Southeast Asia 101: an expedited introduction to the senses

It's Monday, exactly one week since Misha and I got on a plane that took us to a far away land in the East. Since then, it has felt like a crash course in third-world living. I am traveling with a seasoned and knowledgeable explorer who takes me places no first-week traveler could ever find on her own. Welcome to Asia 101: an expedited introduction to the senses.

I've come from a sanitized and sterilized land of carefully manicured lawns, street cleaning, and early morning garbage collection. I come from the land where dogs are leashed, and doggy poop is picked up in doggy backs, and life is not allowed to run wild like a rabid dog. In my land, we neatly fence away our lives, draw our curtains and hide behind closed doors.

Here, life happens outside. Indeed, life is everywhere, in all its beauty and squalor.

People spit and piss, dogs barf and defecate, cows chew and moan all before the eyes of the world. Heaps of garbage line the banks of the river, in which you can just spot the corpse of a long-dead animal floating downstream like a log. 

Meat flesh is chopped with bursts of blood, and the carcass discarded a few feet from where the children play. Here, the kids do not wear helmets, or kneepads (or shoes for that matter). There are no sanitary napkins or bandaids to cover the blood. The air is permeated by strong smells, bright sights, and raucous sounds.

I am not a squeamish person. I can deal with the heavy tang of car exhaust that stays stubbornly in the throat and the stench of heaps of trash baking in the Indian sun. I am not particularly bothered by the fact that the bathroom (for humans and animals) seems to be everywhere. I can even get used to the endless honking of cars and bikes and rickshaws. 

My senses harden and numb, until I almost don't notice.

But there is one thing that I just can't get used to... and that's the hardening and the numbing of my heart. 

Beggars are everywhere. Hands clasped, eyes pleading, waiting for a handout. I give to an old woman with half of her face missing who looks at me with sorrow I could never describe. I give to a man whose body is being reduced to stumps by what looks like polio.

I give to a few, but soon (so very soon) I realize that I cannot help all of these people. I cannot give to everyone. I start to learn to walk by the beggars and not even make eye contact. I learn to ignore the children who are tugging at my shirt. I walk by a young woman shaking in an epileptic seizure on the pavement.

What sickens me is not the stench or the noise, but how quickly my heart is turning numb. 

Where I come from one can easily avoid intimate contact with such poverty and disease for I come from a land where beggars stay in their own part of town, and the sick are hospitalized or put away. My home is fenced away not just from the smells and sounds of raw life, but also from the reality of the frailty of the human condition.  

I discuss my thoughts with Misha, who, as usual, is able to give me some much-needed perspective. He reminds me that I am not really here as a tourist. Tourists are here to enjoy and relax. They stay at cushy hotels in their own part of town and eat food that has been westernized to suit their pallets. I am here to explore and maybe experience a little part of local life. I will never know how these people really feel or what their lives are really like, but I am no longer hiding in my fenced-in world. I will experience strong emotions and maybe this will help me learn something about myself along the way. 

Yes, I could have stayed back home, in my clean, fenced-off life... but one cannot grow or learn if one is living in a closed off world.

So here I am... feeling, and watching, and learning how to sense.

~Rita