• 3CARE.doc: This was an attempt the Brussels Nexus to make the ideas of the Other World more accessable to people. Eventually, it was published as part of the 3rd edition of the "Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential"

• MAPMOUNT.MAP: This is the Mountain of Care chart.

THE TRIP TO MAHMAD by Jon C. Jenkins

I had been invited to India to help with the first consultation for a cluster of villages for the Institute of Cultural Affairs on the subcontinent. It was held in Sevagram the village of Gandhi's ashram in central Maharastra. The consult involved several surrounding villages. The consult was difficult there were lots of logistic problems. There were lots of questions about how the consult should be done and what the final document should look like.

We completed the writing, handed the translation over and started back to Bombay by train. It was good to be done, it was good to be going to Bombay and it was nice traveling with people who had worked hard together for the past four weeks.

When we arrived in Mahmad, the train stopped and waited at the station. We were used to the delays of Indian trains and so continued our conversation with worrying about it. The conductor then explained that the train had stopped because there had been an accident up the line and the train would go no farther.

A couple of us were sent to get refunds on tickets; a couple to go to the bus station for tickets and the rest got the luggage. When we all met at the bus station, thousands of stranded travelers were trying to get busses to Bombay and we were not any where near the front. It would be at least a day and more likely several days before either the track would be cleared or we would get a bus out. We decided to try the long distance taxi drivers. We were discouraged but knew that persistence was not a guarantee of success but the only road available.

Bimrao Tupe and I led the way by virtue of being engrossed in conversation and not noticing that the others were trailing behind. We turned a corner down a darkish alley that opened into a kind of field. I looked off to my left and realized we were walking through the red light district and all of the young women were convinced we were likely customers. I became embarrassed and turned to the front. There was a girl of 14 or 15 with a thin see through rag for a sarong with no underskirt. She was picking through a garbage pile. Her face was distorted in a way that made me think that she was retarded.

When I saw her, a newsreel of images began to flash through my mind. I saw a little boy in Sicily in the early 1960s begging for cigarettes. I saw a young Filipina in Manila with a look so joyless that I could almost taste the brutality of drugs and prostitution she lives with. I saw a leper that sat on the steps of the ICA house in Bombay and remembered his wife and children who slept on the curb a half block away. I saw a man wrapped in cellophane walking down a mountain road in Japan. I saw winos in Chicago. I saw a woman whose boy friend in a drunken rage nearly blinded her with her own high heels. I saw a grammar school friend scarred for life in a fire that had started in his apartment the landlord maintained in a substandard condition. I saw a girl so strung out on heroin I knew she would be dead in months.

I felt the burden of the whole of human suffering drop on me. Not only did I know I was responsible for this destruction of human dignity but I could actually do something about it. I was responsible not in a cause and effect way but I was obliged to act because I could respond. The burden grew heavier with the knowledge that effective action required much more than doing something about the mad girl in front of me.

Every once in a while this little mad girl, now my friend, appears at my side and asks, "What are you doing with your life?"

-- JonJenkins - 29 Apr 2007