Thoughts on the disaster

Dede here. Yesterday as we were eating lunch in the outdoor cafeteria – a shiny grey outdoor platform shielded by a grass-thatched roof – I realized something about our blog. This blog describes in detail the highlights of our work and experiences at Sambhavna clinic but when it comes to capturing the unique (and in many ways still mysterious) order of the place as well as the work that makes this place so special, it doesn’t come close. Thus I decided, sitting there finger deep in eggplant and chilis and ankle deep in poisionous mosquito saliva, to explain a few crucial things we have been learning about Sambhavna. 1) If we had any shadow of a doubt about the validity of Sambhavna’s and IJC’s (International Justice Campaign) claims of the continued gravity of the contamination in Bhopal and its effects, it has been thoroughly stamped out. From the 

corridor outside our room we can look past the lush herb garden that Sambhavna has planted to a hideous reminder in the distance. The Union Carbide India Limited factory that spewed the toxic gas cloud of methyl isocyanate on Dec. 3^, 1984 stands unabashedly rotting for all in this area (Qazi camp) to see, evoking the trauma of that night and reminding with every run of brass-colored rust of the poison it continues to leak into their soil and groundwater. Lately, I,ve been trying to imagine it and you should too; what if the resources that are both most precious to us and most taken for granted – our soil and water – had undetectable poisons in them? What if th

e water we drank no

nchalantly from the tap our used to boil pasta could end up giving our children painful malformations or causing the moldlike blooming of psoriasis on our skin? I wonder how any Dow executive could  live with themself if they actually came here and faced the calamities of past and present that Dow is legally, not to mention ethically, liable for. Every time that I see that rotting tower I think about the presentation that a specialist on cleanup of contaminated sites gave; he explained it wouldn’t take very much money (the highest estimate comes to $30 million) to rid the area around the factory of contaminated topsoil and water, despite 25 years of the toxins spreading. If this is not done, he added emphatically, every hard rain (like the one we had 2 days ago) compounds the damage, forcing the contamination downward into deep groundwater and even aquifers and allowing it to travel to even more communities. $30 million dollars for a corporation as massive as Dow is a joke. What isn’t a joke is the cynical and disgusting reality that Dow’s acknowledgement of the truth would end up costing them billions as many who invest in them would realize what a precedent such actions set. ‘Imagine’ they would exclaim to their spouses and business partners ‘ what would happen is every corporation began to pay such reparations. Tata, Coca Cola, Nike. Imagine how much we’d lose.’ Shit. Now I’ve gotten bogged down in this rant and forgotten to leave space for information and thoughts about the clinic. Well, more will accumulate and I’ll record them in my next entry. In the mean time, now you have a sense of the mental rotations and spirals I experience when pondering this harsh reality that once was an amalgamation of facts and fuzzy images and now is a community that is waking up creating the bleating, beeping, screaming and laughing that is drifting through my window with the early morning light.