Decolonizing Harry
Nate Barksdale
October 1, 2001
If you are restricted in your range by poverty you are but confined to the most significant and vital experiences. It is life near the bone where it is sweetest.—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Though I've belted you and flayed you,
By the livin' Gawd that made you,
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!
—Rudyard Kipling, "Gunga Din"
When I set out to live in a biblically-centered community four summers ago, I really didn't plan to find myself in the role of a colonial master, attempting to control my darker-skinned minions with insulting benevolence. It just sort of happened that way.
Historians of India like to comment that the British conquered the subcontinent not out of malice or even a desire for a healthy profit, but in a simple fit of absentmindedness. For my part, I'd never expected that an attempt to live with my Christian brothers and sisters, more or less keeping our possessions and our earnings in common, would ultimately involve toting my own White Man's Burden, trying desperately to keep a stiff upper lip with nary a pith helmet or gin and tonic in sight.
It was—somewhat ironically—in southern India the summer before that I'd had my first experience of giving up most of life's physical comforts for the sake of a loftier goal and mission. In my case, I'd lived for seven weeks in a three-bedroom house on the outskirts of Bangalore, with twelve other American volunteers and the seven-member family of a white raiment-wearing, miracle-working Tamil Pentecostal preacher. It was The Real World meets Touched by an Angel crossed with Survivor. And it was great. As with most college short-term missions trips, it was pretty clear that we weren't going to save the world by summer's end, but we all managed ...
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