"The work we do is nothing more than a means of transforming our love for Christ into something concrete." - Mother Theresa, from the chalkboard sign on the way into Adoration yesterday. If you're praying for me, please pray that this is my mindset in service. I need to remember why I'm doing what I do.
Yesterday, I visited Apne Aap. Today, in a few hours, I will visit Freeset in Sonagachi for the first time. Now, don't hear me say that I'm planning on suddenly discovering my exact life calling (but I wouldn't turn that down!). Rather, I'm just embracing the truth of what I explained to the women at Apne Aap yesterday: while I loved working at Apne Aap, I really want to be in Sonagachi...so I need to go work with Freeset for the next few days.
As a quick explanation, Freeset is a social business started from New Zealand in Sonagachi, the largest redlight district in Southeast Asia. Freeset helps women get out of prostitution by providing jobs making bags, t-shirts, and other products. They're also just a really cool, women's empowerment-y organization with some volunteers who live in Sonagachi, which I like. Last year, during one of my last days in India, I visited Sonagachi and knew I had to come back. At Urbana this past December, I met Kerry Hilton, the guy who leads Freeset. We met when I randomly felt like I should go stand outside of the International Prayer Room for awhile, and he showed up wearing a shirt covered in Bangla. I started reading his shirt and we began to talk about Sonagachi and Kolkata. Then, a month or so ago, I met Pip, a nurse who is planning on working on health education in Sonagachi with Freeset for the next 14 years. She gave me Kerry's contact info and now...I'm going. In an hour and a half. And I'll be there for the next four days.
But yesterday! Yesterday, I visited the CLS program in Kolkata (which seems wonderful) and returned to Apne Aap for the first time in a year and a half. I bought some mishti to bring with me and walked / ran to the center...to find it padlocked. What. The woman who lives next door told me (in Bangla) that the school had moved. Noooooooooo. I was not happy about this. Then her son grabbed my hand and started walking with me down the street. A block later, he points to a sign - Apne Aap had moved about twenty meters closer to the girls' homes. Ah. That makes sense. The first woman I saw was Angelie's mother. AAAAAAAAAH! We hugged and spoke Bangla and it was wonderful. Up the stairs and I talked with the other teachers I worked with. Yay yay yay! Soma, Dipa's mother, told me that Dipa asks all the time, "where is Ani-di? When is Ani-di coming back?" It was crazy to be able to understand what she was saying. Soma knows nearly no English, but used to try to talk with me in Bangla all the time. This time, I understood some of what she said and was able to respond. Wow. Praise God for language.
Zareen said the girls would come at two o'clock, but that most of them would not come. When I expressed concern that the girls weren't coming to class, she told me that after I left, the girls took an English test and were placed into formal schooling. ALL OF THEM. That means EVERY girl I taught is now in school. This is insane. When I was there, I was their English teacher. Now, they're not even taking English classes at Apne Aap anymore, except a two day per week grammar lesson, because they're going to formal school. At this moment, Zareen taught me how to say "proud" - gorbito. Ami khubi gorbito karon amar shob chatrora schoole jache. I am very proud because all of my girls are going to school. I knew that the English class I taught was making a difference because I saw the girls' progression in speaking, writing, reading, and listening abilities, but hearing that they're in school now...that's something else.
At two o'clock, a few of the girls I taught - Zainab (who now spells her name Jainab), Noori (who was still wearing the bracelet I made for her), and Kohinoor - came for their grammar tutorial. I hugged them all. They each knew more English. I knew more Bangla. We spoke. I can't express in words how it feels to suddenly be able to communicate in spoken language with someone you loved without words for four months. I imagine it's like being suddenly able to see.
Then Dipa walked in and stood by the door, waiting for me. At the time, I was sitting in class with the girls. I stood up, walked over to her and picked her up and carried her out of the room. I put her down and told her that I had missed her so much and that she was beautiful and smart and that I loved her. I also told her she was taller and her teeth had grown bigger. She pulled a ribbon tied into a bow out of her pocket and tied it onto my wrist. Then we went back to class together and she sat with me. AAAAAAAAAAAH I love that child.
Eventually, the rest of the children came to the center. They attacked me and asked me a zillion questions. Then Dipa asked for my camera and we took a zillion pictures. I'll put them on Facebook.
I need to leave for Freeset soon, so the rest of this post might be a bit of a brain-mess. I'll try to organize it.
After Apne Aap, I went to buy henna at a corner store. The man spoke English, I spoke back in Bangla. I told him his English was very good...in Bangla. He said my Bangla was also very good...in English. Then he said something that I've been waiting to hear for three days: "I am trying to prove myself by speaking English." There. That's it. We both refused to speak the language we knew best because we wanted to prove we could speak each others' language. This is why I've had so many conversations here in which I speak Bangla and Indians reply in English. We both want to prove ourselves.
Kintu, ami ekhono shuddhu Bangla kotha bolte chai.
But I still want to speak only Bangla.
Okay.
Going to Freeset now.
I've got an hour to get there. That should be enough time, yeah? Ami asha kori je eta thik. I hope this is right.
I'll try to upload photos for a bit before I go.
Love and transition,
Stephanie
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Kalighat.
"But as for me, I will watch expectantly for the LORD;
I will wait for the God of my salvation.
My God will hear me.
Do not rejoice over me, O my enemy.
Though I fall I will rise;
Though I dwell in darkness, the LORD is a light for me." - Micah 7:7-8
I read through Micah at dinner tonight and was really hit by how clear God is about how He will guide us. It's especially relevant to me now as I walk the streets of a place I've previously called home, trying to discern whether I should return here again, and if so, what my role here should be. As tempting as it is to try to think through it all by myself - when I will return, in what capacity, how I should shape my life to prepare for returning - figuring this out is not something I need to work to do. Rather, I need to wait and pray. Though I know God has a plan for my life and that He'll guide me to where He wants me to be, I often forget that it's okay to not know RIGHT NOW where the path I'm on is headed. But, I trust that at just the right time God will show me what to do.
Give us this day our daily bread.
I think that knowledge of the trajectories of our own lives is also dosed out in daily portions. And those limitations necessitate an increase in faith...how smart, God.
"But as for me, I will watch expectantly."
I will know at just the right time.
Anyway, today. Today was busybusybusy. Woke up in an attempt to get to Mother's House at 7:30 to register for Kalighat. Thought I was leaving Paragon at 7:10. Walked out at 7:40. What? Turns out when I set my clock back an hour yesterday, I had forgotten that India is a half hour off from the rest of the world. So I was running a half hour late. Weeeeeeeee! Hopped an auto, ran into Mother's House. Registered. Grabbed a bus, with a little help from a guy I recognized from Sudder Street two years ago. He used to work at Tirupati, a roadside restaurant near Paragon, and pretend to be a Buddhist monk. Odd to see him so out of context.
Off the bus at the Kali Temple stop. Road to road to sidestreet to road, and then the familiar shops before Kali Temple, selling incense, flowers, beads, little statues. Lots of yellow, orange, deep red. Past the security guards who never check me unless I make eye contact and to Kalighat. Walking in there felt like any other day there...not like it had been a year and a half since the day they sang me the goodbye song. After getting my pass checked, donning a pink apron and dropping my purse in the volunteers' locker, I walked straight into the womens' ward. There were at least ten women still there who had been there a year and a half ago. I plopped down next to one and said, "Shanti! Eta khub bhalo apnake dekte pari." Shanti! It is very good to see you. We had a conversation about how she was feeling, lunch for the day, her family, how I learned Bangla. I repeat: we had a conversation. Like, I'm a person. She's a person. And we spoke and understood each other. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.
Repeat with about six different women, two of whom I didn't know from two years ago. Real conversations with words. It was crazy. I spent three months with these women, and could never understand the words they were saying to me, nor could I communicate what I wanted to say to them. Now I can. And I did. I told them I was so happy to have returned, commiserated with them about their pain, compared our families. All in Bangla.
But here's the thing: I think I was able to serve much more effectively when I didn't know Bangla. Before I knew Bangla, I had no chance of literally understanding what the women were saying, and I didn't even attempt to communicate anything with words myself. As a result, I was completely focused outside of myself, devoting all of my attention to the women - their body movements, intonation, facial expression - all in an attempt to gain some sort of understanding in order to serve them better. Because of this focus, I was able to really connect with the women beyond words, returning day after day to give foot massages and share songs. This time was different. Speaking and understanding a language you only know only a little of takes a whole lot of concentration. I found myself much more focused inside of my head than I was last time, because I was both working to understand the words I heard and produce my own correct sentences. Rather than just trying to serve, I was also trying to communicate. And while I think communication is very important, maybe the communication the women and I had before I knew Bangla was deeper, more effective, and more loving.
The place my Bangla did help A TON was with the mashis - the Indian women who work in Kalighat - and with one very young woman who seemed healthy, minus a healing head wound. When they found out I knew some Bangla, they were really excited. We talked for a long time, the five of us, in only Bangla. They told me I should have a Bangla notebook, so I went to the locker and grabbed my Bangla notebooks to show them. We read through a bit of my translated version of Psalm 121, sang the song I wrote last week, and practiced reading and spelling. The women - both the mashis and the younger residents - and I had so much fun! It's really wonderful to know enough Bangla to be functional, but not enough to actually be good. It means I'm forced to be constantly corrected and constantly learning. Hooray!
Okay! Time to leave the internet cafe. I need to go to bed to prepare for my CLS Kolkata visit tomorrow! Woohoo!!!!!
Love and Bangla,
Stephanie
I will wait for the God of my salvation.
My God will hear me.
Do not rejoice over me, O my enemy.
Though I fall I will rise;
Though I dwell in darkness, the LORD is a light for me." - Micah 7:7-8
I read through Micah at dinner tonight and was really hit by how clear God is about how He will guide us. It's especially relevant to me now as I walk the streets of a place I've previously called home, trying to discern whether I should return here again, and if so, what my role here should be. As tempting as it is to try to think through it all by myself - when I will return, in what capacity, how I should shape my life to prepare for returning - figuring this out is not something I need to work to do. Rather, I need to wait and pray. Though I know God has a plan for my life and that He'll guide me to where He wants me to be, I often forget that it's okay to not know RIGHT NOW where the path I'm on is headed. But, I trust that at just the right time God will show me what to do.
Give us this day our daily bread.
I think that knowledge of the trajectories of our own lives is also dosed out in daily portions. And those limitations necessitate an increase in faith...how smart, God.
"But as for me, I will watch expectantly."
I will know at just the right time.
Anyway, today. Today was busybusybusy. Woke up in an attempt to get to Mother's House at 7:30 to register for Kalighat. Thought I was leaving Paragon at 7:10. Walked out at 7:40. What? Turns out when I set my clock back an hour yesterday, I had forgotten that India is a half hour off from the rest of the world. So I was running a half hour late. Weeeeeeeee! Hopped an auto, ran into Mother's House. Registered. Grabbed a bus, with a little help from a guy I recognized from Sudder Street two years ago. He used to work at Tirupati, a roadside restaurant near Paragon, and pretend to be a Buddhist monk. Odd to see him so out of context.
Off the bus at the Kali Temple stop. Road to road to sidestreet to road, and then the familiar shops before Kali Temple, selling incense, flowers, beads, little statues. Lots of yellow, orange, deep red. Past the security guards who never check me unless I make eye contact and to Kalighat. Walking in there felt like any other day there...not like it had been a year and a half since the day they sang me the goodbye song. After getting my pass checked, donning a pink apron and dropping my purse in the volunteers' locker, I walked straight into the womens' ward. There were at least ten women still there who had been there a year and a half ago. I plopped down next to one and said, "Shanti! Eta khub bhalo apnake dekte pari." Shanti! It is very good to see you. We had a conversation about how she was feeling, lunch for the day, her family, how I learned Bangla. I repeat: we had a conversation. Like, I'm a person. She's a person. And we spoke and understood each other. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.
Repeat with about six different women, two of whom I didn't know from two years ago. Real conversations with words. It was crazy. I spent three months with these women, and could never understand the words they were saying to me, nor could I communicate what I wanted to say to them. Now I can. And I did. I told them I was so happy to have returned, commiserated with them about their pain, compared our families. All in Bangla.
But here's the thing: I think I was able to serve much more effectively when I didn't know Bangla. Before I knew Bangla, I had no chance of literally understanding what the women were saying, and I didn't even attempt to communicate anything with words myself. As a result, I was completely focused outside of myself, devoting all of my attention to the women - their body movements, intonation, facial expression - all in an attempt to gain some sort of understanding in order to serve them better. Because of this focus, I was able to really connect with the women beyond words, returning day after day to give foot massages and share songs. This time was different. Speaking and understanding a language you only know only a little of takes a whole lot of concentration. I found myself much more focused inside of my head than I was last time, because I was both working to understand the words I heard and produce my own correct sentences. Rather than just trying to serve, I was also trying to communicate. And while I think communication is very important, maybe the communication the women and I had before I knew Bangla was deeper, more effective, and more loving.
The place my Bangla did help A TON was with the mashis - the Indian women who work in Kalighat - and with one very young woman who seemed healthy, minus a healing head wound. When they found out I knew some Bangla, they were really excited. We talked for a long time, the five of us, in only Bangla. They told me I should have a Bangla notebook, so I went to the locker and grabbed my Bangla notebooks to show them. We read through a bit of my translated version of Psalm 121, sang the song I wrote last week, and practiced reading and spelling. The women - both the mashis and the younger residents - and I had so much fun! It's really wonderful to know enough Bangla to be functional, but not enough to actually be good. It means I'm forced to be constantly corrected and constantly learning. Hooray!
Okay! Time to leave the internet cafe. I need to go to bed to prepare for my CLS Kolkata visit tomorrow! Woohoo!!!!!
Love and Bangla,
Stephanie
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Ami abar ekhane.
[edit] Listen to this while you read: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfJAh6hrCzw. It fits well with my current emotional / spiritual / general state of existence. And it's beautiful.
I am here again.
In Kolkata.
