Jaddou Unknown
Chloe

I was preparing for my first trip to India. I'd done the research: The countless hours reading through guidebooks and studying maps. I knew about the intense poverty, the touts, the dress codes, and the scams. I knew to check my bottled water for its seal, take my malaria pills, and be careful of what I ate. However, with as much research as I had done, as many stories I had heard and as many photos I had studied, nothing could have prepared me for what India really held and the amazing man I was about to meet.

I arrived in Delhi's International Airport at 3:00 am on the cautious side but open to the experiences that lay ahead. It was my first time outside of Europe or America and I was scared and unsure of what India had to hold, but was excited to find out.

However, after four horrible days in Delhi, consisting of countless scams, feces thrown on my shoes, as well as a serious bout of food poisoning, I stopped trusting people, became obsessed with evading scams, and cutting India out of my life, counting down the days until I could leave. Delhi over-stimulated all of my senses. There was too much going on around me: hustle and bustle of Paraganj, the constant nagging of touts trying to sell you fabrics, carvings, dirty fruit and vegetables. The intense taste and smell of the curries and spices was too much to handle; it was relentless in its pursuit to in saturate you. The dirt and grime surrounding you, the pollution stifling your breath, the over-crowding preventing your passage all got under your skin. It was just too much at once. It scared me, me, and most of all forced me to stay on my guard and keep away from what was happening around me.

My decision not to surrender to India was only reinforced upon arriving in Agra when my boyfriend discovered his wallet was missing. That was the final straw for us. We were tired, angry and wanted India to be swallowed up by the earth, never to resurface. We punched our hotel walls, yelled, considered just getting on the next plane home; back to the comforts of cable TV, clean sheets, and friendly western faces. Why would anyone want to go to India, the godforsaken great (yeah right!) sub-continent? It was dirty, smelly, the people only wanted to rip you off. It was loud, polluted, and congested. The lodging was atrocious, the floors infested with cockroaches, and you had to trek to the bathrooms. All it held was misery and trouble.

So with no wallet, we stormed off to make that emergency call home our parents had been waiting for. Call the bank, disconnect the credit cards and don't ever voluntarily come to India We were on the verge of breaking down.

Then the impossible happened. The rickshaw driver we suspected of having stole Alex's wallet came up to us and handed it back to us! This wasn't supposed to happen. Indians don't do this kind of thing! He's probably stolen some money or taken the credit card, but everything was intact, not a rupee missing. This went against everything I believed about India. People actually had a conscience.

I let my guard down for the first time since arriving. We thanked him, hugged him and then asked why he had giving us back the wallet. He told us that he had found it in the backseat of his rickshaw and had since been looking for us. He wanted to earn his money honestly and believed no one deserved to have his or her money stolen. Having grown up in the shadow of the Taj Mahal's glory, he had learnt early on about the varying degrees of wealth but that each individual could be hurt, happy, kind, angry; emotions and feeling were exempt of monetary values.

I stood there in awe. I was looking at a middle-aged man, dressed in sandals and ripped shorts. His thinning hair was greasy and his hands covered with dirt. I looked over at his rusted and broken rickshaw. This vehicle was his livelihood, he most likely made less in one week then the change I had in my pocket, and yet he had returned the wallet. How ignorant of me to have assumed every Indian citizen lacked morals. Who was I to judge them? I hadn't grown up in a makeshift home on the outskirts of Delhi. Finding money for dinner was never something that actually scared me; if I was low in cash my friends would spot me till I got paid. But that's America - the wealthiest nation in the
world, not India.

What if feeding my family depended on overcharging some innocent tourist? I’d be justified in doing it right? While that may have been true of Jaddou had he had a family, but he had made a conscious decision to live a morally just life. When his path crossed with mine that day, he not only changed the way I traveled, but the way I led my life. For the rest of my trip I decided not only to take part in the world around me, but also to take time to hear the stories people had to offer of their lives in India.

Meeting Jaddou that fateful day in India made me realize that a hero can be anyone. It can be the president of the United States, or a homeless man sleeping on the corner of Haight-Ashbury. A hero is not determined by how many football games he has won, or how much money she makes per year, it has to do with the way you choose to live your life. Jaddou is my real-life hero. His decision to live his life according to his beliefs, and to actually abide by them is astounding when surrounded by so much poverty. I look up to him with such admiration, and I pray that I will one day have that effect on someone. To have returned Alex's wallet and felt good about himself even though his dinner was smaller that night then it could have been was worth more to him. He is a true inspiration, whenever I feel angry at the world I think of him and my heart opens up.