Salma with her beautiful smile and bead work.

A few years ago my son David was valedictorian of his high school grad class.  This week’s column is excerpts from his presentation.

“The air was filled with the stench of animal manure and human waste.  I had to watch my step to avoid getting my feet stuck in the sewage that ran freely through the streets. The air was hot, thick and heavy with polluted humidity seeping into every pore of my skin. On either side of me were makeshift houses no bigger than dumpsters.  These houses were made of tarp, wood and string. Every breath was difficult because flies were trying to get up my nose and into my eyes and mouth.

The scene I’ve described occurred when I was in Grade 9 with my family walking through an illegal slum in New Delhi, India. We had already been in India for about 3 weeks and were about to go home, but little did I know that this experience in the final days of our trip would become one of the single most transformational moments of my life. During that visit to the slum, I met a girl named Salma.  Salma was fourteen years old and lived in the slum. She could not afford to go to school and she and her widowed mother worked 7 days a week as rag pickers in the junk pile outside their door.

Their job was to sort through piles of garbage to pick out was returnable. What captivated me most about Salma was her smile. In amongst all this poverty and the fact that she had almost nothing, she still wore one of the most beautiful smiles I had ever seen. She even invited us into her ‘house’ for a glass of pop.

We were visiting Salma because we were there with a team of individuals who were trying to help people like Salma to leave the slum and receive training to become paid artisans.  Salma was learning how to embroider.  When she showed us her work, I could tell that she was very proud of her accomplishments.

This experience was so humbling for me.  It made me realize how much I have and how often I take it for granted. Unlike Salma, I never think twice about having necessities such as clean water, food, clothing, a roof over my head and an education.  As I thought about Salma’s daily struggle to survive in a dangerous world, I realized that I wake up each day in a bubble of comfortable convenience.

Standing beside Salma, I was a giant – even though we were the same age – because I live in a world where food is plentiful and she lives in a world where food is scarce. In terms of making choices and having options for the future, Salma has few options and little choice, whereas I have a vast frontier of options:  for schooling as a whole, let alone post-secondary education, for choosing where and how I’m going to live, and for the career path I am choosing.

This is when my mind experienced a major shift.  I began to wonder how the abundance of my life was connected to the purpose of my life.  In the midst the extreme poverty of the slum, I began to wonder how I could just stand by and take so much for granted when there are people like Salma who are barely scratching a life out of the dust.  I began to realize that the abundance I enjoy was also meant to be shared or given away somehow so that people like Salma can have some choices and options for their future as well. As I became aware of my privileged standard of living, I started asking myself: How can increase my standard of giving?

I realized from that experience that with great privilege comes the great responsibility to contribute to the betterment of other people’s lives. I realized that, in life, I need to value what I have and to use what I have to serve others in some way.  I realized that I needed to be more concerned about my standard of giving than my standard of living.

May the measure of success in your life be your standard of giving not your standard of living.”