Thin Coat of Craziness

Hello all of our dedicated blog followers. It's awesome for all of us here to hear your support and messages from home in NZ and it's very inspiring but also very pressurizing to know that we are having so many hits on the blog page. Apologies to all, but for now I have to kill the happy mood a bit. 

When we first arrived here in India I was so overwhelmed by the craziness of it all that I that I ignored the obvious signs of extreme poverty and suffering, I guess subconsciously trying to avoid facing the reality which was that the country we were in is far more sinister and scary than I saw it over the first day. This novelty value of of the culture had quickly worn off and very quickly the reality of India has revealed itself to me. Beyond the constant horn blaring and strange sights and smells this place is home to hundreds of thousands of  sick and suffering people and this was highlighted by the dead body of a young boy some of us saw by the entrance to a metro station on our way back from Freeset yesterday (I'm sure many of the lads will touch on this point in their blogs over the next few days). In debrief we discussed this point thoroughly and came to the conclusion that although this would have been a huge tragedy and news story in New Zealand, Indians don't care and further more can't afford to care as a moment taken to tend to a dying boy or bury or cremate his body is a moment you haven't spent making money to get to the next day. Someone said that if you were to stop and care today, than that body would be yours tomorrow, a sad, stark and eye opening thought which is just part and parcel of life here in India. The tragedy of this point was compounded by the afternoon we spent traversing the with members of the Jungle Crows U19 rugby team, some of whom were ex street kids who were saved from a life of poverty. We found today that those guys are just like us. They have Facebook, they make jokes, the check out the girls in the park and the fact that they were just like this dead boy was a real reminder that there is a total lack of justice and fairness in the world. Hiding behind the thin coat of craziness is a world full of injustice and misery. Fortunately there is a shining light in all of this, the people at the Freeset organisation who I'm sure Mr Skeen will have mentioned in his post. The work they are doing to help change the lives of people here is inspiring and humbling and I hope by the end of this tour I will be brave enough to find a way to help as well. 

HAPPY THURSDAY!!!!!!

Apologies once again for the depressing post but I wanted you guys should know what it's really like here right now for me. 

Gus