India- the stuff that’ll make you cry

So….India. Wow. What a country. Distinct from anything I have EVER seen in my life. Coming into India I was told/warned/explained the “situation” of the country. But how can one truly be prepared for what they’ve never experienced before? I felt if anyone was ready for this, that I was. I had talked to several people who had been to India before and they were quite honest with me about India’s condition. Along with all of the amazing stories that they told me about India they also emphasized that they thought that India was one of the dirtiest, most impoverished, chaotic, and overpopulated places in the existence of the world. They then said bluntly, “be prepared.” So, that is what I expected. And I was prepared, or so I thought. The poverty in India just smacked you right in the face. It was blunt. It was frank. And it was not masked by any means. In India there were poor people everywhere, generally women, children, and the handicapped. On the streets, in the train stations, sleeping in their rickshaws, wherever they could. Tiny bodies were constantly begging for food or money. They would take their hands and make motions as if to signal eating and the desire for us to give them food. So, whatever food we had, we gave. Unfortunately, that food was only to those few individuals and only for that particular day. What were they going to do for food tomorrow I constantly asked myself. I have never seen such devastation, ever. I was most unprepared for the amount of disabled people who I came across. People with no feet and people with polio crawling on the ground just to move, people with elephantitus whose feet were the size of watermelons, people with cleft lips, people with skin hanging off of their faces, just any and every type of health disaster. These were the people I could hardly look at for fear that I would break down crying right in front of them. They were helpless, and it broke my heart. Over and over again. And as much as I love India, like love love India, I don’t know how much more of this I could have taken. Feelings that I had never felt before were present, and frankly, I didn’t really like them. I didn’t like feeling so depressed, so disheartened, so helpless, and I really didn’t like the feeling that I was constantly going to break down and cry. And I don’t cry.