Readddddddy to be DONE

We’ve got 2 more days to go on our Garage Project. And, honestly, I just want to be DONE. Now.

I really don’t want to sleep outside…with four people crammed into a bed…again. I also REALLY don’t want to eat rice and beans again. In fact, I pretty much never want to see rice and beans again. I’m feeling cold, damp, dirty, and congested like I might get a cold in the next day or two.

All I’m really thinking about at this point is that I’m ready to move back into our house. I wish the last day was RIGHT NOW so I could be done.

But that makes me think of people who really ARE living in extreme poverty. They don’t get that choice to move back into ‘regular life.’ Their regular life IS poverty.

I’ve been reading the novel Slumdog Millionaire this week while we’ve been in the garage. In one part, the author was describing conditions in a slum in Mumbai, India:

“I live in a corner of Mumbai called Dharavi, in a cramped hundred-square-foot shack that has no natural light or ventilation, with a corrugated metal sheet serving as the roof. It vibrates violently whenever a train passes overhead. There is no running water and no sanitation…I am not alone in Dharavi. There are a million people like me, packed in a two-hundred-hectare triangle of swampy urban wasteland, where we live like animals and die like insects…[Dharavi’s] open drains teem with mosquitoes. Its stinking, excrement-lined communal latrines are full of rats…Mounds of filthy garbage lie on every corner.”

After reading that description, I googled ‘Dharavi Slum, India.” Here are some of the images that came up:

It was heart-breaking for me to see those pictures as I was longing to be done with our project. And that's just one type of poverty (living in a slum) in one city. Our situation all of the sudden is looking a bit better. We have clean water, a Porta-Potty that will be taken away on Monday, and a huge backyard in which our kids can run and play.

So while I am very (VERY) excited to transition back into regular life, I’m also preoccupied with the fact that for the real poor of the world, moving back into their nice house full of modern luxuries is not an option.