Hierarchy

There's a tiny room in my house shaped like a rectangle-- maybe 10ft by 3ft. Adjoining it there is an even smaller room which has a hole with a pipe connected to it. I assumed this was a strange kind of storage space until my friend Devlynn told me they were my servant's quarters. The servant would sleep in the one room and use the bathroom in the hole in the other room. Never mind that I have three perfectly good toilets in my apartment.

It's been a frantic few weeks trying to prepare Orientation training, making sure the volunteers have good living arrangements, figuring out who will be teaching what, and about five million other things that seem to come up a day. And even with the craziness of my job right now, I have had time to experience the city and its people a little more, both the good and the bad.

Last weekend a woman working as part of the AUW administration named Rena invited Devlynn and I to her house for lunch. She's married to a very wealthy business man from the Punjab province in India-- bordering Pakistan. I was not too surprised when her driver picked us up and whisked us off to a large house in a gated community. I was slightly more taken back when she introduced us to her four live-in servants and a very old, very bony woman who was the Nanny of her two sons (the sons spoke impeccable English) Salman and Zen. I was shocked when as we sat for a delicious, beautiful meal with a water pitcher on the table and instead of refilling our own classes, someone was called from across the house to come in and fill them up instead.

That day at Rena's I saw in concentrated form what I've been witnessing in bits and pieces since arriving. The first is that there is a large swath of the population that has almost nothing. These are the begging boys outside the grocery store who saw fit to hit me when I refused to give them money. These are the women who fish garbage out of the ditch in front of my house. These are the rickshaw drivers who have to pay such an enormous amount to rent their rickshaw that they can barely break even despite driving people around 12-14 hours a day. But then there's this tiny segment of society that seems to have EVERYTHING. The man who owns the apartment building I live in uses the total amount from the rent he collects as a spending allowance for one of his sisters. It's her "fun" money. A girl I work with stared at me with confusion and pity when I told her I cooked for myself here and at home in America. And one of the apartment buildings where we house teachers has a separate staircase for workers and cleaners because they are not allowed in the elevator and they are not allowed on the stairs that foreigners walk on.

I know this is not uncommon-- anywhere you go- you usually always have the super rich and the very poor but here that contrast is so vivid. And the lines between those who barely own shoes and those who don't need to because they are carried everywhere they go are fixed and unapologetically reinforced. Class is not to be wiped away or hushed up or acted as if it doesn't exist. Class is to be celebrated. A factory owner or brick layer or sweeper of streets isn't just what you do. It's who you are always going to be.