A rock and a hard place

Although literacy in Kerala is high, per capita income is below average for India. Most people work very hard to make a living.

We were wandering along the clifftops on our last day there and saw these people down below. They were scraping some kind of shellfish off the rocks. The tides along this stretch of the Arabian Sea are really fierce. I was very careful about swimming off the beach and I can't imagine how precarious it must be standing on these rocks.

It's not unusual to see women doing this kind of hard work. I also saw them doing really heavy building work carrying huge bowls full of rubble on their heads. I felt very grateful to be strolling along with not a care in the world.