Everything is perfect.
I don't know how to accurately explain how wonderful it is to be here, but I will try. Also, I've been speaking Bangla for the whole past day, so writing in English feels very strange. The best way to explain today would be to give you a series of events so...here goes. :-)
After being dropped off at the airport, I had my first full-Bangla conversation of the day with the guy who gave me my boarding pass. It was wonderful. We talked about why I was in Dhaka, what I had done, where I had studied, what I liked about Dhaka...all in Bangla. Then, at the gate, I met a wonderful high school student from New York. She's Bengali, but lives in America. We had a fantastic conversation (in English) about culture, identity, multiculturalism...it was great. Then the flight. On the flight, I read the Bible...in Bangla. It was nutty. I didn't understand all of the words, but I know enough that I could recognize what I was reading. I'm going to keep reading the Bible in Bangla to practice. Wow.
When the flight began to land in Kolkata, I looked out the window and noticed...everything was green. What? Kolkata was not green the last time I was here. What. I told the guy next to me (in Bangla) that the last time I was here, Kolkata was not green. He said it was green because of monsoon season. That makes sense. Also, Kolkata is only green on the outside perimeter of the city. That makes more sense.
Landed, deplaned (that's a good word), through customs...and to my first Bangla argument. Fun! The currency exchange guy didn't have the taka exchange rate posted. I tried to exchange taka. He wanted 12,000 taka for...a comparatively very small amount of rupees. It didn't make any sense. I told him it didn't make any sense. He said the exchange rate was very bad for taka to rupees. I know the exchange rate. It's not. But it wasn't posted on the board that showed the rates (no clue why), so he could say whatever he wanted. GAH. What was interesting about the situation was that I was literally arguing the whole time in Bangla. And we both understood each other. We weren't arguing out of frustration with communication - we were arguing because he was trying to cheat me out of money. Woohoo!
Then I went to the next currency exchange place and had another full-Bangla conversation with a nice currency exchange man who gave me a better rate and talked about Sonagachi with me. Yaaaaaay. That was fun. THEN I went to the prepaid taxi stand next to the exchange place and ran into two white guys. I asked where they were from; they said Chicago. What. We shared a taxi to Sudder Street.
On the way to Sudder Street, the Chicago guys and I talked, and I asked the taxi driver a few questions in Bangla. He responded in English. It was like we were each trying to prove we could speak the other's language. Or we just both wanted to practice our second-language skills. The Chicago guys said they were only staying in Kolkata for two days and wanted to know what fun things there were to do in the city. They asked me what my favorite thing to do in Kolkata was. I said, "uh...take care of dying women?" They said they were thinking more about like, going to a Cricket game and asked where they could do that. I didn't know. They asked what I liked to do in my free time. I said I liked playing guitar on the roof. I wasn't very helpful.
We got to Sudder Street. I got out. Walked in the back way to Hotel Paragon. Walking along that street was like a dream. This is all like a dream. Same sewers, same rickshaws, same smells, same rundown rain-ruined walls. I walked into Hotel Paragon and the owners broke into wide smiles...and we began talking in rapid-fire Bangla. They remembered me. I remembered them. It was beautiful. I asked if my old room was available. It was. I went there. Everything Josefin, Jeff, Peter, and I did to the walls is still there, and it's been majorly built upon. Other people have drawn, painted, and written all over the walls. Spiritual stuff, silly stuff, portraits...all on top of and around what I wrote and drew. It's amazing.
Dropped my stuff down, locked the door, and went off to Mother's House for Adoration. Said hi to the guy who sells pants and stuff on the way out. And the guy who runs the shop on the corner. They all remember me. Argued with an autorickshaw guy about the price to Mother's House. He said a hundred taka. I told him in Bangla that I'm not stupid. It was fun. Hopped in another autorickshaw. Didn't have change. The guy next to me paid for me. It was nice. Went to Adoration, got there just as it was ending...apparently they changed the Sunday start time to 6pm. Talked another volunteer who was here the last time I was here and with the new sister in charge of volunteers. I'm working at Kalighat tomorrow. :-)
Walked back with some really sweet volunteers from Poland, Australia, the UK, France, and California. Walked down Sudder street for the first time...and everyone recognized me. It was ridiculous. Then to Khalsa for dinner. Just standing outside, AP (the guy at the counter) saw me and smiled. I walked in, and he said, "it's been what, two years? How are you? Your friend was here a few months ago. Not Jeff, the other one." Jake. :-) I told him I had missed Khalsa a lot. We sat down, and AP came over and said (I am not kidding) "dal mahkhani, right? That's your favorite." My heart melted. I've been gone for two years, and AP still remembers that I want dal mahkhani. After dinner, I told the waiter (who I saw nearly every day two years ago but could never talk with) that I am happy because I now I can speak Bangla. He said, in Bangla, that he is also happy now that I understand Bangla. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. After a fantastic dinner, I walked back down Sudder Street, and sat down at Tirupati. They handed me the guitar. I played and sang the song I wrote in Bangla. Then came here, to the internet cafe. The guys recognized me again, and said (again), "it's been what, two years?" We had a whole conversation in Bangla. I asked if I needed to register again. He said, "do you have the same thumb?" because there's a thumbprint sign-in system. I thumb printed. My picture showed up on the screen. Now I'm here.
Okay, sorry, that's a whole lot of text after a summer of writing nothing. There's something about Kolkata that makes me want to write and write and write, to get down in words all of my experiences, feelings, and conversations. ...especially when they're in Bangla. Today has been amazing. Coming back to this city I love and being able to speak has made everything so much more real. Granted, it's only been a few hours. We'll see about tomorrow.
One thing I've realized since returning is this: I can actually communicate in Bangla in Kolkata. I can't do that in Dhaka. I heard a lot of talk in Dhaka about dialect differences from Dhaka to Kolkata, but I didn't understand what anyone meant until I came back here. After a summer of learning a language and being somehow unable to understand what anyone was saying in public Dhaka, I understand nearly everything I hear in Kolkata. I don't know quite why, but somehow Kolkata Bangla is a zillion times easier to understand than Dhaka Bangla. And somehow, my Bangla blends well with the Bangla here. It's so easy to communicate. Maybe I'm overanalyzing. All I know is that I have had a ton of conversations today in which I'm sure I understood people and they understood me. It will be crazy to go back to Kalighat, Apne Aap, and Sonagachi in the next few days. Stay tuned for that. Aaah!
Okay, I wrote a ton.
I'm so excited about this.
Tomorrow: Kalighat.
Monday: CLS in Kolkata.
Tuesday: Apne Aap.
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday: Freeset.
This is amazing.
I need new adjectives.
Love,
Stephanie
I am here again.
In Kolkata.
Everything is perfect.
I don't know how to accurately explain how wonderful it is to be here, but I will try. Also, I've been speaking Bangla for the whole past day, so writing in English feels very strange. The best way to explain today would be to give you a series of events so...here goes. :-)
After being dropped off at the airport, I had my first full-Bangla conversation of the day with the guy who gave me my boarding pass. It was wonderful. We talked about why I was in Dhaka, what I had done, where I had studied, what I liked about Dhaka...all in Bangla. Then, at the gate, I met a wonderful high school student from New York. She's Bengali, but lives in America. We had a fantastic conversation (in English) about culture, identity, multiculturalism...it was great. Then the flight. On the flight, I read the Bible...in Bangla. It was nutty. I didn't understand all of the words, but I know enough that I could recognize what I was reading. I'm going to keep reading the Bible in Bangla to practice. Wow.
When the flight began to land in Kolkata, I looked out the window and noticed...everything was green. What? Kolkata was not green the last time I was here. What. I told the guy next to me (in Bangla) that the last time I was here, Kolkata was not green. He said it was green because of monsoon season. That makes sense. Also, Kolkata is only green on the outside perimeter of the city. That makes more sense.
Landed, deplaned (that's a good word), through customs...and to my first Bangla argument. Fun! The currency exchange guy didn't have the taka exchange rate posted. I tried to exchange taka. He wanted 12,000 taka for...a comparatively very small amount of rupees. It didn't make any sense. I told him it didn't make any sense. He said the exchange rate was very bad for taka to rupees. I know the exchange rate. It's not. But it wasn't posted on the board that showed the rates (no clue why), so he could say whatever he wanted. GAH. What was interesting about the situation was that I was literally arguing the whole time in Bangla. And we both understood each other. We weren't arguing out of frustration with communication - we were arguing because he was trying to cheat me out of money. Woohoo!
Then I went to the next currency exchange place and had another full-Bangla conversation with a nice currency exchange man who gave me a better rate and talked about Sonagachi with me. Yaaaaaay. That was fun. THEN I went to the prepaid taxi stand next to the exchange place and ran into two white guys. I asked where they were from; they said Chicago. What. We shared a taxi to Sudder Street.
On the way to Sudder Street, the Chicago guys and I talked, and I asked the taxi driver a few questions in Bangla. He responded in English. It was like we were each trying to prove we could speak the other's language. Or we just both wanted to practice our second-language skills. The Chicago guys said they were only staying in Kolkata for two days and wanted to know what fun things there were to do in the city. They asked me what my favorite thing to do in Kolkata was. I said, "uh...take care of dying women?" They said they were thinking more about like, going to a Cricket game and asked where they could do that. I didn't know. They asked what I liked to do in my free time. I said I liked playing guitar on the roof. I wasn't very helpful.
We got to Sudder Street. I got out. Walked in the back way to Hotel Paragon. Walking along that street was like a dream. This is all like a dream. Same sewers, same rickshaws, same smells, same rundown rain-ruined walls. I walked into Hotel Paragon and the owners broke into wide smiles...and we began talking in rapid-fire Bangla. They remembered me. I remembered them. It was beautiful. I asked if my old room was available. It was. I went there. Everything Josefin, Jeff, Peter, and I did to the walls is still there, and it's been majorly built upon. Other people have drawn, painted, and written all over the walls. Spiritual stuff, silly stuff, portraits...all on top of and around what I wrote and drew. It's amazing.
Dropped my stuff down, locked the door, and went off to Mother's House for Adoration. Said hi to the guy who sells pants and stuff on the way out. And the guy who runs the shop on the corner. They all remember me. Argued with an autorickshaw guy about the price to Mother's House. He said a hundred taka. I told him in Bangla that I'm not stupid. It was fun. Hopped in another autorickshaw. Didn't have change. The guy next to me paid for me. It was nice. Went to Adoration, got there just as it was ending...apparently they changed the Sunday start time to 6pm. Talked another volunteer who was here the last time I was here and with the new sister in charge of volunteers. I'm working at Kalighat tomorrow. :-)
Walked back with some really sweet volunteers from Poland, Australia, the UK, France, and California. Walked down Sudder street for the first time...and everyone recognized me. It was ridiculous. Then to Khalsa for dinner. Just standing outside, AP (the guy at the counter) saw me and smiled. I walked in, and he said, "it's been what, two years? How are you? Your friend was here a few months ago. Not Jeff, the other one." Jake. :-) I told him I had missed Khalsa a lot. We sat down, and AP came over and said (I am not kidding) "dal mahkhani, right? That's your favorite." My heart melted. I've been gone for two years, and AP still remembers that I want dal mahkhani. After dinner, I told the waiter (who I saw nearly every day two years ago but could never talk with) that I am happy because I now I can speak Bangla. He said, in Bangla, that he is also happy now that I understand Bangla. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. After a fantastic dinner, I walked back down Sudder Street, and sat down at Tirupati. They handed me the guitar. I played and sang the song I wrote in Bangla. Then came here, to the internet cafe. The guys recognized me again, and said (again), "it's been what, two years?" We had a whole conversation in Bangla. I asked if I needed to register again. He said, "do you have the same thumb?" because there's a thumbprint sign-in system. I thumb printed. My picture showed up on the screen. Now I'm here.
Okay, sorry, that's a whole lot of text after a summer of writing nothing. There's something about Kolkata that makes me want to write and write and write, to get down in words all of my experiences, feelings, and conversations. ...especially when they're in Bangla. Today has been amazing. Coming back to this city I love and being able to speak has made everything so much more real. Granted, it's only been a few hours. We'll see about tomorrow.
One thing I've realized since returning is this: I can actually communicate in Bangla in Kolkata. I can't do that in Dhaka. I heard a lot of talk in Dhaka about dialect differences from Dhaka to Kolkata, but I didn't understand what anyone meant until I came back here. After a summer of learning a language and being somehow unable to understand what anyone was saying in public Dhaka, I understand nearly everything I hear in Kolkata. I don't know quite why, but somehow Kolkata Bangla is a zillion times easier to understand than Dhaka Bangla. And somehow, my Bangla blends well with the Bangla here. It's so easy to communicate. Maybe I'm overanalyzing. All I know is that I have had a ton of conversations today in which I'm sure I understood people and they understood me. It will be crazy to go back to Kalighat, Apne Aap, and Sonagachi in the next few days. Stay tuned for that. Aaah!
Okay, I wrote a ton.
I'm so excited about this.
Tomorrow: Kalighat.
Monday: CLS in Kolkata.
Tuesday: Apne Aap.
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday: Freeset.
This is amazing.
I need new adjectives.
Love,
Stephanie
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Onek Shobdo (many words)
Sorry for not posting until day 20. I'll do better at this writing thing from now on. If you'd like a summary of the last three weeks, go read Margo and Nate's blogs. They've been much more faithful bloggers.
