Memories and decisions...

I`m watching television, a documentary about (street) children in Manila, The Philippines. They live on the garbage of the local landfill. They search through the garbage the whole day, looking for salvageable material. Those that do not work there, the real street children, sniff some kind of chemical substance, and remain high the whole day, on the streets or even the local cemetery. The camera focuses on the face of a "high" husband of two children. They live in a tomb on the cemetery, together with his wife who is 19. That look in his eyes. It breaks your heart.

Two french priests do the best they can with their local organisation. They provide shelter, food, and for some, education. With their limited supplies they try to improve the lives of those children.

That made me remember my experiences in India. For three weeks I stayed in the field and interviewed farmers, or village-people. These are the ones that become the people you see lying under the viaducts of Jaipur, eventually, since living in the field is no option. My work there was about a project developed by the government to secure a livelihood for the people in the country-side, and to keep them from moving to the city, where their life will not be a lot better.

I saw how they lived, in those small and simple, but generally idyllic villages. It was easy to observe that a lot of development work already went in them. There I saw the children, wearing simple clothes, and relatively clean for my standards. I still find it strange how "down to earth" I was while I was there. I just played games with them, was not really surprised by the conditions in which they lived, while they are so much different from those in which I grew up. I did not find it strange. I accepted it. Maybe I realised that these children did not really have it that bad compared to those living on the streets of Jaipur, begging for money. Living in the country-side is often seen as worse than living in the city. Maybe it is easier to gather a livelihood (from the landfill) in the city, when the conditions are horrible. When there is a major drought in the country-side in Rajasthan, there is not much left on which to survive I can imagine.

One of the games I played in one of the villages, was an imitation game. While my boss was handing out some pay for the grown-up villagers, I was just being bored together with the children who started to sit in front of me, and of course, stare. So I decided to imitate. First the staring. Nothing is more fun to make one of those little ones blush. Then I started to imitate how they sat with their hands. For the first minutes they didn`t really get it, but after that the frowns started to change in smiles...and it was just having fun. Indian children however get rowdy soon, so the parents chased them away after a while, leaving me with a young bull.


All this made me realise a thing. My goal in general is to help and advice people with the expertise that I got. But do I want to do this in a business consulting job, where I help the organisations that are already wealthy (relatively speaking)? Or do I want to help the people who are really in need? Question is if I can help them? I think this is an argument often used by the western people...I want to, but I cannot. Why not? Because it demands a major sacrifice on part of your own life. You need to move, your income will not be that high, your work could be harder and proably become your life. Then again, you still need money to buy that ticket, visa, your own food. NGOs and other nonprofit-organisations are not the most wealthy.

Isn`t working for personal wealth/development very selfish? The alternative is to work for others people's wealth/development..and with it your own. Then again, the handpalm-reader in India told me that I am a selfish person. And that I will have two women in my life. On of which I will marry. So what should I do?

I`ll just go and watch Cpt. Kirk at 2:50am on BBC2. Maybe that will give me the answers I need.