Hello Diary,

It's evening again, and I'm back in my bed. I've positioned it directly under the ceiling fan now, and have been lying here for awhile; listening to the CD Noelia made for me, and, again, thinking about where I am and what I'm doing. Let me tell you about today:

We went out to the suburbs and countryside in our usual, heavily air conditioner-equipped landrover, and were to visit three housholds. In relative terms, one with high income, one middle class, and one with low income.

As it turned out, the father of the high-income family, Kevin, while not being extremely wealthy, certainly did well. Working for DHL, he earns a fair enough salary even by Swedish standards. His wife was abroad, working in the United Arab Emirates, and by the sound of it, she brought home a decent income as well.
Still, you couldn't tell this by looking at their house. It was a fairly nice one, two floors and made out of bricks, but it didn't rise above the average middle-class home the way it definitely would have in the case of the family spending their money in India. As it were, Kevin and his wife were putting most of the money away, saving up in order to one day be able to move their son to the United States, to, as the saying goes, give him the chance they never had.
Of course, by watching Kevin himself, you can tell they're doing good. He uses English very well, and frequently comes back to topics like business, the internet, and moving abroad. He looks healthy, and is, I imagine, rather attractive. Reminds me of Viggo Mortensen, albeit a bit darker and with a slightly groomed moustache.

The second family came off a lot more Indian. Mani, the head of the family, works in construction, and keeps a small farm in his yard, with goats, chickens and pigeons. The yard also contains the ubiquitous coconut palm, so to our we-just-arrived-and-think-this-is-very-exotic delight, while showing us around Mani opens a couple of coconuts and hands them out. His eldest son is feeding the pigeons and playing with them, and his wife, a little shyly, shows us some yoga moves.
Mani's home looks pretty similar to Kevin's, although a little smaller and without an internet connection. Mani doesn't speak too much English though, and doesn't have any plans on leaving the country. In all, as far as appearances go, he seems very middle-class indeed. He's getting by, things are ok, and he's content where he is.

Lastly, we come to Santosh. He's 19 years old, and lives with his parents and sister in a strawhut with a mudfloor foundation. His father is out for the moment, so it seems that makes him the head of the family, and the one with the task of speaking to us. When I think about what we did today, Santosh is the one who stands out the brightest. Maybe it's because it was Erik and me who did the talking to him, or perhaps because of his situation.
Santosh and his family, all four of them, live on a space hardly as big as the smallest student room I've ever rented. The hut is comprised of a single room, about 10-12 square metres. This includes a corner with a few pots and jars used as kitchen, and in the other end of the room something resembling a wooden, makeshift double bed, perhaps a bit over one metre across. These people have to live in shifts, I think. There is no sanitation or electricity, and no windows or openings in the straw walls except the door, so the interior of Santosh's home is rather dark, even more so with so many of us trying to get a good look inside.

It's sort of hard to describe Santosh's situation. You try to find common denominators, but the more you see, the more it seems that all the things you usually take for granted are lacking. Water is collected at a common well by the nearby nursery, and there's a small fireplace out the door for cooking. Meals come twice a day, in the morning and the evening, and ususally consist of staple food in the form of rice or wheat, with the occasional addition of fish.

Santosh himself is short by Scandinavian standards, like a lot of Indians, and gives a rather jolly impression. He doesn't speak English at all, and we communicate by means of an interpretor, but he's smiling whenever he's explaining something to us. As far as health status goes, Santosh contracted polio at age three and lost much of the use of his right leg. He's walking on crutches today, which makes it hard for him to find work. As it stands, his father is currently the only family member making money, and he brings in about 150Rs (roughly $3) per day, on days when he's lucky enough to find work.
In all, by any kind of standard we're used to, Santosh doesn't have much. Still, through his eyes, he's probably a lot luckier than some. His family is alive, they're all together, and they have somewhere to stay. He's open, verbose and seems happy enough, rather than bitter, broken, or feeling that the world owes him something. I find myself thinking, again, that it's people like Santosh who led me here. I find myself thinking that in this world there exist degrees of poverty and misery that most Swedes couldn't comprehend, or even imagine, before they got to see it with their own eyes.

The last point of our protocol states that we are to ask about the family's next major investment. Sort of like a car or a television set, I guess. It seems out of place, but Erik's got a way of getting things out smoothly. He asks Santosh what he'd get if given a chance to acquire something, anything, for his family. Santosh smiles and says he'd like to be able to get a new house. Who could hold that against him.
In retrospect, I wonder from my bed if, in the case of us asking Santosh to really go wild, to think up the greatest, roomiest, most luxurious and impressive home he could ever imagine, would he be able to top a 40-million dollar Beverly Hills mansion with 10 bedrooms and three swimming pools? Would he believe there are people living like that? I might be naive in my assumptions of what the happy-albeit-poor know of the world, but still, I think probably not.

Goodnight, Diary. I am far away from home.