When I returned from my short few weeks in India, someone asked me how my vacation in India was. Well, to be honest, India does not qualify as a vacation, unless you’re only staying in 5 Star hotels or resorts and not venturing into the true, real India. It is a journey, a journey of the heart. I’ve done a lot of traveling. I’ve been to every state in our beautiful country. I’ve been to a lot of Eastern and Western European countries, South America, Australia, Cuba, Mexico, Canada, Indonesia…..I have not been anywhere that has hit my heart and soul so hard as India. There was amazing beauty, but dire poverty. I came home appreciating every drop of water that comes out of the faucet. I saw women walking for miles, carrying heavy containers of water on their heads. EVERY day they made this journey to have water for their families. I saw large fields of thousands of people trying to have a home, a shelter built from whatever they could scavenge from the garbage. Cardboard, plastic, scraps of metal; whatever could be stretched to provide a “wall” against the weather and a tiny bit of privacy from peering eyes. We saw from our bus window, many times, whole groups of people that were lucky to find a spigot with running water to bathe, communally. There was no Me, there was only Us. Everywhere we traveled.
And yet what I came home with was the strongest sensation that these 3 Billion extremely poor people have some of the greatest love in their hearts, for everyone. There is a lesson to be learned here.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. – Mahatma Gandhi