The past three weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind. From group bonding to quick cultural adjustments, there have been a lot of forced changes to be made. Subsequently, writing a blog post has not been high on my list. ...but, after three weeks, I think I'm officially blog write-able. :-)
Much to my surprise (but not to the surprise of my wise friends), this summer has thus far been very, very different from my semester in Kolkata. I wake up in a large, air conditioned, private room with a dresser, desk, working fan, a bed bigger than any I've ever owned, and two windows. Outside, there are trees. Lots of trees. There are not trees in Kolkata. The air here is equally thick as Kolkata's, but with humidity rather than dirt. I have my own bathroom with hot water, which gets cleaned a few times a week by someone who isn't me. I walk out into a huge living room with a TV and computer, couch, and two open-minded, kind, intelligent friends also studying Bangla. We live in literally the richest area of the city, in a private, gated community a 10 taka rickshaw ride away from the US embassy. Before heading to class every morning at 9:00, I grab breakfast from the fridge in my flat. Because I have a fridge. My living area is a complete 180 flip from where I lived in Kolkata - a dingy, moldy, one-six person sized (depending on the week) room with walls that left one meter gaps before the ceiling. Other than the scheduled power outages (every hour, for an hour), living in this flat in Dhaka is about 8983438 times more luxurious than how I lived in Kolkata.
Class is from 9:00am to 1:00pm, Sunday through Thursday. We have four different classes, from three different instructors, in grammar, conversation, writing, reading, spelling...everything you can think of a person would need to know to become fluent in Bangla. Because that's the goal here. Learn Bangla. There are 12 of us here in the beginning program, two intermediate, and one advanced. We're all here to learn Bangla. 15 Americans, all here for different reasons. All of whom the US government has said, "yes. Your reasons are legitimate. We will house you, feed you, and teach you for the summer. Go learn something and make a difference in the world. ...and maybe work for us eventually."
Every time I go outside and see signs full of Bangla, or hear my teachers fluently speaking the language I learned to love in Apne Aap, Kalighat, and the gardens of a leprosy center many kilometers north of Kolkata, I need to close my eyes for a few seconds to make sure it's real. For months, this language was something dreamily unattainable, a beautiful mess of poetic gibberish my ears could admire but not understand. But somehow, in the past three weeks, Bangla has taken a few steps toward me, or maybe I toward it. Tenses, vocabulary, vowel shifts, verb conjugation, and case endings have smashed themselves together into something resembling basic language comprehension.
The craziest moment I've had in the process of this realization happened while walking back from dinner with a group from Servants to Asia's Urban Poor. Nine pm, dark, we were walking in a bideshi (foreigner) pack, seven sets of white skin together. A beggar boy stumbleran to me, tripping over a combination of curbs and muddy water in the street. He was carrying flowers, asking me to buy them. This is a normal occurrence both here and in Kolkata. All over the streets, there are pre-teen boys and girls selling various vaguely useless objects. Chunky plastic hairclips. Bags of mysterious orange snack food. Strands of white flowers. They dodge in and out of traffic all day, knocking on car windows and wobbling heads, “madam, madam, madam, madam…” This particular boy found me on the street, and followed me for a minute or two. As he stared up at me, smiling wide and pleading that I buy the flowers, I had the eerie realization that he was speaking words I understood. He did not tell me a string of lyrical nonsense. Rather, he told me the flowers would look beautiful in my hair, that I should put them on my head, that I wanted the flowers. I needed the flowers. And while I knew that I didn't need or want the flowers, for once in this journey, I was able to understand that this boy was a person, communicating with me rather than speaking at the brick wall of my brain, and that I needed to communicate back with him to complete the reasonable exchange. My response, inadequately light for the weight of the moment, was "lagbe nai." Do not want. After a bit more pushing, he left.
Recently, I've realized that language is something much more important than I ever thought it would be. After four months of living in Kolkata with extremely minimal Bangla, I was fairly functional. But I was skimming the surface of real relationships, because I didn't know how to ask things like "hey, how's your family," much less understand a response. Now that I'm learning how to legitimately speak this language, I'm watching the chance of real connection get closer and closer.
A few weeks ago, a lovely friend by the name of Katie Lundell posted the lyrics to a song by Derek Webb on Facebook. It's called Rich Young Ruler, and it's about God wanting us to give Him what we are most scared to give up. Stuff like our financial security, our SUVs, our comfortable houses - in essence, the feelings of control over our lives that are false in the long run anyway.
But the lyrics that are really getting to me are these:
"He says, more than just your cash and coin
I want your time, I want your voice
I want the things you just can't give me
Because what you do to the least of these
My brothers, you have done it to me
Because I want the things you just can't give me "
For me, what's hard to give to God is my time and voice. I'm pretty selfish about my time. But here, in Bangladesh, I've been given an amazing opportunity to learn Bangla for free. What the monkey?! For some crazy reason, the American government decided last minute that my reasons for wanting to learn Bangla were worth funding. And now I'm here. So what should I do with my time? Study. Yep. Study. I should study. Fortunately, I'm really, really, super-duper über motivated to learn this language. Every time I don't want to study, I think of Dipa , and remember how badly I want her to get an education and not end up as a prostitute. Seriously. That girl is awesome. That's how I've been coping with not spending my time teaching or otherwise clearly serving. It feels like the time I spend studying now is an investment in future service. So I will serve God by studying my face off. Please send me annoying Facebook messages to encourage this.
In other news, in the past few weeks, I've become close with a church here called Dhaka International Christian Church (DICC). The pastor is the cousin of my friend Heather's husband. The night before I went to church, I read the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15. Once again, I was reminded through it that God will always be waiting to bless me more, no matter how long I've been trying to live my life alone. In church, the pastor announced that he and his wife were starting a book study on The Prodigal God, a book by Tim Keller about the story of the prodigal son(s). I took the hint from God and went to the study. It's. Fantastic. A group of people from all over the world, all in Dhaka for different reasons, all wanting to study what God is trying to tell us through Luke 15. Yay yay yay yay yay! I've met some awesome people through this study - including a woman who will be working with Freeset for the next 14 years as their head healthcare person. Yay yay yay yay yay!
I think if there's anything huge I've learned in the past three weeks (other than an absurd amount of Bangla...haven't even started talking about that one), it's that God provides...extravagantly. I came to Bangladesh to learn Bangla, and have been blessed with a fantastic community, a diverse and supportive spiritual home, kind and challenging teachers, and a comfortable living environment. Yes, I would rather be living in Kolkata right now, serving in Sonagachi. But I'm not going to be the bratty child of God asking, "why can't I serve now, Father?" I know that now is the time to learn the language I need to serve God and others more fully and more effectively. So I'm going to study study study. Study.
In fact, this post is done now.
Time to study.
Love and studystudy,
Stephanie
P.S. Sorry it's so long. ...oops.
The past three weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind. From group bonding to quick cultural adjustments, there have been a lot of forced changes to be made. Subsequently, writing a blog post has not been high on my list. ...but, after three weeks, I think I'm officially blog write-able. :-)
Much to my surprise (but not to the surprise of my wise friends), this summer has thus far been very, very different from my semester in Kolkata. I wake up in a large, air conditioned, private room with a dresser, desk, working fan, a bed bigger than any I've ever owned, and two windows. Outside, there are trees. Lots of trees. There are not trees in Kolkata. The air here is equally thick as Kolkata's, but with humidity rather than dirt. I have my own bathroom with hot water, which gets cleaned a few times a week by someone who isn't me. I walk out into a huge living room with a TV and computer, couch, and two open-minded, kind, intelligent friends also studying Bangla. We live in literally the richest area of the city, in a private, gated community a 10 taka rickshaw ride away from the US embassy. Before heading to class every morning at 9:00, I grab breakfast from the fridge in my flat. Because I have a fridge. My living area is a complete 180 flip from where I lived in Kolkata - a dingy, moldy, one-six person sized (depending on the week) room with walls that left one meter gaps before the ceiling. Other than the scheduled power outages (every hour, for an hour), living in this flat in Dhaka is about 8983438 times more luxurious than how I lived in Kolkata.
Class is from 9:00am to 1:00pm, Sunday through Thursday. We have four different classes, from three different instructors, in grammar, conversation, writing, reading, spelling...everything you can think of a person would need to know to become fluent in Bangla. Because that's the goal here. Learn Bangla. There are 12 of us here in the beginning program, two intermediate, and one advanced. We're all here to learn Bangla. 15 Americans, all here for different reasons. All of whom the US government has said, "yes. Your reasons are legitimate. We will house you, feed you, and teach you for the summer. Go learn something and make a difference in the world. ...and maybe work for us eventually."
Every time I go outside and see signs full of Bangla, or hear my teachers fluently speaking the language I learned to love in Apne Aap, Kalighat, and the gardens of a leprosy center many kilometers north of Kolkata, I need to close my eyes for a few seconds to make sure it's real. For months, this language was something dreamily unattainable, a beautiful mess of poetic gibberish my ears could admire but not understand. But somehow, in the past three weeks, Bangla has taken a few steps toward me, or maybe I toward it. Tenses, vocabulary, vowel shifts, verb conjugation, and case endings have smashed themselves together into something resembling basic language comprehension.
The craziest moment I've had in the process of this realization happened while walking back from dinner with a group from Servants to Asia's Urban Poor. Nine pm, dark, we were walking in a bideshi (foreigner) pack, seven sets of white skin together. A beggar boy stumbleran to me, tripping over a combination of curbs and muddy water in the street. He was carrying flowers, asking me to buy them. This is a normal occurrence both here and in Kolkata. All over the streets, there are pre-teen boys and girls selling various vaguely useless objects. Chunky plastic hairclips. Bags of mysterious orange snack food. Strands of white flowers. They dodge in and out of traffic all day, knocking on car windows and wobbling heads, “madam, madam, madam, madam…” This particular boy found me on the street, and followed me for a minute or two. As he stared up at me, smiling wide and pleading that I buy the flowers, I had the eerie realization that he was speaking words I understood. He did not tell me a string of lyrical nonsense. Rather, he told me the flowers would look beautiful in my hair, that I should put them on my head, that I wanted the flowers. I needed the flowers. And while I knew that I didn't need or want the flowers, for once in this journey, I was able to understand that this boy was a person, communicating with me rather than speaking at the brick wall of my brain, and that I needed to communicate back with him to complete the reasonable exchange. My response, inadequately light for the weight of the moment, was "lagbe nai." Do not want. After a bit more pushing, he left.
Recently, I've realized that language is something much more important than I ever thought it would be. After four months of living in Kolkata with extremely minimal Bangla, I was fairly functional. But I was skimming the surface of real relationships, because I didn't know how to ask things like "hey, how's your family," much less understand a response. Now that I'm learning how to legitimately speak this language, I'm watching the chance of real connection get closer and closer.
A few weeks ago, a lovely friend by the name of Katie Lundell posted the lyrics to a song by Derek Webb on Facebook. It's called Rich Young Ruler, and it's about God wanting us to give Him what we are most scared to give up. Stuff like our financial security, our SUVs, our comfortable houses - in essence, the feelings of control over our lives that are false in the long run anyway.
But the lyrics that are really getting to me are these:
"He says, more than just your cash and coin
I want your time, I want your voice
I want the things you just can't give me
Because what you do to the least of these
My brothers, you have done it to me
Because I want the things you just can't give me "
For me, what's hard to give to God is my time and voice. I'm pretty selfish about my time. But here, in Bangladesh, I've been given an amazing opportunity to learn Bangla for free. What the monkey?! For some crazy reason, the American government decided last minute that my reasons for wanting to learn Bangla were worth funding. And now I'm here. So what should I do with my time? Study. Yep. Study. I should study. Fortunately, I'm really, really, super-duper über motivated to learn this language. Every time I don't want to study, I think of Dipa , and remember how badly I want her to get an education and not end up as a prostitute. Seriously. That girl is awesome. That's how I've been coping with not spending my time teaching or otherwise clearly serving. It feels like the time I spend studying now is an investment in future service. So I will serve God by studying my face off. Please send me annoying Facebook messages to encourage this.
In other news, in the past few weeks, I've become close with a church here called Dhaka International Christian Church (DICC). The pastor is the cousin of my friend Heather's husband. The night before I went to church, I read the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15. Once again, I was reminded through it that God will always be waiting to bless me more, no matter how long I've been trying to live my life alone. In church, the pastor announced that he and his wife were starting a book study on The Prodigal God, a book by Tim Keller about the story of the prodigal son(s). I took the hint from God and went to the study. It's. Fantastic. A group of people from all over the world, all in Dhaka for different reasons, all wanting to study what God is trying to tell us through Luke 15. Yay yay yay yay yay! I've met some awesome people through this study - including a woman who will be working with Freeset for the next 14 years as their head healthcare person. Yay yay yay yay yay!
I think if there's anything huge I've learned in the past three weeks (other than an absurd amount of Bangla...haven't even started talking about that one), it's that God provides...extravagantly. I came to Bangladesh to learn Bangla, and have been blessed with a fantastic community, a diverse and supportive spiritual home, kind and challenging teachers, and a comfortable living environment. Yes, I would rather be living in Kolkata right now, serving in Sonagachi. But I'm not going to be the bratty child of God asking, "why can't I serve now, Father?" I know that now is the time to learn the language I need to serve God and others more fully and more effectively. So I'm going to study study study. Study.
In fact, this post is done now.
Time to study.
Love and studystudy,
Stephanie
P.S. Sorry it's so long. ...oops.
Monday, May 10, 2010
God to Stephanie: "Surprise! You're going to Bangladesh."
This post is a brief explanation of the whole "I'm going to Bangladesh now kthxbi" thing. Feel free to skip it.
In December, I applied for a Critical Language Scholarship to study Bangla in Bangladesh for the summer. Though it was something I certainly had planned on applying for since my sophomore year at IWU (thanks, Kara Lutzow!), I didn't think I would actually get the scholarship. In fact, I originally planned on applying for Hindi, but switched last minute because a) I like Bangla waaaaaaaaaay more than Hindi and was really only applying for Hindi because I thought it would be more practical and b) I figured Bangla would be less competitive. I finished the essays (please let me learn Bangla so I can legitimately communicate with the girls I'm trying to prevent from being trafficked), filled out all the forms, and hit "submit" from my Nana's house in Vegas with about 20 minutes to spare.
