Tikun Olam – volunteering

Tomorrow Jesse and Jordan will begin one of their volunteer initiatives, teaching English to underprivileged children. It looks like a promising program, and it starts with a spate of tours around New Delhi. Should be interesting. One of my Indian colleagues commented that the Indian population doesn’t seem to be as immersed in volunteer initiatives as the foreigners are, and this set me wondering. It could be that the Indian middle class population is so inured to the poverty that they see around them that it seems “normal” rather than jarring; it’s just the way things are and have always been. Or perhaps life is more of a struggle even for the Indian middle class, and so they don’t have enough “spare cycles” of cash, or time, to get more involved. (I doubt this latter option even as I write it….time seems to be a gift that you get more of here, with all of the low cost options available to every middle class Indian to hire household staff and handle many of the mundane and time-consuming aspects of living.)