On Hustlers And My Pampered Western Life

Today, back in Kathmandu after a not unpleasant 8 hour bus journey, I found myself once again staying in the neighborhood of Thamel, a tourist base-camp of sorts, which attracts, in turn, a proportional camp of hustlers.  One develops a certain equanimity to the hustle after a few weeks on the road and it can tend to fade into the background unless one encounters a singularly interesting practitioner, as I did today.  

Having just finished some basic laundry and grocery business, I was beginning the hour-long walk back to the visa office to collect my freshly re-stickered passport.  As is not unusual, I was called after and followed a few times with various offers of goods and services, but all were ignored except one persistent voice at my elbow.  A  boy of about twelve, by the name of Raman, was chattering brightly in fairly solid English about the various U.S. presidents, their number in the sequence, and some commonly known facts about their lives.  I, in turn, waited for the hustle to be made clear.  He told me he could name every capital in the world.  I tested him, using capitals I knew from South America and Africa, rather obscure examples that I prided myself on being unique in knowing, but he nailed every one without hesitation.  I continued to wait for him to play the next card.  I asked if he went to school and he claimed he did, but that it was a holiday and continued to chatter and ask me questions.  I asked if he intended to follow me all the way to the visa office.  He said no, and at this point decided to play his ace:  He wanted to know if I would buy milk for his brother.  No money.  Money is bad.  Just milk.

Knowing this hustle as well as its many cousins (the lost soccer ball, the pen and pad for school, in each case the child returns the item to the vendor and splits the amount paid) I waived him on his way.  Still, I found myself uniquely impressed by his abilities.  Here was a child of notable intelligence trying to get ahead in an environment where that task is almost impossible, his destiny tied to this little community of tricksters and smooth talkers.  As I considered this, I found myself renewing a line of thinking that I seem to follow fruitlessly every time I am in a country where poverty is everywhere you look.  It involves the things that we tend to think we deserve in life.  Most of us believe (or allow ourselves to believe) fervently in a fallacy that we all arrive at fairly naturally.  It goes like this: I have earned everything that I possess, through either hard work or natural ability, and the luxuries I enjoy are the just rewards for my labors.  When confronted with a hard working genius like Raman I tend to laugh at myself for believing I "deserve" anything.  After all, Raman, who is probably smarter and more ambitious then I ever was at his age, has about as much chance of traveling the world and blogging about his experiences as he does of playing professional soccer, which is to say, almost none.  Doesn't he deserve the same chances I have?  Hasn't he earned them?

Of course the fact is that we, the ones with high quality educations, the ones with money and cars and televisions and computers, were each born in the right place at the right time.  We work hard, just like everyone else.  The difference is that our work produces such excess that we can buy new clothes and airline tickets, simply by virtue of our location and circumstance.  Most people's work barely feeds their family, even if they work twice as hard as we do.  Every exception the free-market optimists will point to as proof of the possibility of the "up by the bootstraps" world of opportunity is crushed by the weight of the billions of stories that prove what we all like to forget:  Our lives are to a large degree defined by the conditions we are born into.

I don't know what to make of this most times.  It tends to be a sobering, even depressing thought and I never get over it too quickly.  What I come back to in the end that gives me some peace is that I can't go around feeling sorry for myself for being born lucky, but I  sure as hell can stop whining about not having every pleasure that I see is available.  I often find myself saying on this trip, "It's been a long day.  I deserve a beer."  or "Wooo, I've done a lot of walking.  Let me sit down in this nice restaurant and reward myself."  It's the kind of thinking that's so ingrained in my lifestyle that I sometimes forget to question it.  Before I know it I'm rewarding myself for getting out of bed in the morning, finding the bar I that I was looking for, or for just being a decent human being.  That road leads the opposite direction from the simplified life that I'm (somewhat casually) seeking in my travels.

But there's always something like this: On the final day of The Trek, I met a familiar trekker at a town about 30 minutes from the main road.  We were both exhausted and she told me she planned to eat a big meal there and catch a taxi back to Pokhara immediately afterwards.  I asked her how much the taxis were, found they were about 20 USD, and told her I'd be sticking with my plan to take the bus for 2.50 USD.  As I stumbled up the ugly town road thinking about another crammed local bus, I noticed myself finding more and more value in the taxi which would take half the time and be twenty times more comfortable.  I grabbed a cab driver and bargained him down to 12 USD.  I rode back to my hotel doorstep in relative luxury.  Had I earned that luxury through my labors on the trail?  Realistically, probably not.  Was it worth every penny?  Yes. A thousand times, yes.