In March, I received an email saying I was an alternate, and they'd probably let me know by mid-April whether I was going. In April, that did not happen. I made two slightly frantic phone calls to a very patient man who explained (twice) how the alternate list worked and told me he really couldn't tell me whether or not I was going, but I probably wasn't. But there was always a chance. Having no clue how to plan for the next few months, I talked for a long time with a fantastic professor who reassured me that taking nursing classes, volunteering, and waitressing over the summer were really good uses of my time. In the next week, I applied for classes which were already filled up. I emailed volunteer organizations that never wrote back. I sent my resume to an internship that never called. My summer, contrary to how I tried to plan it, was completely empty.
At the beginning of May, the night before my May Term class began, I got an email from CLS that began with "congratulations." Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat. I mean, of course. Of course I would try to plan an entire summer and God would have a better plan. Bangladesh. What.
I'm going to Bangladesh?
AAAAAH!
A few notes about the program:
1. It's funded by the Department of State. That means your tax dollars are sending me to Bangladesh. Thanks!
2. I'm going with 14 other American undergraduate and graduate students, who all want to learn Bangla for different reasons.
3. I'll be studying at Independent University, Bangladesh.
4. I'll be living in an apartment with two other students. So, no more sharing a room with middle-aged Japanese women with sharp knives who stare at me while I sleep.
5. I'll be in Dhaka from June 5 - August 7, then in Kolkata for a week.
Okee! There are some details.
More will come later. :-)
Love,
Stephanie
In December, I applied for a Critical Language Scholarship to study Bangla in Bangladesh for the summer. Though it was something I certainly had planned on applying for since my sophomore year at IWU (thanks, Kara Lutzow!), I didn't think I would actually get the scholarship. In fact, I originally planned on applying for Hindi, but switched last minute because a) I like Bangla waaaaaaaaaay more than Hindi and was really only applying for Hindi because I thought it would be more practical and b) I figured Bangla would be less competitive. I finished the essays (please let me learn Bangla so I can legitimately communicate with the girls I'm trying to prevent from being trafficked), filled out all the forms, and hit "submit" from my Nana's house in Vegas with about 20 minutes to spare.
In March, I received an email saying I was an alternate, and they'd probably let me know by mid-April whether I was going. In April, that did not happen. I made two slightly frantic phone calls to a very patient man who explained (twice) how the alternate list worked and told me he really couldn't tell me whether or not I was going, but I probably wasn't. But there was always a chance. Having no clue how to plan for the next few months, I talked for a long time with a fantastic professor who reassured me that taking nursing classes, volunteering, and waitressing over the summer were really good uses of my time. In the next week, I applied for classes which were already filled up. I emailed volunteer organizations that never wrote back. I sent my resume to an internship that never called. My summer, contrary to how I tried to plan it, was completely empty.
At the beginning of May, the night before my May Term class began, I got an email from CLS that began with "congratulations." Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat. I mean, of course. Of course I would try to plan an entire summer and God would have a better plan. Bangladesh. What.
I'm going to Bangladesh?
AAAAAH!
A few notes about the program:
1. It's funded by the Department of State. That means your tax dollars are sending me to Bangladesh. Thanks!
2. I'm going with 14 other American undergraduate and graduate students, who all want to learn Bangla for different reasons.
3. I'll be studying at Independent University, Bangladesh.
4. I'll be living in an apartment with two other students. So, no more sharing a room with middle-aged Japanese women with sharp knives who stare at me while I sleep.
5. I'll be in Dhaka from June 5 - August 7, then in Kolkata for a week.
Okee! There are some details.
More will come later. :-)
Love,
Stephanie
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Namaste, USA.
It's cold. It's clean. It's quiet. Everyone is white, speaking English, and standing far away from each other. There is a garbage truck that drives around streets and picks up everyone's neatly packaged trash, and brings it to somewhere we don't have to see it. The government pays for this service. My room is full of stuff I don't need and never use.
My breakfast cost 250 rupees, which is 17 plates of noodles, which could feed either me for two weeks of dinners or a family for a whole week. Or it could be seven plates of noodles, and a sari. Clothing and dinner for a week. Or it could be two shirts, two pairs of pants, and seven plates of noodles. Clothe two kids and feed 'em for a week.
The average wage for an agricultural worker in (and around) Kolkata is 50 rupees a day. I spent five days of work on three pancakes.
Mmmkay, that's all for now.
My breakfast cost 250 rupees, which is 17 plates of noodles, which could feed either me for two weeks of dinners or a family for a whole week. Or it could be seven plates of noodles, and a sari. Clothing and dinner for a week. Or it could be two shirts, two pairs of pants, and seven plates of noodles. Clothe two kids and feed 'em for a week.
The average wage for an agricultural worker in (and around) Kolkata is 50 rupees a day. I spent five days of work on three pancakes.
Mmmkay, that's all for now.
Monday, April 6, 2009
But do I have to?
Printed my boarding pass.
I, uh, said goodbye to my girls.
And Dipa.
Who kept waving and turning around and looking back.
No blog post today.
See Facebook for photos of Kalighat and more Apne Aap.
I took a bunch of videos.
They'll get posted later.
Love,
Stephanie
I, uh, said goodbye to my girls.
And Dipa.
Who kept waving and turning around and looking back.
No blog post today.
See Facebook for photos of Kalighat and more Apne Aap.
I took a bunch of videos.
They'll get posted later.
Love,
Stephanie
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Red-light #2 and some lists.
It's hot here.
So this post might be a blob.
What I Will Not Miss:
1. Men trying to talk to me (or just looking at me) while they pee in public
2. Not being able to sleep because of the heat
3. Having to grope-block men with my elbows seventeen thousand times a day
4. Wasting plastic by purchasing bottled water
5. Muttered comments about my appearance as I walk by men
6. "No problem, no problem" no matter how obvious the problem
What I Will Miss:
Everything else.
Really, everything. The beggars, the nauseating smells, the music, the bartering, the clothing, the colours, the dialects, the languages...and Kalighat. And my girls.
Everyone at Apne Aap keeps asking me when I'm coming back. "Amar ke khub bhalo lagbe, kintu kolkhon jani na." I would like it very much, but I don't know when.
Aaah! I'm considering lots and lots of options about returning, but I know that everything will happen according to God's timing. It'll all work out according to His will, thankfully.
Gosh, my brain is going bingbingbing today.
"There are times when love demands that you break the rules." - Father Patrick
This could be stretched to justify all sorts of ridiculousness, but in general...I'm a fan. It's a quote from this amazing priest at Mother's House. Father Patrick, from Tijuana. He plays guitar. And I'm stealing one of his talks as a devo for campers this summer.
Dear brain, please focus. Love, Stephanie.
Sonagachi. The largest red-light district in all of Kolkata. Hundreds of multi-story brothels. I went with Sam, my wonderful Kiwi roommate. Yet again, why do I have so many close friends named Sam?! We went around five pm, before it got dark, via Metro. We asked for directions at the internet place and at Paragon before leaving, and again in the metro station and no the street on the way there. Everyone had the exact same response - wide eyes, nervous smile, and why you want to go there?" or "what you do there?" or, at one point, "you know what happens in that place, yes?" Indeed, we knew. And that's why we were going. The last person we asked for directions was a police officer, leaning against his bike just a block away from Sonagachi. He walked us part of the way there.
SO WHY WASN'T HE DOING ANYTHING ABOUT IT?!
I mean, I know why. Because he's a police officer, which means he gets first pick of the new girls, and in exchange he gets to lean against his bike all day and ignore the twelve-year-olds getting raped and beaten in the buildings next door.
The brothels are huge. The buildings are imposingly tall. And the women are EVERYWHERE. Hundreds, thousands of women, wearing make-up to make their faces lighter, bright red lipstick, dark black eyeliner. And western clothes. Flowy skirts and tight tank tops. Some wear jeans, the same skin-tight type we wear daily in America. And tall shoes. They look disconcertingly like someone in between normal American teenager and little girl playing dress up with mommy's make up. But they're twenty, thirty, forty years old.
And all they do is stand there and pose. Arms crossed, chin raised, waiting. In groups of five, ten, twenty.
And the men! Ugh. Many more men than women. Standing around, joking, trying to appear inconspicuous. Shut up. We all know why you're here. Hsdfjaldsjfkld! I wanted to get them all in a group together and show them videos about the emotional and physical effects of sex trafficking. I wanted to explain to them that women are more than their bodies. I wanted to tell them how their actions affect their wives. I...aaaaah! Sex trafficking will not stop until the buyers receive some sort of consequence for their actions. Apne Aap is working to pass legislation to punish the buyers. Currently, the women get punished for "inappropriate soliciting." How absurd is that? When they've been trafficked at eleven and twelve and forced through "debt" to stay in the brothel. What a ridiculous legal system.
Anyway, Sam wanted to buy sweets ('cause why not stop and buy sweets in the middle of a red-light district?), which ended up being a fantastic idea. It meant that we stood in one place for awhile, which meant that, after walking around a bit, we were called over by some of the women (two wearing saris, one wearing a green flowy tiered skirt and a black tank top and flip-flops - just what I would wear in the summer) the second time we walked by. I had been waiting the entire night to talk with women. Any women. We stood around with them for about fifteen minutes. Don't worry, no one thought we were prostitutes. And we didn't go inside the brothel. And we didn't face the street or pose with them. We talked about how I learned Bangla, our families, marriage, why I'm in Kolkata, their thoughts about America, my nose piercing and why my ears aren't pierced (Indian women love to ask me about my lack of holes in my earlobes) ...we pretty much exhausted my Bangla skills. And omigosh, it was wonderful. We laughed. We joked. They touched my hands and liked my henna. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH so wonderful.
I think two of them might have been pregnant.
And walking back, I realized something. I remember flipping through the YWAM guide post-Mexico, looking at all the ministry options. I remember seeing "prostitute outreach" and thinking "no freaking way." But now...yeah. I would love to do ministry with prostitutes, former prostitutes, children of prostitutes. I don't know if I have the stamina, or if I'm extroverted enough. I know I'm not mature enough, nor do I have the wisdom or the language skills to be effective in India.
But maybe I will eventually?
Okay, that's all.
Time to print photos for my girls.
Oh, also. One more list.
What I didn't expect to bring back from India:
1. An inherent distrust of men who walk by me on the street.
2. A lack of sympathy for many people's problems. After seeing a naked baby covered in flies sleeping on the street, everything else seems so minimal. I'm going to need to pray a lot about this. I know that suffering is relative to the individual. I just need to learn to feel universal empathy. And I'm going to need to ask for patience from my friends and family. Please be gracious to me if I say something like "but it doesn't matter" when you tell me about something that bothers you. I'm sorry in advance.
3. A passion for medical work. Thanks Kalighat.
4. A love of cold showers.
5. Lice. JK, I don't think I have lice.
6. A henna addiction.
Goodnight!
Love and preparation pandas,
Stephanie
So this post might be a blob.
What I Will Not Miss:
1. Men trying to talk to me (or just looking at me) while they pee in public
2. Not being able to sleep because of the heat
3. Having to grope-block men with my elbows seventeen thousand times a day
4. Wasting plastic by purchasing bottled water
5. Muttered comments about my appearance as I walk by men
6. "No problem, no problem" no matter how obvious the problem
What I Will Miss:
Everything else.
Really, everything. The beggars, the nauseating smells, the music, the bartering, the clothing, the colours, the dialects, the languages...and Kalighat. And my girls.
Everyone at Apne Aap keeps asking me when I'm coming back. "Amar ke khub bhalo lagbe, kintu kolkhon jani na." I would like it very much, but I don't know when.
Aaah! I'm considering lots and lots of options about returning, but I know that everything will happen according to God's timing. It'll all work out according to His will, thankfully.
Gosh, my brain is going bingbingbing today.
"There are times when love demands that you break the rules." - Father Patrick
This could be stretched to justify all sorts of ridiculousness, but in general...I'm a fan. It's a quote from this amazing priest at Mother's House. Father Patrick, from Tijuana. He plays guitar. And I'm stealing one of his talks as a devo for campers this summer.
Dear brain, please focus. Love, Stephanie.
Sonagachi. The largest red-light district in all of Kolkata. Hundreds of multi-story brothels. I went with Sam, my wonderful Kiwi roommate. Yet again, why do I have so many close friends named Sam?! We went around five pm, before it got dark, via Metro. We asked for directions at the internet place and at Paragon before leaving, and again in the metro station and no the street on the way there. Everyone had the exact same response - wide eyes, nervous smile, and why you want to go there?" or "what you do there?" or, at one point, "you know what happens in that place, yes?" Indeed, we knew. And that's why we were going. The last person we asked for directions was a police officer, leaning against his bike just a block away from Sonagachi. He walked us part of the way there.
SO WHY WASN'T HE DOING ANYTHING ABOUT IT?!
I mean, I know why. Because he's a police officer, which means he gets first pick of the new girls, and in exchange he gets to lean against his bike all day and ignore the twelve-year-olds getting raped and beaten in the buildings next door.
The brothels are huge. The buildings are imposingly tall. And the women are EVERYWHERE. Hundreds, thousands of women, wearing make-up to make their faces lighter, bright red lipstick, dark black eyeliner. And western clothes. Flowy skirts and tight tank tops. Some wear jeans, the same skin-tight type we wear daily in America. And tall shoes. They look disconcertingly like someone in between normal American teenager and little girl playing dress up with mommy's make up. But they're twenty, thirty, forty years old.
And all they do is stand there and pose. Arms crossed, chin raised, waiting. In groups of five, ten, twenty.
And the men! Ugh. Many more men than women. Standing around, joking, trying to appear inconspicuous. Shut up. We all know why you're here. Hsdfjaldsjfkld! I wanted to get them all in a group together and show them videos about the emotional and physical effects of sex trafficking. I wanted to explain to them that women are more than their bodies. I wanted to tell them how their actions affect their wives. I...aaaaah! Sex trafficking will not stop until the buyers receive some sort of consequence for their actions. Apne Aap is working to pass legislation to punish the buyers. Currently, the women get punished for "inappropriate soliciting." How absurd is that? When they've been trafficked at eleven and twelve and forced through "debt" to stay in the brothel. What a ridiculous legal system.
