This May I will be heading back to India to work on training rural health care workers. Upon sharing this information with some individuals, I was told that many of the problems in India are unfixable and not worth the effort. This is my response to them:
Between the corruption, the healthcare crisis and increasing socio-economic disparities between the rich and the poor, it is difficult to decide what is India's biggest problem. Many people see India as a country with a plethora of problems. But lets get straight to the point - India is just one giant problem. Nothing ever seems to work! The buses come late, the trains stop on the middle of the tracks, the electricity goes off every few hours, the internet stops working just as Tendulkar is about to make the winning hit on the cricket field. Nothing - nothing at all - works. And after a day of infuriating, delaying, annoying, and fixable problems, sometimes sitting on a train that's going in a single, right direction feels like a miracle.
But isn't anything in the world that happens correctly a miracle? Suppose we had a perfect world, devoid of chaos, corruption, dishonesty - a world devoid of problems big and small - well, that would be a miracle too, wouldn't it? A miracle made of tiny miracles - like a train going in the right direction, or a single rural medical practitioner not reusing a contaminated needle on a new patient. Granted transportation, healthcare, education are all huge, and seemingly unfixable problems. But they too are made of simple, tiny instances in which something small goes entirely wrong - simple problems which can be solved.
I know I am no miracle worker - I am not a professor, PhD, a Messiah, or a world-renowned member of the human race. But I do believe that I am an individual with the power to make small differences - small miracles. I don't know how many difficulties and failures I may encounter on my journey this summer - but I do know how I wish to view my failures and difficulties. I don't know much about anything - but I know that if I just listened to those around me I would end up knowing a lot. But most of all, I do not know in numbers and concrete ideas what I would like to achieve this summer - but I do know that if I leave just one word, one thought, one feeling smarter, I will have achieved.
So yes, India has a problem. A big problem made of tiny, itty bitty problems. But what country doesn't? Unfortunately for India, with a population of more than 1 billion individuals, tiny problems tend to add up fast. But with a little hope, a little effort, and a little love here and there, in that very population of 1 billion, miracles can add up quite quickly too. And it is that latter equation that I choose to be a part of - what about you?
