pavement dwellers

Our daily commute entails a 20-30 minute walk down a very busy street, full of the sights, sounds, and smells of people, vehicles, and small shops and stalls. It’s not the vehicles that stop you in your tracks, but the faces of men, women, and children who call the streets their home who pierce my heart… men and women, grandmas and grandpas, children, and even little babies, sleeping, playing, studying, and living life on the streets… not that this makes the situation better, but I’ve grown accustomed to the site of homelessness in America, where we see mostly men sleeping on sidewalks, over gutters, or on benches. It doesn’t lighten the situation, but it’s a more familiar sight than seeing babies crawling and sleeping on dirty streets.

on our daily commute, every evening they sit there on the sidewalk and prepare for the night ahead, in the morning we sometimes find them still passed out and other times they are back to sitting or sweeping their little home, i.e. the street that I walk on and the small area that they sleep on. a couple times i saw a young girl squatting in her family's area reading a workbook, like she was doing homework.

it's a scene that would be unacceptable in America. yet it's sad how easily even this site of street families can so quickly feel normal. As if seeing several families and individuals living life on the streets daily… as if there being a community of people who lived a similar lifestyle should make it seem more ‘okay’ in my heart… is my heart becoming hardened? Are my eyes just adjusting to the “new normal” now that I’m in a new foreign city? But then I think of God… He sees it all, and I don’t believe He feels any less compassion on His children living on the streets simply because there are many in the same boat.

In America, there are plenty of homeless, but many of them are invisible. They may live in shelters or they may live on the streets under bridges and overpasses or in parks. Police will hunt them and shoo them out of the public eye. But in Kolkata, they are very visible, and quite frankly, hard to miss, even if you have heart of stone and veiled eyes. If you don’t see them sitting or laying on the street, they’ll be sure to come up and be in your face and beg or try to sell you something.

We’d never survive a night on these streets. Cockroaches and other creepy crawlies, rats, dogs, even cows, huge crows flying and pooping everywhere, animals defecating, food waste and other trash thrown all over, cars and trucks blowing black exhaust from their tailpipes, loud honking horns all day and night… it’s hard enough just walking down the street let alone sleeping. Yet families do it every night. If it rains, some set up a tarp and hold it down with a brick or two. If it doesn’t rain, they just sleep out in the open on the sidewalk. it's hot out so no covers, no mosquito nets, no nothing to keep out the many elements. While many of these children do not attend school, there was one evening where I saw a young girl, probably about 12 years old, sitting with her family on the sidewalk in her school uniform with a notebook out doing her homework. EMC has programs for streets kids but at the end of the day the families must agree and the child must want to attend. And while you’d think the parents of course would send their children, but for many of these families, survival is their first instinct and educating their children may not be.