Anyway, Sam wanted to buy sweets ('cause why not stop and buy sweets in the middle of a red-light district?), which ended up being a fantastic idea. It meant that we stood in one place for awhile, which meant that, after walking around a bit, we were called over by some of the women (two wearing saris, one wearing a green flowy tiered skirt and a black tank top and flip-flops - just what I would wear in the summer) the second time we walked by. I had been waiting the entire night to talk with women. Any women. We stood around with them for about fifteen minutes. Don't worry, no one thought we were prostitutes. And we didn't go inside the brothel. And we didn't face the street or pose with them. We talked about how I learned Bangla, our families, marriage, why I'm in Kolkata, their thoughts about America, my nose piercing and why my ears aren't pierced (Indian women love to ask me about my lack of holes in my earlobes) ...we pretty much exhausted my Bangla skills. And omigosh, it was wonderful. We laughed. We joked. They touched my hands and liked my henna. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH so wonderful.
I think two of them might have been pregnant.
And walking back, I realized something. I remember flipping through the YWAM guide post-Mexico, looking at all the ministry options. I remember seeing "prostitute outreach" and thinking "no freaking way." But now...yeah. I would love to do ministry with prostitutes, former prostitutes, children of prostitutes. I don't know if I have the stamina, or if I'm extroverted enough. I know I'm not mature enough, nor do I have the wisdom or the language skills to be effective in India.
But maybe I will eventually?
Okay, that's all.
Time to print photos for my girls.
Oh, also. One more list.
What I didn't expect to bring back from India:
1. An inherent distrust of men who walk by me on the street.
2. A lack of sympathy for many people's problems. After seeing a naked baby covered in flies sleeping on the street, everything else seems so minimal. I'm going to need to pray a lot about this. I know that suffering is relative to the individual. I just need to learn to feel universal empathy. And I'm going to need to ask for patience from my friends and family. Please be gracious to me if I say something like "but it doesn't matter" when you tell me about something that bothers you. I'm sorry in advance.
3. A passion for medical work. Thanks Kalighat.
4. A love of cold showers.
5. Lice. JK, I don't think I have lice.
6. A henna addiction.
Goodnight!
Love and preparation pandas,
Stephanie
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Problem.
We all knew this would happen.
Today, the mother of my favourite child in all of India (Dipa) told me that she wants me to adopt Dipa and bring her to America.
For serious.
And I can't, 'cause I'm...
a) 19
b) not married
c) not done with college
d) not planning on settling down with a kid any time soon
e) not fluent in Bangla
However, explaining this to Shoma, Dipa's mother, was not fun.
Especially because, approximately two weeks ago, I posted a picture of Dipa on Facebook and captioned it with "Dipa Sardar. I'm bringing her back to the States with me."
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
Love and trying-to-not-adopt-a-kid,
Stephanie
(we've been making silly faces at each other since the first day I came to Apne Aap)
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Some numbers.
Hmm. A few days. A week? A little more than a week.
Ten days.
Ten days is a long time, right? A week of camp is only five days, and if done right, it can feel pretty close to eternal. Ten days is darn close to forever.
I have this theory called India Age. Before I explain it, let me promise that it's completely flawed for many, many reasons. But I've been thinking about it, so I've decided to type it up.
Okay, so...I'm nineteen. I've met a few travelers here who are nineteen, three eighteen. And I'm friends with a lot of people who are in their mid-late twenties and early thirties. But what's strange is this: I've found that I never believe the people who tell me they're eighteen, nineteen, twenty. They look and act so much older. I tell them they're lying. They're really twenty-seven. And then when I admit to being nineteen, everyone looks at me funny and says "no you're not. Wait, really? You don't act like you're nineteen." And though they assure me that I don't seem nineteen, they can't tell me what age they thought I was.
A few days ago, I stayed up super-late with a guy from Australia, a girl from Holland, and a few other Americans (there haven't been many Americans in Paragon until recently; I don't know why they all decide to come to Kolkata in time for sweltering heat). After being generally giggly and joking about metaphysics (it was a fantastic group), we got to talking about age. Turns out there were two nineteens, one twenty-four, one twenty-five, one twenty-seven, and one twenty-eight. And the guy that I had clicked best with was, in fact, the oldest, and I was the youngest. And I didn't believe Simone when she said she was nineteen, and no one believed me until I showed them the graduation date on my IWU shirt.
Thus, I'm starting to think that maybe technical age, in terms of time spent on earth, isn't something we think about here.
I think we tend to think about age a lot in the States because it's easy to compare people by age. We're all on vaguely the same path - high school, college, job, family (which is a silly set of restrictions, p.s.), so it's easy to think of someone who's older as having generally more life experience. Here? No. We're all in India. We're all experiencing something completely new, and it's as if the moment our planes land our age hits the reset button. And I've noticed that it seems we all interact as if we're exactly the same age, with one clear exception: those who have been here longer are communicated with as if they're older, and the people who have been here for less time act more like worried children or teenagers concerned about their impression on others. Which creates an odd social conundrum for me, because I'm technically the baby of nearly every group, but I'm treated as one of the oldest because I've been here for four months.
Hm.
Second topic involving numbers: the temperature. It's freaking hot. This hot. But it feels hotter. I've never felt this type of heat. It feels thick, like constant damp heaviness pressing in on all sides. It's hard to breathe. It's near impossible to sleep. I've been waking up with migraines from the pressure. I asked Reshma (at Apne Aap) if it gets hotter, and she said yes. Much hotter. The forecast is 100 for the day I leave.
Third topic, then I'm off to Kalighat.
Money. Gosh, money is weird. For the next two weeks, I'm literally living off of two dollars a day, not counting rent. This is quite easy to do here.
Walk to Motherhouse: free.
Breakfast: free.
Bus to Kalighat: 4 rupees.
Tea at Kalighat: free.
Metro to Park Street: 2 rupees.
Lunch at Apne Aap: free.
Auto to Park Street: 6 rupees.
Dinner at Khalsa, Tirupati, wherever: approximately 25 rupees.
Water during the day: 20 rupees.
Internet: 20 rupees.
Actually, that's 52 rupees. Which is a dollar.
And then there's rent, which is 125 rupees a day.
That's around 180 rupees a day, which is about $3.50.
The exchange rate is so screwy.
I'll write more about this later.
About how McDonald's is one of the most expensive restaurants in Kolkata.
It's Kalighat time.
Love and numbers,
Stephanie
Ten days.
Ten days is a long time, right? A week of camp is only five days, and if done right, it can feel pretty close to eternal. Ten days is darn close to forever.
I have this theory called India Age. Before I explain it, let me promise that it's completely flawed for many, many reasons. But I've been thinking about it, so I've decided to type it up.
Okay, so...I'm nineteen. I've met a few travelers here who are nineteen, three eighteen. And I'm friends with a lot of people who are in their mid-late twenties and early thirties. But what's strange is this: I've found that I never believe the people who tell me they're eighteen, nineteen, twenty. They look and act so much older. I tell them they're lying. They're really twenty-seven. And then when I admit to being nineteen, everyone looks at me funny and says "no you're not. Wait, really? You don't act like you're nineteen." And though they assure me that I don't seem nineteen, they can't tell me what age they thought I was.
A few days ago, I stayed up super-late with a guy from Australia, a girl from Holland, and a few other Americans (there haven't been many Americans in Paragon until recently; I don't know why they all decide to come to Kolkata in time for sweltering heat). After being generally giggly and joking about metaphysics (it was a fantastic group), we got to talking about age. Turns out there were two nineteens, one twenty-four, one twenty-five, one twenty-seven, and one twenty-eight. And the guy that I had clicked best with was, in fact, the oldest, and I was the youngest. And I didn't believe Simone when she said she was nineteen, and no one believed me until I showed them the graduation date on my IWU shirt.
Thus, I'm starting to think that maybe technical age, in terms of time spent on earth, isn't something we think about here.
I think we tend to think about age a lot in the States because it's easy to compare people by age. We're all on vaguely the same path - high school, college, job, family (which is a silly set of restrictions, p.s.), so it's easy to think of someone who's older as having generally more life experience. Here? No. We're all in India. We're all experiencing something completely new, and it's as if the moment our planes land our age hits the reset button. And I've noticed that it seems we all interact as if we're exactly the same age, with one clear exception: those who have been here longer are communicated with as if they're older, and the people who have been here for less time act more like worried children or teenagers concerned about their impression on others. Which creates an odd social conundrum for me, because I'm technically the baby of nearly every group, but I'm treated as one of the oldest because I've been here for four months.
Hm.
Second topic involving numbers: the temperature. It's freaking hot. This hot. But it feels hotter. I've never felt this type of heat. It feels thick, like constant damp heaviness pressing in on all sides. It's hard to breathe. It's near impossible to sleep. I've been waking up with migraines from the pressure. I asked Reshma (at Apne Aap) if it gets hotter, and she said yes. Much hotter. The forecast is 100 for the day I leave.
Third topic, then I'm off to Kalighat.
Money. Gosh, money is weird. For the next two weeks, I'm literally living off of two dollars a day, not counting rent. This is quite easy to do here.
Walk to Motherhouse: free.
Breakfast: free.
Bus to Kalighat: 4 rupees.
Tea at Kalighat: free.
Metro to Park Street: 2 rupees.
Lunch at Apne Aap: free.
Auto to Park Street: 6 rupees.
Dinner at Khalsa, Tirupati, wherever: approximately 25 rupees.
Water during the day: 20 rupees.
Internet: 20 rupees.
Actually, that's 52 rupees. Which is a dollar.
And then there's rent, which is 125 rupees a day.
That's around 180 rupees a day, which is about $3.50.
The exchange rate is so screwy.
I'll write more about this later.
About how McDonald's is one of the most expensive restaurants in Kolkata.
It's Kalighat time.
Love and numbers,
Stephanie
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Red lights and grapefruit concentrate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHUQht1HRmY&feature=PlayList&p=EE44B22B10AF8653&index=0
Best song ever, seriously.
Okay, this entry might be a bit chaotic.
I think I make that disclaimer every time I post.
I leave Kolkata in two weeks, and I'm having difficulty not thinking about returning to the States. Not because I want to leave, but because I'm so conflicted about it. I'm so excited to see my friends and family in America, but really, you all are the only part of America that I miss. If everyone close to me in America were to come to India, I don't think I'd have a reason ever go back to the States.
Tonight, I went out to dinner with a bunch of Americans, and it was weird. They're really sweet people, and I like them a lot. It was just...being around so much AMERICA was overwhelming. And the American accent annoys me. I'm so used to India - I feel home here. America feels disconcertingly foreign.
Okay, enough of that.
I went to the Red Light District on Tuesday.
It was awful.
The street itself looked like any other slightly out-of-the-way Kolkata street. There were children running around everywhere. Streetside restaurants. Little shops selling water and biscuits and chips. The only difference was the women. There were loads of them, maybe fifty. They waited just outside of the buildings - the younger ones (my age and a little younger) wearing spandex-y skirts in day-glo colours and tight tops, the older ones (30, 40) in saris. The older ones sitting on barrels, boxes, the sidewalk itself. The younger ones literally posing in groups together, arms crossed, seductively staring into nothingness.
The younger girls are hidden inside the brothels. The women are only allowed outside when they've been there for awhile, been beaten, raped, broken in. Inside the brothel are the girls, as young as seven, who have been sold, trafficked from Nepal and smaller Indian villages with the promise of work and money.
We got out of the cab and walked through part of the district.
Looked the women straight in the eyes - namaste, di. They smiled.
What to do? I have no idea.
In the cab on the way back, I asked Sraboni what would happen if we just swiped a girl by cab from the street and took her somewhere else. She said the girl would think we were trying to traffic her to be a prostitute in a different city. It takes years to earn trust, which is why Apne Aap's self-help groups are so committed to work with the same women for so long.
I finally found out why I'm teaching English to my specific group of girls. At their age, they're about to get married. Many of them will be tricked into becoming prostitutes in the name of marriage. So instead of being sold (dowry) into an arranged marriage, their families will accidentally pay a pimp and they'll be relocated to the red-light district.
I'm teaching them English because, if they get trapped, girls with job skills are more motivated to break free and find different work.
This is such a mess.
I hate sex trafficking.
While walking through the district, I talked with Mimi, our guide. I met her back in January on my first day at Apne Aap. That was the day I sat in a room full of women who I didn't realize were prostitutes, and didn't understand anything they said 'cause it was all in Bangla. I hadn't seen her since that day. On Tuesday, Mimi and I spoke. In Bangla. About her family, and the area through which we were walking. Yeah, my grammar sucks, but I still understood a little and could speak a little. Enough that when she asked me in Bangla if I had children (tumi chelemeye ache?), I responded quickly with "ami chelemeye bhalo lagke, kintu ekhon na." I would like children, but not now. Wow. I didn't know a word of that the last time I saw her.
I've been having a few full circle moments like that one. Yesterday, I bought a skirt near New Market. There are a bunch of guys who sell skirts on racks outside the market, big flowy skirts, the kind I like. My second day in Kolkata, I was looking through the skirts, and ended up having a skirt shoved at me and I didn't know what to do so I paid 250 rupees and walked away. And at the time, I tried to speak Bangla, but didn't know what I was doing...it was bad. Thus, I promised myself that I would buy a few skirts before I left, but not buy any until the last two weeks.
Yesterday, I looked through every skirt stall. Weirdly, there were only a few skirts that I wanted to buy. I remember looking through the stalls a few months ago and wanting all of them. This means my sense of clothing has completely morphed without me noticing. And the skirt is orange and purple and pink. Hmmm. Anyway, I settled on one skirt. Bartered it down to 75 rupees, in Bangla. I said no in Bangla. I asked for colours and smaller sizes in Bangla. I said "stop, I know what I'm doing" in Bangla. Everything in Bangla.
And it was so much fun.
Amar ke bangla khub bhalo lagge.
I like Bangla a lot.
