Go the extra mile

Dengue Fever is a potentially life threatening illness that is transferred from person to person by mosquitoes, much like malaria. It is sometimes referred to as the “bone breaker” disease – such is the pain inflicted upon victims by the disease, that they feel like breaking their own bones. I was not ready to “break my own bones”, but following a trip to India in 2008 and contracting Dengue Fever, I was able to understand how the disease gets its colloquial name.

As the disease worked its way through my fever affected body, I was racked by pain in my joints, my muscles, my lower back, my head, my eyes, my skin – everything seemed to hurt. Amidst the pain, I was struck by a story that I had heard some weeks prior while visiting a slum in the northern India town of Ambala.

My trip to India had been part of a surveying exercise that my wife, Samantha, and I had embarked upon to study the missions organisation Gospel for Asia and the work they were doing in the 10/40 window of Asia. Of particular interest was the work being done amongst the Dalit (or “untouchable”) community of India, and more specifically, the care being provided to the children of the “untouchables” in Jesus’ name through child care centres, known as Bridge of Hope centres.

Around 550 centres now operate throughout India and more than 62,000 children receive a quality education, nutritious food, clothing, medical care and most importantly they learn English (which is known as the “money language” in India). The ministry is motivated by Christian love and performed in the name of Jesus and so, the children receive the gospel message of Christ as a standard part of their education.

All of this is done to break the inhuman poverty cycle that has been inflicted upon these precious people for more than 3,000 years by Hinduism’s caste system – a religiously inspired form of discrimination that has trapped more than 300 million people at the bottom rung of society, where they are considered “sin polluted”, regarded as inhuman and considered of less importance or value than animals. Welcome to the broken world of the Dalits (the word “Dalit” actually means, “broken”).

It was some years back that the Dalit community across India took the bold step of rising in defiance of Hinduism’s discriminatory teachings and beliefs, proclaiming that they were sick and tired of Hinduism as it had done nothing for them other than to trap them at the bottom of society. They were uneducated, sick, poor and without resources to improve their lives – and this state was attributed and perpetuated directly by the teachings of the Hindu faith.

The worldview of Hinduism was so final and pervasive, that the Dalits themselves accepted their lives as “their due” – a payment of sorts for a past lives lived badly. And so with this new resolve, the Dalits were ready to discard Hinduism and embrace a new religion – Buddhism and Christianity were the two preferred religions of choice. A call went out the Christian church to “come and teach us your ways”. Gospel for Asia was one of the agencies that would respond to this plea, establishing the Bridge of Hope centres, focusing on the education and health of the Dalit children as a means to establish a new social structure within the Indian community (much to the behest of fundamentalist Hindu groups, who have for years now targeted both Christian and Dalit alike with threats, violence and at times, death).

And so it was here in a muddy slum in Ambala that I learned about a little boy, a son to some of the slum dwellers, who one day fell ill with a fever. Medical care is expensive and money for the care of a doctor or for medicine is a luxury that many slum dwellers can only dream of. And so his parents could do little for him other than hope that he would get better. He didn’t. As the classic symptoms of Dengue Fever gripped his little body, he grew sicker and sicker. It would only be at the urging of others within the slum community, that his mother would eventually seek help for the child, but it was too late - the child died.

It was three days after returning to Melbourne from Ambala, that I woke to a splitting headache, fever, aching joints and hypersensitive skin.  Unable to eat for seven days, I endured a head-splitting migraine that lasted three days, accompanied by hallucinations and excruciating pain.  Blood tests proved I had been infected with Dengue Fever – by all accounts, the same illness that had affected the little boy.

Now bedridden, I reflected on the differences between Ambala and Melbourne.  I had access to medical help and advice, medication to control the pain and reduce the fever, nutritious food and clean drinking water, and best – a safe, warm place to recover and rest. The differences were stark. The slum dwellers had appalling conditions, living in the mud, in one-room homes amidst stinking, running, open sewers in homes cobbled together from odd, irregular bamboo sticks, lashed together by string and covered with plastic garbage bags for protection against the heat, the cold and the mosquitoes. They lived on dirt floors, cooking on an open fire, fuelled by animal dung and sticks. Their food was scarce and of poor quality and their water was polluted and unsafe. The differences multiplied in my mind the more I compared them.

It might be worth addressing the cynic at this point of the discussion – the one who wags the finger at the situation, and wonders why the west should once again be forced to carry the burden of India’s social needs when India’s economic growth continues to outstrip it’s western counterparts with GDP growth around 7.9% (as measured in a recent Merrill Lynch Capgemini report), and the nation now creates millionaires at a faster pace than any other country on the planet (with more than 123,000 in 2006[1]).