For the last five years I have been an elder for Servants to Asia’s Urban Poor. Servants is a network of spiritual communities committed to living and working holistically with the poor in Asia’s urban slums. Servants have been going for twenty years, and they have developed communities in India, Thailand, Cambodia, and the Philippines. They seek to do whatever they can to be the change they want to see in the world by helping the poorest of the poor – doing everything from developing in-formal associations of supportive relationships through to developing formal organisations delivering professional community services. Servants are a modest but important model of a movement that seeks to incarnate the Be-Attitudes in our brutal world through the power of the spirit.

Let me tell you a couple of stories that show us how to shine a little light in our dark times. The first story is of ‘Mike and Karen and the Kahawaha Slum’.[1]

A few years ago Mike and Karen are an Aussie couple who decided it was time for them to take the Be-Attitudes more seriously and respond to the needs of the world’s poor more personally, more practically. So they decided to go with Servants to India. Upon their arrival in New Delhi they began to look around town for a slum to live in.

In 1999 Mike and Karen and their young son moved into the Kahawaha slum, built on government land along the bank of a drainage canal. They found a little hut and settled in alongside 900 hundred other families. Over the next couple of years Mike and Karen immersed themselves in the life of the slum, living alongside the slum-dwellers, learning their language and culture, and developing heaps of reciprocal trey relationships with people in the slums.

During this time they got to know Amir and Shruti. Amir was born and raised as a Muslim. He became a follower of Jesusas a result of reading Christian literature he confiscated at a check point when the O.M. driver refused to pay a bribe. Amir’s wife, Shruti was born and raised as a Hindu. After becoming a follower of Jesus, she met and married Amir and they went together to study at the Bible College.

When Amir and Shruti returned home, they met with angry reactions, particularly from the local Muslim community of which Amir used to be a part. A fatwah or order to kill was issued against Amir as an infidel. Amir and Shruti had to flee.

So they made their way to New Delhi. They arrived with nothing, and spent the first month living on the platform of the New Delhi Railway Station.

After that Amir and Shruti moved into a basti in a nearby slum. In the slum they found many other Urdu speaking migrants and refugees. And they felt a call to work in slums where there was a significant number of ‘their people’.

So Amir and Shruti began working in one of the largest slum colonies in Delhi.

Mike and Karen offered to help Amir and Shruti develop their work. And they were given the task of documenting the basic needs of the people in the slum.

In the slum there was a total population of 135,000 destitute people in 13,200 basti shacks. There was no government water supply to the area, so all the water for the slum comes from hand pumps. Diarrhoea and dysentery were common. Residents also regularly suffered from malaria as they lived so close to the river. A government survey in 1997 suggested that the male literacy rate in the area was five per cent and the female literacy area was two per cent

Amir and Shruti then asked Mike and Karen to help them develop a project proposal which Himmat – their emerging local community organisation – could submit to for funding. The proposal was approved, and the project began.

Over time Himmat has helped the people in the colony rebuild their houses after fires, then floods, then fires again, swept through the slums. They have trained 12 community health workers; started 16 kids classes; 32 adult classes; organized 80 micro-finance co-ops; and commenced 16 house churches.

On October 19^th 2001, someone pointed out to Mike a notice that had been pasted onto the communal toilet block. It said that the council was going to clear the slum and relocate the people 25 kilometres away in 6 days time!

Understandably, the people were in an distraught! Mike called several community meetings to discuss the eviction. After hearing anyone who wanted to contribute, the people decided they needed to get 1) a stay order until winter was over, which would give them time to raise the deposit to buy new land in the relocation area; 2) legal title to the new land before the relocation took place, and 3) legal entitlement to new land for all people in the slum who owned huts.

Mike, who is a lawyer by training, had identified a group of local lawyers who could take the case to the Delhi High Court. He liaised between the representatives of the slum and the lawyers and, eventually, together they got the backing of the court for the slum-dwellers basic demands.

During the hearings, a judge asked for a list of the families in the slum, and the council refused to make their list available. So Mike and his friends in the slum had to embark on the huge logistical task of making another list of all the families in the slum.

Chotu was one of Mike’s friends in the slum who’d offered to help. And the two of them, with the help of their friends, set about the task of collecting all the information. Chotu’s hut became the centre of operations, documenting every-one’s name, ration card, hut number, and entitlement .

After weeks of hard work, Chotu and Mike eventually got an up-to-date list together that helped ensure the entitlement of a dozen or more families who were eligible but would have otherwise missed out in the allotment.

One day Mike was dropping his son off at school, when he saw literally hundreds of armed police in riot gear getting ready to forcefully clear the slum. Mike borrowed a friend’s mobile phone and contacted everyone he knew in order to stop the provocation, and the inevitable violence that would result from the fighting that would follow the police action.

Fortunately, at the last minute, the police force was recalled to barracks and the relocation was deferred. Subsequently Mike and his friends were able to negotiate the peaceful relocation of the people, in the end getting land entitlements for more than eighty per cent of the slum-dwellers – some seven hundred and fifty families.

However, the people discovered there was no water, no electricity, next-to-no transport, and their new land was three to five feet lower than the road, so when it rained, it flooded, and became a dirty great big swamp! Mike and his friends had to go back to court with the lawyers again and again to make sure that the level of the land was built up, drinking water was provided, and electricity was put on. There are still not enough buses. The struggle of the Be-Attitudes goes on.

In the meantime, Mike and Karen and Chotu are working together with Amir and Shruti and Himmat and a range of other local agencies to provide small loans to help the people start some small businesses. Mike is also writing a pamphlet in Urdu on a protocol for relocating slum-dwellers, in the hope of it being used to inform people of their rights in future forced relocations in the city.

Dave Andrews

From Hey, Be And See (Authentic)