Awesome moment at Kalighat earlier this week. There's this woman named Chanda who, a few weeks back, another volunteer told me was "dramatic" and "faking for attention." I believe her. Chanda asks for bedpans when she can walk just fine, and then cries the entire time on the way to and in the bathroom. Argh. Thus, I haven't spent much time with her.
A few days ago, there were a ton of volunteers, so I sat down and massaged Chanda's feet for awhile. I didn't know what else to do, so I asked one of the Sisters. She pointed at Chanda and said "this one needs a lot of love." Wow. The one the other volunteers said to avoid, Sister says needs love. So I massaged her hands, back, legs, feet, for...an hour? A long panda time. And we didn't talk. And when it was tea time, Chanda just stared at me. And I touched her forehead to mine, 'cause that's a blessing. And that was all.
Apne Aap. My girls are amazing. I adore them. In an effort to figure out how well they can distinguish English sounds, I gave them a dictation test. "Industrial engineering" and "grapefruit concentrate." Man, that was a mess. I've decided to ditch the white board and teach them everything via speech.
Uh, Kohinoor is adopting a kid. She's 17, Kohinoor. And she mentioned something about her son, and I was like what? And then she told me that he's six years old, and is learning to read, and his mother is very poor, so she's adopting him. And she's SO EXCITED about it. I asked her if she wanted to get married, and she said no. Gosh. Kohinoor's adopting a kid eleven years younger than her.
I saw a naked baby sleeping on a mat on the sidewalk. His mouth was encrusted with dirt, his stomach was super-bloated and he was covered in flies. I didn't know what to do, so I took a photo.
This + red light district = I'm just starting to understand the ridiculous suffering in Kolkata.
I'm going to try to go to Sonagachi tomorrow. Largest red-light district in India. Place Born Into Brothels was filmed. I've heard there are children dressed in make-up and tight clothes everywhere. Please pray for them.
Okay, this was long.
I'm gonna go back to Paragon now.
Love and three-months-late culture shock,
Stephanie
Best song ever, seriously.
Okay, this entry might be a bit chaotic.
I think I make that disclaimer every time I post.
I leave Kolkata in two weeks, and I'm having difficulty not thinking about returning to the States. Not because I want to leave, but because I'm so conflicted about it. I'm so excited to see my friends and family in America, but really, you all are the only part of America that I miss. If everyone close to me in America were to come to India, I don't think I'd have a reason ever go back to the States.
Tonight, I went out to dinner with a bunch of Americans, and it was weird. They're really sweet people, and I like them a lot. It was just...being around so much AMERICA was overwhelming. And the American accent annoys me. I'm so used to India - I feel home here. America feels disconcertingly foreign.
Okay, enough of that.
I went to the Red Light District on Tuesday.
It was awful.
The street itself looked like any other slightly out-of-the-way Kolkata street. There were children running around everywhere. Streetside restaurants. Little shops selling water and biscuits and chips. The only difference was the women. There were loads of them, maybe fifty. They waited just outside of the buildings - the younger ones (my age and a little younger) wearing spandex-y skirts in day-glo colours and tight tops, the older ones (30, 40) in saris. The older ones sitting on barrels, boxes, the sidewalk itself. The younger ones literally posing in groups together, arms crossed, seductively staring into nothingness.
The younger girls are hidden inside the brothels. The women are only allowed outside when they've been there for awhile, been beaten, raped, broken in. Inside the brothel are the girls, as young as seven, who have been sold, trafficked from Nepal and smaller Indian villages with the promise of work and money.
We got out of the cab and walked through part of the district.
Looked the women straight in the eyes - namaste, di. They smiled.
What to do? I have no idea.
In the cab on the way back, I asked Sraboni what would happen if we just swiped a girl by cab from the street and took her somewhere else. She said the girl would think we were trying to traffic her to be a prostitute in a different city. It takes years to earn trust, which is why Apne Aap's self-help groups are so committed to work with the same women for so long.
I finally found out why I'm teaching English to my specific group of girls. At their age, they're about to get married. Many of them will be tricked into becoming prostitutes in the name of marriage. So instead of being sold (dowry) into an arranged marriage, their families will accidentally pay a pimp and they'll be relocated to the red-light district.
I'm teaching them English because, if they get trapped, girls with job skills are more motivated to break free and find different work.
This is such a mess.
I hate sex trafficking.
While walking through the district, I talked with Mimi, our guide. I met her back in January on my first day at Apne Aap. That was the day I sat in a room full of women who I didn't realize were prostitutes, and didn't understand anything they said 'cause it was all in Bangla. I hadn't seen her since that day. On Tuesday, Mimi and I spoke. In Bangla. About her family, and the area through which we were walking. Yeah, my grammar sucks, but I still understood a little and could speak a little. Enough that when she asked me in Bangla if I had children (tumi chelemeye ache?), I responded quickly with "ami chelemeye bhalo lagke, kintu ekhon na." I would like children, but not now. Wow. I didn't know a word of that the last time I saw her.
I've been having a few full circle moments like that one. Yesterday, I bought a skirt near New Market. There are a bunch of guys who sell skirts on racks outside the market, big flowy skirts, the kind I like. My second day in Kolkata, I was looking through the skirts, and ended up having a skirt shoved at me and I didn't know what to do so I paid 250 rupees and walked away. And at the time, I tried to speak Bangla, but didn't know what I was doing...it was bad. Thus, I promised myself that I would buy a few skirts before I left, but not buy any until the last two weeks.
Yesterday, I looked through every skirt stall. Weirdly, there were only a few skirts that I wanted to buy. I remember looking through the stalls a few months ago and wanting all of them. This means my sense of clothing has completely morphed without me noticing. And the skirt is orange and purple and pink. Hmmm. Anyway, I settled on one skirt. Bartered it down to 75 rupees, in Bangla. I said no in Bangla. I asked for colours and smaller sizes in Bangla. I said "stop, I know what I'm doing" in Bangla. Everything in Bangla.
And it was so much fun.
Amar ke bangla khub bhalo lagge.
I like Bangla a lot.
Awesome moment at Kalighat earlier this week. There's this woman named Chanda who, a few weeks back, another volunteer told me was "dramatic" and "faking for attention." I believe her. Chanda asks for bedpans when she can walk just fine, and then cries the entire time on the way to and in the bathroom. Argh. Thus, I haven't spent much time with her.
A few days ago, there were a ton of volunteers, so I sat down and massaged Chanda's feet for awhile. I didn't know what else to do, so I asked one of the Sisters. She pointed at Chanda and said "this one needs a lot of love." Wow. The one the other volunteers said to avoid, Sister says needs love. So I massaged her hands, back, legs, feet, for...an hour? A long panda time. And we didn't talk. And when it was tea time, Chanda just stared at me. And I touched her forehead to mine, 'cause that's a blessing. And that was all.
Apne Aap. My girls are amazing. I adore them. In an effort to figure out how well they can distinguish English sounds, I gave them a dictation test. "Industrial engineering" and "grapefruit concentrate." Man, that was a mess. I've decided to ditch the white board and teach them everything via speech.
Uh, Kohinoor is adopting a kid. She's 17, Kohinoor. And she mentioned something about her son, and I was like what? And then she told me that he's six years old, and is learning to read, and his mother is very poor, so she's adopting him. And she's SO EXCITED about it. I asked her if she wanted to get married, and she said no. Gosh. Kohinoor's adopting a kid eleven years younger than her.
I saw a naked baby sleeping on a mat on the sidewalk. His mouth was encrusted with dirt, his stomach was super-bloated and he was covered in flies. I didn't know what to do, so I took a photo.
This + red light district = I'm just starting to understand the ridiculous suffering in Kolkata.
I'm going to try to go to Sonagachi tomorrow. Largest red-light district in India. Place Born Into Brothels was filmed. I've heard there are children dressed in make-up and tight clothes everywhere. Please pray for them.
Okay, this was long.
I'm gonna go back to Paragon now.
Love and three-months-late culture shock,
Stephanie
Friday, March 20, 2009
Quick moment.
Most of this is paraphrasted (paraphrased + pasted) from a message I sent to Josefin.
God did something super this morning. Actually, He did super stuff all day, but this was something I wrote in my journal. I was sitting in a travellers' cafe eating lunch and reading Luke. And because I'm ADD, I was daydreaming while reading the story about the possessed pigs who run off the cliff, thinking about the moment I'm going to see my family in the airport at five AM, and whining in my head about how, even though I really like my family, I also really want to stay in India. And then, while in the midst of my thought stupor, I read this:
"The man from whom the demons had gone out begged to go with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying "return home and tell how much God has done for you." So the man went away and told all over the town how much Jesus had done for him." - Luke 8:38-39.
When God rocks our world, He doesn't want us to just follow Him along, kissing His feet. We're supposed to thank God for what He's done, and sing praises and all that good stuff. But there's a difference between sitting around thanking God and being motivated by God's love to go actively love. God wants us to run back to the people who knew us BEFORE He rocked our world, and tell them what He's done. More than that, He wants us to show the people closest to us how He's changed us. The guy in Luke 8 had been chained to a rock, hidden away, because He was possessed and unwanted in society. When he went back to town, it must have been obvious how God had healed him. I've written before about how I still don't know quite how God has changed me in India, and I know it's nowhere close to kicking out a legion of demons. But I'm still excited to run back to the US, to telltelltell about the awesome stuff God has done in India.
Hmmmmmmmm.
Thoughts?
Love and gogogo,
Stephanie
God did something super this morning. Actually, He did super stuff all day, but this was something I wrote in my journal. I was sitting in a travellers' cafe eating lunch and reading Luke. And because I'm ADD, I was daydreaming while reading the story about the possessed pigs who run off the cliff, thinking about the moment I'm going to see my family in the airport at five AM, and whining in my head about how, even though I really like my family, I also really want to stay in India. And then, while in the midst of my thought stupor, I read this:
"The man from whom the demons had gone out begged to go with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying "return home and tell how much God has done for you." So the man went away and told all over the town how much Jesus had done for him." - Luke 8:38-39.
When God rocks our world, He doesn't want us to just follow Him along, kissing His feet. We're supposed to thank God for what He's done, and sing praises and all that good stuff. But there's a difference between sitting around thanking God and being motivated by God's love to go actively love. God wants us to run back to the people who knew us BEFORE He rocked our world, and tell them what He's done. More than that, He wants us to show the people closest to us how He's changed us. The guy in Luke 8 had been chained to a rock, hidden away, because He was possessed and unwanted in society. When he went back to town, it must have been obvious how God had healed him. I've written before about how I still don't know quite how God has changed me in India, and I know it's nowhere close to kicking out a legion of demons. But I'm still excited to run back to the US, to telltelltell about the awesome stuff God has done in India.
Hmmmmmmmm.
Thoughts?
Love and gogogo,
Stephanie
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Leprosy and Philippians 4:13
Something amazing happened today. I feel so ridiculously blessed, and I don't know how to thank God enough. When I was first at Kalighat, there was this woman named Barka. I'm not sure whether I ever talked about her. She's pretty young, maybe 35, and I didn't really understand why she was in Kalighat for so long. She seemed healthy, except her foot was always bandaged. We got to know each other pretty well because she used to sing, all the time. Like, she would see me and start singing. In Hindi. And she sang beautifully! She'd follow me around the room with her eyes and sing until I sat with her. When she was tired or upset or in pain, I would sing Sufjan to her, and then her mood would lighten, and she'd sing a Hindi gan (song) back to me. She was super. Then I walked into Kalighat one day, and she wasn't there. I assumed she had been released, because really her foot was the only thing medically wrong with her. She never came back. Weird. ...I'll come back to this in a few paragraphs. :-)
Today, I went to the leprosy center about an hour outside of Kolkata! Woohooooo!
Yesterday, I realized that the trips to the center are the third Thursday of the month, and suddenly was like "oh crap this is my last chance!! Aaaah oh no!" So I went to registration at three, and the sister told me that registration for the trip had been in the morning. I asked if she could add one more. She said absolutely not, because only 25 are allowed. More than 25 is just too many people for the leader of the trip to handle, and the trains are really crowded. I pouted, but understood. No trip for me.
...and then I found out that Peter and his parents (P.S., Peter's parents are here, and I adore them) had registered, so I decided to go anyway, prepared to be sent away if anyone found out I hadn't registered.
Peter and I woke up super-early and walked to Motherhouse. We were supposed to get there for a pre-departure meeting at seven, but we got there near the end of the meeting. My friend Jeff (not Jeff who left [but he's back again], a different Jeff) was briefing everyone on info about the center. Two minutes later, Jeff walked over to me and said "hey, you can lead this, right?" I said no, I hadn't been to the center before, but at the same time Jeff quieted the entire room, pointed at me, smiled, and said "this is Stephanie, she'll be your leader! She knows where she's going, so follow her." What? As everyone began to talk again, Jeff turned to me and said "it's okay, no one I appoint as leader has ever been there before. Don't worry about it." Then he gave me the list of people registered to go to the center, and said "you don't really have to check this, but theoretically you should, just to make sure everyone's here." I checked it. Everyone was here...plus me, the only one not on the list.
At that moment, I kind of felt God laughing at me a little. The reason Sister said I couldn't go was because more than 25 was too many for the leader to handle. And I was the leader. So I had to deal with the stress of keeping track of too-many-people. Plus, I was the only one with the list, which meant only I knew I never registered. Whoa.
I head-counted (27, Sister had let two extra people register, and there was only one no show) and we all hopped on the bus to Sealdah station. I head counted again and we all bought tickets. Then to the train. Counted as they went on the train. While on the train, I suddenly realized that I know Bangla. Okay, I really don't, but what little I know is extremely useful. People in the group asked me to talk with men on the train for them, to purchase fruit and figure out the location of our stop. It was craziness. While on the train, I talked with Jon, a guy from DC who is TEFL certified and taught English in Korea for awhile. Cool.
