Phonemes, three-day weddings, and Stephanie Hates AIDS.

So...that last post was quite long. Sorry about that. I've decided to post on Sunday and Wednesday evenings, in an effort to prevent super-long and super-often posts.

I know that Paul says to do everything without complaining or arguing, but I feel the need to rant about a few things that currently bother me. Ready? Go.

Air conditioning. Don't get me wrong, I like air conditioning. It's freaking hot here. At the Apne Aap conference last week, a little air conditioning was nice...kind of. Nice in comparison to the 95 degrees outside. But there's this air conditioning smell...the one that says "don't believe me, it's actually quite hot outside." It's a little bitter. Metallic, maybe. Anyway, air conditioning bothers me because it makes me feel like I'm breathing fake air.

Toilet paper. Two quick points about toilet paper. Number one: is there any other kind of mess that we clean with dry paper? Oh look, I broke a flower pot on the floor, let's clean it with thin, dry, paper! No. That'd be dumb. You dump some water on it, then wipe it up. Or let's say, if I had a bunch of dirt on my hands. Would I clean them with paper? NO! I'd clean them with WATER! AAAAAAAAH! Number two: how many trees do we kill by using toilet paper? No really, think about it. We put so much effort into recycling paper and conserving paper and yada yada yada. Do we ever think about the amount of paper we use every year to wipe our butts? No! Actually, I'm going to Google search this...

"It takes 48 full grown trees to make roughly 500 rolls of toilet paper. So using that number it takes about 1/10th of an adult grown paper tree to produce 10 rolls of toilet paper. Every American in the United States, roughly 300+ million, uses at the very least 49 rolls of toilet paper a year. That is 5 trees a person."

There you go. Stop killing trees.

And lastly...

AIDS. Okay, yeah, this one's a little heavier. Remember Neda, the young woman at Kalighat? On Wednesday, I sat with her for a while. Her eyes were rolled up in her head, her jaw was locked, she was shaking violently about every three minutes. Her skin was clammy. Her face was gaunt. I tried to feed her, but I couldn't get her mouth to open. I put on some gloves and held her hand and stroked her hair and sang to her for awhile. She squeezed my hand. She knows me. I prayed for her while I sang, because I didn't know what else to do to take care of her. For something like AIDS, are you supposed to pray that they get better, or die quickly? I don't know. She looks awful. I hate AIDS. A week ago, she was gorgeous. Wednesday, she was dissolving. I hate AIDS. I hate AIDS. I hate AIDS. Aaslkdjfaioejsldkafjlakgjkasdfuyoiewjfldksf.

Okee, complaints done.
Moving along...

A few friends and I went to an Indian wedding. Well, the last day of the wedding. Indian weddings are three days long and utter ridiculousness. Ceremony after ceremony. Party party party. During the second-to-final ceremony, in the temple, the groom was text messaging and the bride was absent-mindedly playing with the material in her saree. She was covered in gold, henna, a giant headress. Both of them looked exhausted and bored. It was Day Three.

After the ceremony, there was a giant dancing-in-the-streets party with drums and a guy playing keyboard while sitting on a bicycle rickshaw. It was LOUD. And there were fireworks. For like, two hours. The party kept moving through the alleyways to the reception area. We got there around midnight, had dinner, and went back to Paragon to bed. Bhalo.

Teaching difficulties. I wrote on the white board "Secretly choose one person in the class. Write a description of them. Colours. Body. Clothes. Location (here there left right). Five sentences." This was because they know colours, body parts, clothing, and how to describe how to get places. And they know third person possessive grammar (Neesha's pants are blue, etc.). So I figured we could combine them all, right? No. The girls stared at the board and did nothing. So we read it out loud. Blank stares. Then we broke the directions into individuals words, and I re-explained what every word on the board meant. Nope. They didn't do anything. I asked them why they weren't writing, and they said they didn't understand what I was asking them to do. I don't know why. This hasn't happened before. I'll talk with them about it again tomorrow.

Also, I realized last week why one of my students is having so much difficulty reading. Shagufta has had trouble sounding out words since I started teaching her. She knows the alphabet. She can name all the letters. But she can't combine them into words. I've been writing the transliterated Bengali under the English words for her, but it hasn't helped. Then I figured it out - she can't read Bengali. Or Hindi. She's never learned a written language. She speaks Bengali fluently, but cannot read or write. English is the first language she's ever learned to read or write. I think I'm going to ask Sraboni to give me more time with her. And I might teach her Bengali, which is strange, because I don't speak Bengali. But she speaks it, and I can write and read it...so maybe that would be helpful. I think so. Yep, I'll do that. Thought it's entirely disconcerting that she lives in India, and the first written language she's tried to learn is English. Odd.

