Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part series inspired by Hillier’s trip to India during January interterm.

Katherine Hillier
Managing Editor

When I told my cousin that I was going on a short study abroad trip to India, he winced and said “good luck.” I thought he, being a travel writer, would be ecstatic, but his experience in India, as he put it, was “very intense.” Without prying further or taking this advice to heart, I gathered my necessities and boarded the almost 20-hour flight to Kolkata.

I now know that not even that advice could have prepared me for what I was about to see. It is amazing how much we take for granted just by living in the United States. Taking that trip to India opened up my mind to places I didn’t know existed.

I was traveling with a group of about 17 University of La Verne students and two professors, and we were all about to embark on an adventure that would splinter the frame of our global world-view forever.

Many of us had traveled outside of the United States before, and so, the idea of experiencing culture shock once we arrived seemed like something for rookie travelers, but not for us.

We were so wrong.

I remember when we first landed in New Delhi and had a six-hour layover before we could fly to our final destination of Kolkata; the air there smelled drastically different than anything I had ever experienced. The aroma in the air was such a shock that I new we were “not in Kansas anymore” before we ever even saw a sign telling us so.

It is so cliché to say this, but India really does smell like incense – everywhere. They burn it in the airport when you arrive, on the streets as your bargaining for a deal and sometimes even inside cars. I smell incense now and my mind drifts back. Not that all of India smelled mysterious, there were definitely other smells that I reluctantly recognized as feces and distant burning fires. These smells mingled with that of incense to evoke an all around scented festival, especially in the city of Kolkata.

Once our nostrils adjusted to the new flavors in the air a sense of anxiety crept across our faces, and this, combined with a major lack of sleep, was the beginning sign of our culture shock.

The thing about culture shock is that you can’t read about it in a book, and then try to avoid it. It affects everyone differently. It mutates from person to person, so, I am not quite sure how everyone felt on our first day in Kolkata, but I can say that I was stunned.

I’ve been to Tijuana and seen the mass poverty that has fallen over the city, and I thought that was as bad as it got, but I was wrong again.
The poverty in Kolkata is devastating, and very emotionally difficult to digest. And even though I am attempting to convey what the poverty there is like, unless you have seen poverty in a third world country, you won’t be able to understand its severity. Some poor people in the city literally live on piles of garbage, and many live and work on the sidewalks. It was not uncommon to see men showering from a waterspout in the street or urinating against a wall.

While the homeless in Los Angeles are confined to the shopping carts, the homeless in Kolkata barely have clothes to cover their bodies and shoes are a luxury.

As our group gazed in amazement out the window of our “tourist” bus during the trip we were dumbfounded by what we saw at every turn.

Everywhere you look there was a cluster of small children begging for food or women in beautifully colored sari’s asking for pocket change so that they could buy formula for the new born baby that was slung in their arms. While visiting the house of Mother Theresa I saw a woman holding a newborn with two broken legs and I almost lost it.

It is so overwhelming that, part of the culture shock from the poverty is not knowing what to do. I didn’t know how I could help. We were like a bunch of lame ducks viewing a country so drastically different then our own that we just drifted along not knowing how to assimilate into it in any way.

India will grab you, and never let go. No matter how old I am I will never forget my experience there. The massive emotion that follows behind the word India is not something that can be put into language, and I’m sure even the likes of Shakespeare would have a difficult time interpreting and analyzing a way to compress the culture and poverty lying on the streets on Kolkata into a short article.

I now know that there are layers to poverty, but they are like those popular scrambled pictures that came out in the 90’s where you had to stare at them for hours through crossed eyes to see the image buried beneath. I may have thought that I had seen the whole picture of poverty, but it wasn’t until I was starring out the window from our “tourist bus” in Kolkata for what felt like hours, that I realized all the language and understanding that I had previously formed about the topic of poverty had been shattered instantly. And, like those scrambled pictures, once I saw that poverty I knew that I would always see that poverty no matter how many times I looked away. The layers have been revealed to me, and now, with my freshly abrasioned heart, I look at poverty here and think that we live the life of luxury.

One of the most important things I learned from my experience in India is that I am so lucky to have been born in the United States. I am lucky to be in college, I am lucky to choose whom I would like to marry and I am lucky to have a meal to eat three times a day. They say that sometimes you have to go away to appreciate what you have and my journey through India was comparable to an explosion in my brain. Plato once said that all we see in the world are shadows on the wall and it isn’t until we exit our caves that we can truly see what life is really like. I may not have found true enlightenment or even left the cave, but I do feel that I have brought myself one step closer to that goal.

Katherine Hillier can be reached at khillier@ulv.edu.