Forty minutes later, we arrived, head-counted, crossed the tracks, and walked to the Brothers' House. Brief intro. The center is a place for people who have had leprosy to live and work. The center seems fully self-run - there's a giant cloth factory, gardens, huge dorms, a school, etc. Even though leprosy is now fully treatable and curable, it's still a disease that, in India, completely outcasts people from society. The lepers / former lepers need a place to live, so Momma T started a center for them to work, make money, eat, sleep, etc.
Tour time. I quickly realized that I strongly dislike guided tours, and lagged way behind everyone the entire time. First tour place was the...gosh, what do you call a place where people make fabric? Loomery? I don't know. We walked in to the sound of "clickclackclickclackclickclack...". Women rolled thread onto spools, men wove thread into fabric on giant looms. I greeted most women - Nammashkar di. I stood in front of one weaving machine mabobber for awhile, trying to figure out how it worked. I asked the woman. She offered me a try. Absolutely. I sat down and spun and MAN it burned my fingers! I had to use my hand as a corner to brace the thread, and the thread spun super-fast, like a rope burn + paper cut. I yelped. The woman laughed. I asked to see her fingers. They were hard-core calloused exactly where mine were red. We Nammashkarred again, I thanked her, walked on. Took a picture of the giant loom, with permission from the men. They wanted to pose with Peter. They did. Hehe.
Walk walk walk...to a zillion other places. Dyeing room (fabric), nursery (babies!), gardens, prosthetics workshop, classroom (kids!), and a bunch of other rooms. I think I ignored every component of every presentation. I decided it would be better to talk with the people who live in the center. Yep. Definitely. During the fabric dyeing talk, there were four women sitting to the side, eating lunch. They greeted me first - Namaste. I said "kaemon achen," and we spoke for a few minutes. Omigosh, I know enough Bangla to have a conversation. Omigosh. I love Bangla.
Then to the kitchen...same deal. Some presentation, I talked with the people hanging around the kitchen. Then the nursery, and I talked with the women. Then the school..."namaste, chelemeye!" They sang a song. Shundor gan. Everyone was so excited that I spoke Bangla. It was amazing. I talked with approximately everyone I saw. Tours are lameskees. Communication is pandatastic. Granted, I know nearly nothing about the center, but that's okay.
At the end of the tour, we walked through the wards. I didn't talk with the men, 'cause they're men and it's weird for a woman to initiate conversation with men. I had been waiting the entire time for the women's ward, so I could talk with the women. I was jumpy. So excited. I walked into the GIANT ward - maybe 200 beds - and had no idea with whom I should sit. Actually, sitting with them wasn't even in the schedule. We were supposed to walk through and leave. The room was a giant dorm stretching to the right, so I looked to the left and gasped. I don't remember the last time I've gasped.
Barka was sitting on the bed two meters away from me.
I may or may not have shrieked "Barka?!" And she freaked out too. Not as much as me; she was tired. But I think we exchanged "Barka?!" "hya" (yes) about ten times. I sat down, asked her how she was, she showed me her scars from the operation. She had been transferred to here from Kalighat to have med work done. We talked for a few minutes, and I couldn't help gushing in English about how much I adore her. She gave me a "you're being a doofus, but it's nice to see you too" look. Llsdfjkaiosdfjalsdfjsdklafjklasdfjaiosjfklsdafjklsdajfl BARKA! ...and I totally broke the rules and took a picture. She said it was okay. She's raising an eyebrow at me in the photo.
And then I had to leave. I walked out completely dazed. Barka. Gosh it was good to see her. And she looked so much happier than in her last few days at Kalighat. The center is much more spacious. At Kalighat, residents have to stay in bed. Here, they're free to walk around the center, which is a bunch of rooms bordering an outdoor garden.
Wrap-up meeting at the Brothers' House, I gave a quick "here's how we're taking the train back and then the Metro blah blah blah" and then back to the train.
I now understand why having more than 25 people on the leprosy center trip is a terrible idea. Public trains in India are "fit as many as you can," standing. And they only stop for about ten seconds. So when the train came, we jammed everyone in the car. Not too crowded, but we left one Japanese girl at the station. Peter jumped off at the next stop and waited. After about twenty minutes on the crowded train, it got really crowded. Like, squished. Not even "I appear to be pressed in on all sides," but more than that. Like, close your eyes and think about what an orange through a juicer must feel like. Unfortunately, the train was mostly big sweaty men, and I am a woman. And yeah, I'm used to getting groped, 'cause it happens about every day, but that's usually little things, like a hand barely on my butt or a man's arm "accidentally" brushing my chest as he walks by. On the train (only once), I got full-on grabbed. If this had been two months ago, I would have felt violated, frozen up, but not done anything. This time, I punched him. ...not hard, because I'm not really capable of punching people. But he grabbed me, so I punched him, because it's MY body, not yours. Not okay. Rar.
For the rest of the train ride, I shielded the two Japanese girls who were next to me, so they wouldn't get groped. They were freaking out. I was fine, just extremely squished. And after grope number one I decided that no one else would grope me, so I elbowed everyone who inched closer to me. And they gave me looks of sheepish "I thought you wouldn't notice because you're a stupid American girl." GAH. And this guy next to me kept saying "next stop DumDum, move!" when it clearly was not possible to move. Jlsdfkja.
When we got to our stop, it was pushpushpush to leave the train. So I pushed. And four volunteers on the train didn't. Thus, we left two Italians and the two Japanese girls on the train. Fortunately, I had said in my briefing that you could either get off the train at DumDum and take the Metro to Sudder, or get off and Sealdah and take the bus to MotherHouse. There really wasn't anyway to follow them, and they were together, so we waited at the station for Peter and the other Japanese girl, who were on the next train. I felt awful. You know that camp counselor (or parent...) feeling when you lose a kid? Yeah. I had 26 kids. I lost four. They were together, and they're adults (I'm always the youngest one in every group - everyone is usually in their late twenties / thirties), so I figured they'd be fine. Sealdah's the last stop, and it's the station at which we started the day. So they knew where they were. But I still feel irresponsible and bad-mommyish for losing them.
Then we Metroed back to Sudder for lunch. And I napped. And now I'm awake and writing a lot.
I've been journalling a lot lately, trying to figure out exactly how I've changed in India. I've written on this blog before about little changes - working at Kalighat, for example. Before I came to India, and even during the first month here, I consistently said that I would never work at Kalighat. Ever. I said I just didn't have the ability to work with sick people, and especially not dying people. My mom's a nurse. I'm not. I can't do blood or wounds or IVs - aah!
But I've been at Kalighat for two months. And I love it. Not only do I love it, but not once have I thought "ew" or "I need to lie down now" or anything like that. And it's not that I haven't seen heavy stuff - my goodness, I have. There's Kamala, who I was with near constantly right before she died. Now I know what the "death wheeze" sounds like. There's Neda, who I saw dissolve in two weeks due to AIDS. There's this other woman, whose name I still don't know, whose husband poured boiling water over her head - so her entire scalp and chest are completely covered in burn wounds. And then there's Shanti, who Peter found on the street and brought in. She's the one who has wounds all over her body, to the bone. Yeah, that bothers me, just like all of this bothers me. But not in a "aslkfjasdoifj icky" way, rather in a "I hate that this is happening, now how can I help?" way.
My conclusion is this: since being here, I think I've started to learn the meaning of Philippians 4:13 - I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Strength has always been a sort of vague word in my mind. But after all that I've seen at Kailghat, I think I might get it. A little. I don't understand the strength that the men and women at Kalighat have - the sort of strength that causes a dying man to go "nope, don't feel like it today" and eat a ton, start walking, exercise, and leave healthy (true story). I don't understand that at all. Maybe it's something I would have to experience. I do, however, feel a little more in touch with the strength that God has granted me. In my life, strength is being able to do anything God asks of me, whether it's working at Kalighat, teaching a play in a language I don't know, or leading a group of 26 people who only partially speak English to a place I've never been. In India, I've been doing stuff I never thought I'd be able to do. I can't quite think of the word for what I've developed - resilience? No, I think strength is the right word. Yep. I can (apparently) do all things through Christ who strengthens me. And really it really is only through prayer and Bibling and faith and hope and recognizing God in everyone I see that I've developed the patience and endurance to do all this stuff.
Okay, dinnertime.
Oh, I forgot to mention - I talked with a lot of people at the center, which means I touched a lot of people - handshakes and such. Which means I've kind of achieved my goal upon coming to India, which was to hug lepers. Done. I can leave now.
...jk, I love my girls.
Going to the redlight district tomorrow night.
Faith, hope, and love,
Stephanie
P.S. Do I want this tattooed somewhere: আশা
It says "asha," which means "hope" in Bangla.
Hmmm.
Today, I went to the leprosy center about an hour outside of Kolkata! Woohooooo!
Yesterday, I realized that the trips to the center are the third Thursday of the month, and suddenly was like "oh crap this is my last chance!! Aaaah oh no!" So I went to registration at three, and the sister told me that registration for the trip had been in the morning. I asked if she could add one more. She said absolutely not, because only 25 are allowed. More than 25 is just too many people for the leader of the trip to handle, and the trains are really crowded. I pouted, but understood. No trip for me.
...and then I found out that Peter and his parents (P.S., Peter's parents are here, and I adore them) had registered, so I decided to go anyway, prepared to be sent away if anyone found out I hadn't registered.
Peter and I woke up super-early and walked to Motherhouse. We were supposed to get there for a pre-departure meeting at seven, but we got there near the end of the meeting. My friend Jeff (not Jeff who left [but he's back again], a different Jeff) was briefing everyone on info about the center. Two minutes later, Jeff walked over to me and said "hey, you can lead this, right?" I said no, I hadn't been to the center before, but at the same time Jeff quieted the entire room, pointed at me, smiled, and said "this is Stephanie, she'll be your leader! She knows where she's going, so follow her." What? As everyone began to talk again, Jeff turned to me and said "it's okay, no one I appoint as leader has ever been there before. Don't worry about it." Then he gave me the list of people registered to go to the center, and said "you don't really have to check this, but theoretically you should, just to make sure everyone's here." I checked it. Everyone was here...plus me, the only one not on the list.
At that moment, I kind of felt God laughing at me a little. The reason Sister said I couldn't go was because more than 25 was too many for the leader to handle. And I was the leader. So I had to deal with the stress of keeping track of too-many-people. Plus, I was the only one with the list, which meant only I knew I never registered. Whoa.
I head-counted (27, Sister had let two extra people register, and there was only one no show) and we all hopped on the bus to Sealdah station. I head counted again and we all bought tickets. Then to the train. Counted as they went on the train. While on the train, I suddenly realized that I know Bangla. Okay, I really don't, but what little I know is extremely useful. People in the group asked me to talk with men on the train for them, to purchase fruit and figure out the location of our stop. It was craziness. While on the train, I talked with Jon, a guy from DC who is TEFL certified and taught English in Korea for awhile. Cool.
Forty minutes later, we arrived, head-counted, crossed the tracks, and walked to the Brothers' House. Brief intro. The center is a place for people who have had leprosy to live and work. The center seems fully self-run - there's a giant cloth factory, gardens, huge dorms, a school, etc. Even though leprosy is now fully treatable and curable, it's still a disease that, in India, completely outcasts people from society. The lepers / former lepers need a place to live, so Momma T started a center for them to work, make money, eat, sleep, etc.
Tour time. I quickly realized that I strongly dislike guided tours, and lagged way behind everyone the entire time. First tour place was the...gosh, what do you call a place where people make fabric? Loomery? I don't know. We walked in to the sound of "clickclackclickclackclickclack...". Women rolled thread onto spools, men wove thread into fabric on giant looms. I greeted most women - Nammashkar di. I stood in front of one weaving machine mabobber for awhile, trying to figure out how it worked. I asked the woman. She offered me a try. Absolutely. I sat down and spun and MAN it burned my fingers! I had to use my hand as a corner to brace the thread, and the thread spun super-fast, like a rope burn + paper cut. I yelped. The woman laughed. I asked to see her fingers. They were hard-core calloused exactly where mine were red. We Nammashkarred again, I thanked her, walked on. Took a picture of the giant loom, with permission from the men. They wanted to pose with Peter. They did. Hehe.
Walk walk walk...to a zillion other places. Dyeing room (fabric), nursery (babies!), gardens, prosthetics workshop, classroom (kids!), and a bunch of other rooms. I think I ignored every component of every presentation. I decided it would be better to talk with the people who live in the center. Yep. Definitely. During the fabric dyeing talk, there were four women sitting to the side, eating lunch. They greeted me first - Namaste. I said "kaemon achen," and we spoke for a few minutes. Omigosh, I know enough Bangla to have a conversation. Omigosh. I love Bangla.
Then to the kitchen...same deal. Some presentation, I talked with the people hanging around the kitchen. Then the nursery, and I talked with the women. Then the school..."namaste, chelemeye!" They sang a song. Shundor gan. Everyone was so excited that I spoke Bangla. It was amazing. I talked with approximately everyone I saw. Tours are lameskees. Communication is pandatastic. Granted, I know nearly nothing about the center, but that's okay.
At the end of the tour, we walked through the wards. I didn't talk with the men, 'cause they're men and it's weird for a woman to initiate conversation with men. I had been waiting the entire time for the women's ward, so I could talk with the women. I was jumpy. So excited. I walked into the GIANT ward - maybe 200 beds - and had no idea with whom I should sit. Actually, sitting with them wasn't even in the schedule. We were supposed to walk through and leave. The room was a giant dorm stretching to the right, so I looked to the left and gasped. I don't remember the last time I've gasped.
Barka was sitting on the bed two meters away from me.
I may or may not have shrieked "Barka?!" And she freaked out too. Not as much as me; she was tired. But I think we exchanged "Barka?!" "hya" (yes) about ten times. I sat down, asked her how she was, she showed me her scars from the operation. She had been transferred to here from Kalighat to have med work done. We talked for a few minutes, and I couldn't help gushing in English about how much I adore her. She gave me a "you're being a doofus, but it's nice to see you too" look. Llsdfjkaiosdfjalsdfjsdklafjklasdfjaiosjfklsdafjklsdajfl BARKA! ...and I totally broke the rules and took a picture. She said it was okay. She's raising an eyebrow at me in the photo.
