Earth Day in India: Hope and Healing in a Dire World

by Emma Sleeth
– India / USA –

Summer has begun here in southern India, which means that most days are in the high 90s or low 100s. It’s bad enough for my friend Val and the staff here at the Dean Foundation—all healthy and living in homes that have fans—but I can’t begin to imagine what it is like for our terminally ill patients. Our bedridden neighbors lie in their homes, day after day, developing puss-filled sores where their hot, damp skin makes contact with the dirt floors and ragged beds they are lying on. We visit them in their homes and dress their bedsores, cutting away tracts of dead skin and sluff the size—and depth—of a pack or two of playing cards and covering the wounds with anti-bacterial solutions, but many sores never improve because of the heat and slow pace at which old bodies heal.

The hardest things that I’ve had to deal with since coming here are an infected hangnail on my big toe and the effects of mild dehydration—light-headedness, shaking hands, and not always being able to keep my breakfast down. It’s annoying, but not exactly life-threatening. And yet these little things—ailments on an infinitesimally smaller level of magnitude than bedsores or the side-effects of cancer and chemotherapy—are good reminders of the fragility of the human body.

It’s like when I was a toddler and one of my favorite pastimes was chasing my brother around the house and biting him. Clark was amazingly tolerant and never once hit me back, despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that he was twice my size and could have actually hurt me. I finally stopped biting him the day my dad put my hand in my own mouth and pushed up on my jaw, causing me to bite my own fingers.

My dad saw that I was startled: being bit hurt. It hurt a lot.

I had never understood exactly what I was doing to my brother; once I knew, I stopped. My dad still feels terrible about intentionally causing me pain that day, but it was necessary for me to hurt a little in order to stop me from biting my brother on a regular basis.

I truly believe that the reason people do not care about the environment is because they don’t fully realize the impact that their actions have. In America, we see the beginning of an environmental hangnail or two—a few more kids with asthma, a few endangered species, and higher gas prices for a few months. In India, though, the effect of irresponsible use of resources is harder to ignore. Rivers that run through the city covered by floating trash, dramatic increases in environmentally-related cancer rates, and children picking through rubbish heaps by the side of the road are graphic illustrations of our excessive exploitation of the natural world and the impact it has on other people. India doesn’t have the resources to hide the results of global consumerism the way that our country does. In the U.S., the decrease in fish population might mean seafood being slightly more expensive. In India, it means that every fisherman has less chance of feeding his children or sending them to school.

Yesterday, Val and I lay on our bed sweating because the power had gone out, as it does most days, and the fan was off. As I stared up at the ceiling, overwhelmed by the heat, I thought about all the people I knew whose bedsores were getting worse every minute that the electricity stayed off. And then I thought about all my friends at home, surfing the web or playing video games. And I realized that I wasn’t mad at them. Because they are like I was when I was two years old. They simply don’t know any better. They don’t fully understand that there is a limited amount of fuel on this planet and that it is their responsibility to steward it.

I truly believe that every single person I go to church with would turn off their computer if they knew it meant that a bedridden man in India with sweat irritating his abscesses could turn on his fan. I truly believe that every one of my friends would use fabric bags if they saw all the plastic ones cluttering the rivers that thousands of people depend on for their drinking water here in Chennai. Maybe I’m naïve, but I truly believe that people would change if they knew their actions were harming others.

God takes no more pleasure in making us experience the effects of our actions than my dad took from making me experience the effects of what I was doing to my brother. But it’s necessary. We’re not going to make ourselves sacrifice a little convenience or give anything up until we realize that by doing so we can make other people more comfortable. We’re not going to stop wasting resources on frivolous things until we realize that the same resources could be used to make another person’s life concretely better. We’re not going to save the planet until we realize that by doing so we are serving God and the people He made in his image.

My hope is that we will realize that the earth is worn out. My hope is that we realize that we cannot expect it to keep on healing itself if we continue to plunder it at the current pace. My hope is that those of us who have resources will choose to conserve them.

My hope is that this Earth Day will be an opportunity for people to realize exactly what they are doing to the environment. My hope is that we grow up and stop hurting our brothers and sisters around the world. My hope is that we all will bite our own hands today.

Emma’s father, Dr. Matthew Sleeth, was interviewed by The WIP for his book,
Serve God, Save the Planet in 2007 – Ed.

About the Author
Emma Sleeth, 18, is a junior at Asbury College and author of It’s Easy Being Green. This semester, Emma has been serving at the Dean Foundation in Chennai, India, providing hospice and palliative care for the poor.