Apne Aap conference. Last Thursday and Friday, Apne Aap held a film festival in celebration of Women's Day. It was a giant educational mabobber, with films about trafficking and women's rights. Super. As part of the festival, my girls performed a skit. It was a short play about a king, some priests, and a kingdom in which everything costs one rupee. In Hindi. I thought it was strange that it wasn't about trafficking or something relavant...until I realized that the girls didn't know what the conference was about. They just knew they were representing Apne Aap. In addition...*drumroll*...I'm nearly certain that they don't know anything about sex trafficking. Nothing. They live in the slum, which means that they're at high risk of being trafficked and taken into the red-light district, but they haven't been swiped, so they don't know that it's a possibility. What the monkey. I'm going to talk with Sraboni about this tomorrow.

While my girls were getting ready for the show, we all started singing the Ring Ring Ringa song. A girl who isn't in my class asked how I knew it, I said that my class had taught me, and that it was in Slumdog Millionaire. Pammi said "no, Smalldog Millionaire," and I said "nope, it's Slumdog." And she said "what's a slum?"

How do you explain to a girl who lives in a slum what a slum is? And it wasn't a language barrier thing. My friend Rhiddi, who speaks Bangla, Hindi, and English, had been translating between us all. Rhiddi, a little shaken, said "they're huts," and Pammi seemed fine with that. Somehow, my 16-year-old girls who go to school at an anti-sex-trafficking agency don't know that they live in a slum, and don't know about sex trafficking. Weird.

Before my girls went on stage, the emcee read a sort of introduction about the girls. She said that they were the "children of Apne Aap," and that they "have lived in the Park Circus slum all of their lives." She said that they "nearly never leave the slum, so this outing is very exciting for them." ...and she spoke briefly about how Apne Aap educates the girls to prevent them from sex trafficking. But she said this all in ENGLISH. Because the entire audience was India's ELITE who spoke ENGLISH the entire conference. So my girls HAD NO IDEA WHAT SHE WAS SAYING. So my girls went onstage, nervous nervous, performed their Hindi play fantastically, and then lined up and introduced themselves at the end: "my name is Neesha Khatoon, etc." Mumtaz doesn't know her last name, so she just said Mumtaz. Then they went offstage, excited about their speedy, but near-flawless performance. Because they don't speak English, they had no chance of understanding anything else in the conference. They weren't invited to attend - only to perform and leave.

Why is it that a conference put on the educate the public is only presented in ENGLISH? Why was everyone who attended dressed so richly, speaking English with each other, eating expensive food at the cafe...what's the point of an awareness campaign if the only people who can understand any of it are too rich to associate with the girls who live in the slum or the women who sell their bodies in Khidderpur? I know I'm being cynical. I know that these people can vote, and pass legislation, and that by knowing these things, they'll be able to battle sex trafficking because they have money and thus political power. It was just...frustrating to see my girls up there like dancing monkeys, while the audience of English-speaking-well-dressed-Indians watched in pity, faces to their images of the slum - and my girls had no idea.

Later, at the after-conference dinner, a man said to me: "those were the girls from the slum? Wow. I expected them to be sad." What?! You expected them to be sad? I explained to him that they were girls like any other girls in India, and that they happened to live in a big cement building all together. They're wonderful girls. We henna each other, we have dance parties, we freak out about Nashima telling Mr. Computer Sir about Pammi's boyfriend (he might tell her mother) - and that's why I'm going to work my butt off teaching them as much English as they can possibly learn in the next month. Because I adore them, and I refuse to allow them to not understand.

This week, I'm going to Khipperpur (the red-light district) at night. With Sraboni, Josefin, and Daniel. Good good. I realized the other day that the first meeting I sat in on, the one with 40 women speaking Bengali...was a self-help meeting for prostitutes. So I've already met a bunch of the prostitutes in Khidderpur. Hmm.

One more thing, and then I'm done. Promise.

At dinner tonight, Peter goes "oh, the woman with AIDS died today." Oh. I wasn't at Kalighat today because I need to reregister - one of the sisters found out that I'm actually registered for Daya Dan. Hm. So, um, Neda died today. Her body is currently wrapped up in a bright blue sheet. Peter is often on morgue duty in the morning, so I'm going to try to go with him. If the sisters say no, I'll cry.

I hate AIDS.

Bedtime. Up early to go cremate Neda's 25-year-old AIDS-destroyed body.

I'm sorry. I just really hate AIDS. Stupid AIDS. She was fine a week ago. I hate gang-rape. I hate FGM. I hate AIDS. Lldsuf098aweurmwieurdowru9dwriasjradshf!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay. Goodnight.

Love,
Stephanie