee they could buy some oral rehydration solution could save an infants’s life. The world was suffering from a failure communication and trust, not a lack of generosity or compassion and authority to try to force it to happen. What we need to create is a path of least resistance to ever-increasing virtue. Create it, and people will come.
I also came to the realization that transformation was an issue at many different levels simultaneously, from personal, to family, to community, to nations, to governments, multilateral institutions, and emerging technology. Rather than look at transformation being 7 different problems, I envisioned it as one problem happening at 7 different levels. Is there a scalable form of transformation?
This is a profound question, whose answers are just now becoming apparent with the advent of the World Wide Web and global connectivity. It reaches into notions of complexity theory and the ways that networks can organize themselves. Research into notions of trust and social networks emerging from electronic commerce is also applicable to this quest. Electronic forms of community are sprouting up, and new technologies, such as XML, allow us create a linguistic shell within which we can create speech communities of positive discourse.