India & CFGB

Last week we had the pleasure of hosting Arun from India. He was in Canada through Canadian Foodgrains Bank speaking at 20 banquets and 5 schools in 28 days! He works with a food aid nonprofit company in India who is connected with CFGB and had been asked to come and share with Canadians how their donations help the people in India. He felt he was quite inadequate for the job for a couple of reasons: 1) he worked in the field with the people of India, he wasn't an executive of his organization and 2) he had to speak english to english speaking people and that felt really intimidating for him. Both Ron and I said to him that he seemed like the perfect person for the job because he worked in the field and could see exactly how the people were affected by the money they received for their farm/food projects. Also, he spoke english very well, he chose all the right words and his accent was relatively easy to understand.

Arun said he was pleasantly surprised by what he saw of Canadians in his experience. He had been told that Canadians just eat junk food, eat at fast food restaurants and can't make their own food! He said he had been in a few restaurants but they were not fast food, they were good food, and any homemade food he had was very good. He was very impressed when he stayed with us and found out we ground our own wheat for flour to make our own bread. He said people in India didn't make their own bread, the big factories just made it and brought it to the stores and markets. Score one for Canada!! Arun had also been told that Canadian children were very disrespectful and because both parents work in most households the kids didn't know how to act and they got whatever they wanted. (I'd like to know where "they" get their information from!) He stayed with one other family on his tour besides ours and he said he thought all the children in those families were very respectful and the parents were doing a very good job of raising them. He also said the children in the schools he spoke in were very attentive to his presentation, asked good questions and were very well behaved. He wasn't sure where all of the misconceived notions of Canadians were coming from. I'm so glad we will have someone in India to say not all Canadians are how they are portrayed to be!

After hosting Arun I was very excited for the projects he is doing and wanted to go see for myself. I think Ron was feeling the same way too because he asked about the snake situation in India. Arun said there are poisonous snakes in India but they leave you alone for the most part and the people aren't scared of them because they know how to take the poison out if someone gets bit. Ron then asked how many snakes there were. Arun said there weren't many, if he were working in a 60 acre field there might be one or two. That was enough to discourage Ron from ever going! I might have to just take the girls and go sometime!!

Having Arun stay with us was just as educational for us as it was for him. We learned that there are 1.21 billion people living in India and most of them (I can't remember the percentage 85% maybe) are living right at or below the poverty line. Clothing, perfume and food are all inexpensive there, from our perspective, but there are many, many people who can't afford to eat. Arun wanted to buy a gift for his wife so he bought her two bottles of perfume for $80. After he bought it he did some quick conversions to rupees (Indian currency) after he remembered he was paying in Cdn $ and discovered that would feed his family of three for a month! He promptly returned the perfume, he said his wife would kick him out of the house if he spent that much money on perfume! In India you can buy very good perfume for $1 and when a couple gets married the bride is given special perfume that is about $5. Very good coffee in a very expensive restaurant is $0.25. Arun couldn't believe that people would pay $1.50 for a cup of coffee here let alone $5 for a specialty coffee at Starbucks! It's hard to imagine that there are people living in poverty in India when the prices seem so affordable to us but they also make very, very little compared to us too. Arun had been working for a pharmaceutical company, making 15,000 rupees a year and took this job to help with those in poverty and is now making 1,500 rupees a year. One Cdn dollar is 50 Indian rupees so basically he went from making $300/year to $30/year just to put everything in perspective. Arun refused to buy clothes because most of them were made in China. He said if you live in India you don't buy anything made in China! He searched high and low for something made in Canada and couldn't find it. I don't think he was looking for food products so then it's very hard to find. He spent his last few days in the city so maybe he did find something from Canada that was affordable for him there.

We are so glad to have had the opportunity to have hosted Arun. The kids were fascinated by him. Nathan got to spend the most time with Arun out of all three of the kids and they really hit it off. Larissa only got to see Arun for a few short minutes before school one morning but she was full of information and questions! Bethany liked showing off for Arun and at times just sat and stared at him. Arun has a daughter Bethany's age so he understood her personality perfectly! I sure hope we get a chance to do that again!

Arun in his borrowed winter jacket. He was so glad it wasn't colder than the +3C (37F) he was experiencing in Canada!!