New Year's, Bangla and peanut "butter".

New Years. God is cool. I was sitting in my room by myself at 8:00pm, without a clue what I was going to do that night. Decided to go to Hotel Ashreen to find out what other volunteers were doing, because a few had asked me what my plans were. Nearly everyone was gone already. Then this woman stepped out of her room and said "they've all gone to mass." Facepalm. Of course there's mass on New Year's Eve! So another guy and I walked to mass. And it was beautiful. Then to Hotel Maria's teeny roof for a ridiculously claustrophobic party.

Lesson learned: I still suck at parties, because I don't drink and large groups of people + me = dysfunctional Stephanie. And I'm terrible at smalltalk.

...then a guitar showed up. And I took it. And this guy Peter followed me. Subsequently, we sat in a corner for two hours strumming a guitar and talking about Irresistible Revolution, our tattoos, how Jesus has rocked and drastically changed our lives, the meaning of real service, why we're in love with Kolkata, how Christianity is all about admitting that we suck at following God and then desperately trying to do it anyway, and why he's banned from entering the United States. This type of socialization, I can do.

Apne Aap today. Oh gosh, I do not speak Bangla. I went to a self-help planning meeting with about thirty women, all sitting on the floor in an upstairs room in someone's house. This consisted of me sitting there listening to lots and lots of women arguing in Bangla for four hours. And going "oh crap oh crap I need to learn this language." And then I started writing down phrases, and translating, and spent the whole meeting in a notebook. And my Bangla got a little better.

Lesson learned: whatever I do with the rest of my life, it must involve children / teenagers. I'm better at being a kid than an adult. Three hours into the meeting, six or seven girls, maybe ages 9-14, showed up and sat against the wall. Quietly. So...we kept catching each others' glances and making slightly silly faces. After the meeting, the woman who brought me there invited me into a different room with five other women, while they recapped what happened (in Bangla, with each other). And then I noticed that the girls were all peeking around the corner at me. So I raised an eyebrow at them, excused myself, and kinda ran into the room with them. And they were like "Auntie Auntie Auntie!!!" so I said "kamon acho?" and they were like "aaaaaaaaaaaaaah you speak Bangla!" and I was like "...a little..." and they were like "tik ache tik ache, we speak little Englishes" and I was like *melt*. So we counted to ten in Bangla together, and I reeled off the few phrases I can say in Bangla, and they applauded, and asked me where I was from, and we pretended to be airplanes, and they asked me to dance so I danced, and then one of the girls sang a song and we all danced together, and then they asked me to sing, and I was about to sing but then one of the women called "Ani" from the other room. And we had to leave. So they all followed me out and yelled "bye!" and I couldn't stop smiling. In the taxi, I asked why the girls were there. Their mothers are all prostitutes, and so the girls stay in that house at night so they don't get abused by their mothers' clients.

...then I got shoved into an autorickshaw, and somehow made my way back to Sudder. On the way, I bought peanut butter, which is actually just a lot of peanuts in something that is kind of like peanut butter.

And tomorrow morning, I move to Paragon Hotel, because I realized that I'm bad at living by myself. So it's dormitory life for me. Also, the room is only 110 rupees, which means that my money worries are going *poof*.

Wow, that was a big blob of a post.

I hope you're all well, and that you have fantastic New Years.

Love and slight chaos,
Stephanie (or Ani, because Bangla's alphabet is very different from English's, and I enjoy being able to spell my own name, and other people enjoy being able to pronounce it)