Dog Days of Summer

5/16/10

Location:  Delhi, India

I took my last step on the stairs leading down from the Cathay Pacific plane from Cairns onto the ground by the Delhi airport and the heat hit me like a brick wall. Suddenly, it was slightly more difficult to breathe and within minutes I had a thin layer of sweat on my skin, undoubtedly working overtime to adapt to the sudden change from the coolness of the plane to the sauna I just walked in. India is sizzling hot, and that was the first thing I learned. It’s like you’re in oven, even when the sky is dark, heat radiates from the ground and enwraps you like a vicious, roasting snake. It’s impossible to stay cool and not sweat even while remaining still. It’s a heat unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, and with the week’s highs above 110 degrees Fahrenheit, it appears as though my Scandinavian self who has lived through 20 ND/MN winters and whose parents keep their house at a cool 62-65 degrees better get used to it.

The next thing I saw in India came after I had cleared customs and was standing outside with the group waiting for our bus transfer to our hotel in Delhi. A pack of wild dogs were roaming the area outside of the airport, cautiously approaching the exiting pilots and scouring the parking lot for anything to eat. They were the skinniest dogs I’ve ever seen in my life. I thought of my own dog, Rex, at home who my family jokingly refers to as our “sweet 80.6 pound baby Rexus” (Talladega Nights reference), and they looked absolutely nothing like him. They barely looked like dogs. Their stomachs were concave and I could see their ribs and their bones in their legs. They looked like a dog/bird hybrid they were so scrawny. They were also incredibly dirty and I could only guess where they have been. They didn’t beg, or even make much noise. One laid down several feet away from our group and just lay there, panting in the heat and its eyes searching for something good. My heart ached just looking at him,

Our bus soon arrived and we loaded our bags and boarded. The drive to the hotel was dark, but I still saw everything. I saw so many people, still up and walking the sides of the streets. I saw tents and huts that were homes, and many people lying on the sidewalks with no home in sight. I saw garbage everywhere; the only thing that outnumbered the strewn paper, cans, and plastic was the dirt and dust that gently rise and fell with the slight breeze that didn’t do anything to break the heat. I didn’t really know what to expect from India. I knew I would see poverty and I knew its culture is very different from my own. I wasn’t prepared for the extent and spread of the poverty. Now I know that India is estimated to have one-third of the world’s poor and 42 percent of its people (456 million) fall below the international poverty line of $1.25 per day, which is actually reduced from 90 percent in 1980. And I completely believe those numbers after seeing the amount of poverty I saw in just one drive that took about a half hour.

There are images that will never leave you. I will never forget my shock and alarm at the slums I saw, and the people whose eyes I watched from the shelter of my air-conditioned bus. In a previous entry, I said that you could never really know a place until you’ve been there, because pictures and moving images don’t allow you to feel it or to really grasp your surroundings. The same holds true for issues like poverty in India, I think. You can read the statistics, you can listen to the news and you can technically know that it is true. But until you’re there, until you’re riding in the streets and you see their bicycles that look like they can barely function, you see their shelters that look like they can barely shield them from the elements, you see their eyes that look just as distraught and hungry as the gaunt dogs by the airport, you never truly know.

All of the below photos were taken on the bus the next morning in Dehli.