If you aren't part of the solution, are you part of the problem? The answer to that question would be most likely if you are not part of the problem then you wouldn't be part of the solution. You would just be the outside person seeing what the problem is and so someone couldn't blam you for anything that you were not part of.
In the book SOLD by Patricia McCormick, Lakshmi is still at the Happiness House third of the way through the book. She still is seeing things that she wishes she did not see. So when Lakshmi is in her new room with other girls, she notices different things. Like how one girl named Monica who is able to leave because she payed off her debt to Mumtaz but is still there because of her family needs the money back at home. She has a daughter and her father needs an operation done. Then after a while Monica came back. "Look, she says, she shrugs off her shawl, revealing arms and shoulders covered in angry purple bruises. " He did this with his cane," (193). After Lakshmi hears this, she asked Monica if she got to see her daughter. But Monica says that they told her daughter that her mother was dead. Lakshmi felt really bad about asking and also that it wasn't her problem, so she shouldn't do anything about it.
I think that you have a really good point that sometimes it is better to stay out of other peoples problems when they want their privacy. However, what about when the problem is bigger than one person? If everyone just decided that it wasn't their problem and if they didn't do anything because they couldn't be blamed where would the world be? When Lakshmi gives the card the American man gave her with a flying-bird on it to the street boy, he goes and gets help for her even though it could be much easer to just go on with his life. Finally Lakshmi receives help from an American man. "His way of speaking my language is hurried now as he reads from a battered Nepali wordbook. I see that it has the image of the flying bird on its cover, and I say a silent prayer of thanks to the street boy whose name I will never know" (249). If the street boy never helped Lakshmi because it wasn't his problem she would have spent possibly the rest of her life in that brothel.
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