Report on humanitarian work in India

Well, while they’re finding my slides, I will tell you that I got involved with the transhumanists quite a few years ago because I thought Here are a group of really bright young men who are being responsible for the belief system that they have. Mormonism has a lot of strange beliefs uh about transfiguration and uh the second coming, all of these kinds of things. And I thought Okay, you can uh have a belief system that you put the responsibility on somebody else and maybe it’ll just Appear someday, or you can actually actively get involved with that way of thinking and figure out that that’s something that you actually believe and you want to further those beliefs and you want to be uh responsible for the belief system that you have. And so I thought, okay, there aren’t too many people in the Mormon church that really follow through with Some of the beliefs that they have.

I also have to admit that Even though I’m a Mormon, I was raised as a Mormon, I’m also a mystic. And I know there are people in the Mormon transhumanists who are Maybe agnostic, might be Buddhist, might be Christians, might be a lot of other religions. And I really appreciate that because I think this group is thinking out of the box.

I think when you’re a member of an organization such as a Mormon, especially along the Wasatch Front, or you are A Bible Belt Christian or whatever else, you contain your belief systems within the boundaries that Chris was talking about earlier. And the one thing about transhumanism is that it’s breaking down the barriers of belief systems. And I think that that’s a real important aspect. Of moving into the next few years. Because I think our belief systems and the walls around our belief systems are starting to break down. And I think we’re becoming more inclusive about how we think about who we are and what what we actually believe and what we’re willing to put our efforts into.

I’ve been going to India for the last twenty years. I hadn’t gone back for a few years this last trip. I took a trip last month and I was there for a couple of weeks. And I was amazed at the changes that have happened in India. It’s not quite as exotic as it was 20 years ago. There aren’t as many elephants, camels. Water buffalo walking, you know, kind of pulling things down the roads. But there are many, many more problems and many more people. When I first started going to India, there were probably, you know, 800 million people. Now there’s over a billion. And I’m thinking that the United States has what 300 and approximately 350 Million people? Well, that many people have been born in India since the first time.

Let’s see. Oh, we’ve got a visit to India here. Right when I’m talking about it.

I have to say that India is you talk about boundaries of belief systems, boundaries of realities. And if I know some of you have probably been there, but the one thing that you come away from after being in India for a while is realizing that the reality that you thought you knew has expanded and that that reality is not the solid reality that you thought it was. Anything, it seems that almost anything that is possible can exist in India. It is the extreme of everything. It is the extreme of beauty, of the opposite also. It is the extreme of wealth and poverty. It is the extreme of the very finest and the very worst. You just you walk away expanding what you thought could be possible on planet Earth.

I spent some time in the slums of Delhi this time. As I mentioned before, The population of India has increased since I started going there as much as the whole population of the United States. It has over a billion people in a land mass. That’s maybe a third the size of the United States. The people are brilliant. You probably work with people from India.

This is, I would say, on an inside of a slum, and it’s fairly clean. The slums that I went to this last time We were overwhelmingly problematic. And I just felt like: what is going on? What is the future of the people who live in these slums?

In Delhi alone, there are 20 sometimes when I’m talking, I get my figures wrong, but there are 20 million people. in Delhi. And so I would say 20% of those people live in the slums. So you’ve got Four million people living in these in circumstances like this in one city.

Now, India has like, you know. at least three and maybe four cities that are close to 20 million people the size of Delhi. And they all have huge slums. I’ve spent some time in Mumbai and the slums there. Calcutta is an incredible city. And then just across the border you’ve got Bangladesh with Dhaka that is another city of 20 million people. With huge slums.

So, when we talk about the quality of life and the quality of life that we expect, The planet Earth is shrinking, and we’re becoming a global society. And we may not think that we have to deal with other parts of the world, but We really do. And I think it’s pretty apparent now as we look at the problems on the other side of the planet that we’re not going to avoid. the problems of other countries, of other cultures, of what we think we can do nothing about.

This is not a great photo, but it’s a little girl who It’s typical of the kids that you see in the slums and in India. And they always are smiling. They are always happy. And you wonder, how can they be happy living in this garbage?

I just think they really need to people around here need to really, really be grateful for the wonderful air that we breathe, the beautiful conditions that we have around us.

These boys look happy now. They’re faced with a lifetime of problems. Many of them will commit crimes when they get older. There’s so much corruption in India that when you have that many people living in slum conditions, you’re going to end up with a lot of problems.

This is a little village I visited in Chandigarh. Chandigarh is in the middle of the Indus Valley. It’s the beginning of civilization. 10,000 years old. That civilization goes back 10,000 years. We go back, what, not a little over 150 years in this area. So you can imagine, you talk about the depth of culture, the depth of the arts that exist there, and yet the problems are just overwhelming.

This is a little Angonwada, which is kind of a government-based little preschool that allows children to get some education.

The problem in this area is gender equality. And you’ve heard that there’s so many young children Or I should say there are 75 girls born to every hundred boys born in this particular area and other parts of the world. because of gender inequality. And there’s so many problems associated with raising girls of being a girl that at least 25% are aborted before they’re even born.

These are girls who Are obviously in a pretty good school in Delhi. They’re being well educated, and they have Future if they’re educated. If they do not have an education, Either married off at a very, very young age, 25,000 girls under the age of 18 are married worldwide. They have a future of poverty and servitude and really, really poor health, and it’s pretty obvious in India.

This is an intern from the University of Utah assisting one of the NGOs that I’m working with in Delhi. And we’re feeding, the photo didn’t come through too good, but she’s feeding a group of widows and widows uh are kind of thrown out basically after their husband dies or when they get older and there’s no one there to take care of them. Their whole f their families it’s so traditional, it goes back for so many years that They really are underappreciated and neglected. And so this group that I’m working with is really trying to help.

It’s too bad some of these didn’t come through very good. This is another widow.

These are some children from the slums who are happy Like I said, they’re just the smartest, greatest kids in the world, and yet they have so little opportunities at this point.

This is a Delhi slum, and I wanted this particular picture especially because you can’t see it, but the girl behind the blue balloon is wearing a princess dress. Now, I don’t know where she got the princess dress, but everybody has a daughter or a niece or somebody who you know has been wearing a princess dress the last couple of years, almost every time. So it’s the same thing happens in India. These little girls, they want to be princesses, and they want the best That is available to them, but they have so little opportunity.

So I know that We can’t all go to India. We can’t all help in a physical way. But we can know what the problem is. We can use our technology. We can use our education. We can be supportive in so many ways. to help educate and to help some of the situations in some of the developing countries that are right on our borders.

I could go on and on and on, but I’m not going to. But if anybody has a question, I’ll answer it at this point.

Kathy Wilson

I think we need to keep moving to schedule a bit. Okay. All righty.