And then I had to leave. I walked out completely dazed. Barka. Gosh it was good to see her. And she looked so much happier than in her last few days at Kalighat. The center is much more spacious. At Kalighat, residents have to stay in bed. Here, they're free to walk around the center, which is a bunch of rooms bordering an outdoor garden.
Wrap-up meeting at the Brothers' House, I gave a quick "here's how we're taking the train back and then the Metro blah blah blah" and then back to the train.
I now understand why having more than 25 people on the leprosy center trip is a terrible idea. Public trains in India are "fit as many as you can," standing. And they only stop for about ten seconds. So when the train came, we jammed everyone in the car. Not too crowded, but we left one Japanese girl at the station. Peter jumped off at the next stop and waited. After about twenty minutes on the crowded train, it got really crowded. Like, squished. Not even "I appear to be pressed in on all sides," but more than that. Like, close your eyes and think about what an orange through a juicer must feel like. Unfortunately, the train was mostly big sweaty men, and I am a woman. And yeah, I'm used to getting groped, 'cause it happens about every day, but that's usually little things, like a hand barely on my butt or a man's arm "accidentally" brushing my chest as he walks by. On the train (only once), I got full-on grabbed. If this had been two months ago, I would have felt violated, frozen up, but not done anything. This time, I punched him. ...not hard, because I'm not really capable of punching people. But he grabbed me, so I punched him, because it's MY body, not yours. Not okay. Rar.
For the rest of the train ride, I shielded the two Japanese girls who were next to me, so they wouldn't get groped. They were freaking out. I was fine, just extremely squished. And after grope number one I decided that no one else would grope me, so I elbowed everyone who inched closer to me. And they gave me looks of sheepish "I thought you wouldn't notice because you're a stupid American girl." GAH. And this guy next to me kept saying "next stop DumDum, move!" when it clearly was not possible to move. Jlsdfkja.
When we got to our stop, it was pushpushpush to leave the train. So I pushed. And four volunteers on the train didn't. Thus, we left two Italians and the two Japanese girls on the train. Fortunately, I had said in my briefing that you could either get off the train at DumDum and take the Metro to Sudder, or get off and Sealdah and take the bus to MotherHouse. There really wasn't anyway to follow them, and they were together, so we waited at the station for Peter and the other Japanese girl, who were on the next train. I felt awful. You know that camp counselor (or parent...) feeling when you lose a kid? Yeah. I had 26 kids. I lost four. They were together, and they're adults (I'm always the youngest one in every group - everyone is usually in their late twenties / thirties), so I figured they'd be fine. Sealdah's the last stop, and it's the station at which we started the day. So they knew where they were. But I still feel irresponsible and bad-mommyish for losing them.
Then we Metroed back to Sudder for lunch. And I napped. And now I'm awake and writing a lot.
I've been journalling a lot lately, trying to figure out exactly how I've changed in India. I've written on this blog before about little changes - working at Kalighat, for example. Before I came to India, and even during the first month here, I consistently said that I would never work at Kalighat. Ever. I said I just didn't have the ability to work with sick people, and especially not dying people. My mom's a nurse. I'm not. I can't do blood or wounds or IVs - aah!
But I've been at Kalighat for two months. And I love it. Not only do I love it, but not once have I thought "ew" or "I need to lie down now" or anything like that. And it's not that I haven't seen heavy stuff - my goodness, I have. There's Kamala, who I was with near constantly right before she died. Now I know what the "death wheeze" sounds like. There's Neda, who I saw dissolve in two weeks due to AIDS. There's this other woman, whose name I still don't know, whose husband poured boiling water over her head - so her entire scalp and chest are completely covered in burn wounds. And then there's Shanti, who Peter found on the street and brought in. She's the one who has wounds all over her body, to the bone. Yeah, that bothers me, just like all of this bothers me. But not in a "aslkfjasdoifj icky" way, rather in a "I hate that this is happening, now how can I help?" way.
My conclusion is this: since being here, I think I've started to learn the meaning of Philippians 4:13 - I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Strength has always been a sort of vague word in my mind. But after all that I've seen at Kailghat, I think I might get it. A little. I don't understand the strength that the men and women at Kalighat have - the sort of strength that causes a dying man to go "nope, don't feel like it today" and eat a ton, start walking, exercise, and leave healthy (true story). I don't understand that at all. Maybe it's something I would have to experience. I do, however, feel a little more in touch with the strength that God has granted me. In my life, strength is being able to do anything God asks of me, whether it's working at Kalighat, teaching a play in a language I don't know, or leading a group of 26 people who only partially speak English to a place I've never been. In India, I've been doing stuff I never thought I'd be able to do. I can't quite think of the word for what I've developed - resilience? No, I think strength is the right word. Yep. I can (apparently) do all things through Christ who strengthens me. And really it really is only through prayer and Bibling and faith and hope and recognizing God in everyone I see that I've developed the patience and endurance to do all this stuff.
Okay, dinnertime.
Oh, I forgot to mention - I talked with a lot of people at the center, which means I touched a lot of people - handshakes and such. Which means I've kind of achieved my goal upon coming to India, which was to hug lepers. Done. I can leave now.
...jk, I love my girls.
Going to the redlight district tomorrow night.
Faith, hope, and love,
Stephanie
P.S. Do I want this tattooed somewhere: আশা
It says "asha," which means "hope" in Bangla.
Hmmm.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
OMIGOSH
I just found a picture of Kalighat online!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nirmal_Hriday.JPG
No way! That's the men's side. The women's side looks...mostly similar.
Super!
Love and jpegs,
Stephanie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nirmal_Hriday.JPG
No way! That's the men's side. The women's side looks...mostly similar.
Super!
Love and jpegs,
Stephanie
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Quick update.
Life is busy. I'm nearly done translating the Apne Aap show into Hindi. For the next few weeks, I'll be orally teaching it to the women, because they cannot read. This means that I need to learn to pronounce all the Hindi near-correctly. It's interesting - I purposefully chose to learn Bangla rather than Hindi because Bangla is much easier for me to speak. And now I need to speak a ton of Hindi. I'm excited.
Josefin leaves tonight.
I've seen a lot of bone this week at Kalighat. It looks like models of the earth's layers + meat hanging in the market. I don't do the medical stuff - I just massage squirming feet.
If you want anything specific from India, please let me know.
Thanks!
Have a super week!
Love and Hindi,
Stephanie
Josefin leaves tonight.
I've seen a lot of bone this week at Kalighat. It looks like models of the earth's layers + meat hanging in the market. I don't do the medical stuff - I just massage squirming feet.
If you want anything specific from India, please let me know.
Thanks!
Have a super week!
Love and Hindi,
Stephanie
Sunday, March 8, 2009
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...
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
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
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Tiger kothay?, slum visit, street drama.
Okay.
So.
Gosh, this will take a long time and be super-sporadic.
Here goes!
In chronological order, from two weeks ago...
A day before I left for Sunderbans, at Apne Aap, my girls and I were like "psssshhhh we don't feel like learning anything today." So we ran upstairs to the little kids' classroom on the roof, turned on the radio, and had a dance party. It was fantastic. They were all "dance, di, dance!". For a brief moment, the thought "wait, I can't dance, I don't know how to dance" crossed my mind. And then I realized that my body has been crafted to dance to Indian music. Everything in Indian dance makes so much more sense to my muscles. The arm movements (kinda like you're spinning a balloon), the hips, the smoothness of it all - gosh. As opposed to the overt sexuality in Western dance, Indian dance is more subtle sensuality. It's beautiful rather than awkward and provocative. And all my girls were so excited about dancing with me, and we all sang, and then the Ring Ring Ringa song came on - the one they taught me a month ago, when I traded them for Sufjan Stevens. I firmly believe that part of my soul resides in the Ring Ring Ringa song. We danced in a circle, each girl had her chance to start a foot / arm pattern that we all copied, they stopped to teach me when I had difficulty picking something up. And though my mind was like "what?" my body was like "shut up mind, I know how to do this." ...then I French braided my hair to keep it back and my girls freaked out. Hair thrown at me from everywhere. I don't remember the Hindi word for "braid," but I heard it about a zillion times. So then our dance party turned into a hair braiding party. It was like a fifth grade sleepover.
New topic. Sorry for the jumpjumpjump, but there's a lot I want to write.
I prayed and thought a lot last week about this passage:
"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,' when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye." - Luke 6:41-42
First off, the image of a plank in my eye is funny. What would I look like walking around with a plank in my eye? And how ridiculous would it look if I tried to get a speck out of Josefin's eye with a plank in my eye? I'd probably jab her in the face. And there's no way I'd be able to see clearly.
I've been thinking about this from the perspective of giving advice. If you know me, you know that I don't really hesitate in advice-giving. I completely ignore the whole "don't give advice until you're asked" idea. But then again, I often am in no place to give advice. There are planks in my eyes. Last week, I made a list of my major planks, and I'm trying to figure out how to get them out of my eyes. To extend the ridiculously easy-to-extend metaphor, I've learned that removing planks involves a good mirror. Thankfully, going to Adoration as often as possible is helpful.
I should explain Adoration. Literally, it's a bunch of volunteers and sisters sitting in a room praying, with a consecrated wafer in a little golden stand on a table at the front of the room. If you walk in and don't know what's going on, it looks like a lot of people staring at a cookie. I purposefully started going to Adoration because it didn't make any sense to me. Cookie. Gold stand. Saying the Rosary, plus silent prayer halfway through the hour. What?
And when I got there, I realized why Adoration is super. This might sound strange, but the spiritual density in that room is absurd. It's ridiculous. It's overwhelming. It felt like walking into a room in which you know God is sitting. I almost fell over. Praying in that environment is mind-blowing. I don't know why. I can't explain it. And I really don't understand the whole God-in-a-wafer thing. But I do know that Adoration, for me, has become a for-sure way to make sure I'm in focused prayer for at least an hour a day. I've started going to Adoration at Kalighat, which is even more amazing. Five sisters, five/six volunteers...oh man. It's wonderful. I don't think I've ever had more focused prayer (scheduled prayer time? whoa.) in my life.
In response to questions, yeah, I pierced my nose. Safely. I sterilized the needle. It's completely healed. My girls think it's great. I like it. Mmmkay, that's all about that.
At Kalighat two weeks ago, there was a 20/30 maybe year old woman. Newly arrived. Stunningly beautiful. Big brown eyes. Could be a model. She doesn't speak. I spoke with her, but she didn't respond verbally. Every time I walked near her, she caught my gaze and followed me with her eyes. So I bent down, placed my hand in hers and asked "gan?" (song). She barely squeezed my hand. I sang Come Thou Fount. She looked a little happier, not that she ever seems to have any facial expression besides entranced. She's gorgeous. I asked another woman there what was wrong with her, and she shrugged. She said that the woman had just arrived a few days before, so the only thing they knew was that she had terrible FGM, enough that she needed a catheter. I don't want to talk about it. Look it up.
Sunderbans. Wow. Gorgeous. Jungle. We were only there for two days - we all took the weekend off from our Momma T assignments, which was good because I didn't have to miss Apne Aap at all. Our group was Matias (Chile), Jed (Colorado OMG he went to Brown and knows Talia Stein!), Josefin (Sweden), and Daniel (Cuba / Miami / Seattle). We woke up super-early, and took a train / auto / boat / auto / boat combination to get there.
I had a slightly heartbreaking experience at the train station. There were beggar kids all over the place, because there are a ton of beggars at train stations in India. This one girl, holding a baby, started "auntie, auntie, canna"ing me. Which means "auntie, auntie, food." There were two pieces of bread in my bag, so I shrugged and figured sure, why not? I didn't need those two pieces of bread. So I dug through my bag, found the bread, and handed one piece to her and one to the baby, who looked old enough to chew. And...the girl looked at the bread, looked up at me, looked down at the bread, looked up at me, and said "canna, canna?" And I said, "hai, eta tomar canna" - "yes, it's your food." And she just kept asking. All the while, the baby tore the bread into little pieces and dropped it on the floor. We walked away. A few minutes later, the girl found me again, and still asked me for food - still holding a torn up piece of bread, which crumbled on the floor as she asked for food.
I don't understand.
Anyway, train to Canning. Auto to shore. Giant ferry canoe to somewhere. Auto to somewhere. The auto had two rows of seats, facing each other - one backwards, one forwards. I was sitting in the seat facing forwards, on the right side. So, when we almost got hit by a giant bus, I was the one who saw it coming. By almost, I mean the auto driver nearly hit it head on, and then swerved to the left at the last moment. We two-wheeled it on the left side for about five seconds, all threw ourselves to the right, and then stopped to get Daniel's bag, which had fallen out. Daniel probably should have gotten badly injured - it would have made sense for him to get a foot caught up and tangled in the wheels. But nope. We were all shaken (not stirred) but fine. Super.
Then another boat, and we were in Gosaba, where we found a pink guest house with bucket showers and giant beds with mosquito nets, bartered the rooms down to 200 each, and set out adventuring. I. Adore. Gosaba. Nearly no one there speaks English. Fortunately, Jed speaks a lot of Bangla, so we were able to communicate. We drank sugarcane juice and ate street fruit. Jed and I walked over to the shore, where we discovered the grossest, most absolutely superb mud I've ever seen. Our feet sunk nearly to our knees every time we stepped. Naturally, I decided that meant we should roll up our pants and walk the thirty meters or so to shore. GROSS. But fantastic. And three kids joined us, and we all went "ew ew ew" and it was great. I have videos.
Then Jed and I walked to the village-y section of Gosaba. Where everyone on the tiny island lives. We wandered at random, walked past goats, chickens, cows, and green green green. Eventually, kids started following us, so we spoke Bangla with them. After some time, a woman stepped out of her house and called to us. We followed. She invited us in for chai, and pulled chairs out so we could sit on her porch. There ended up being about ten women, three men, and a half dozen children - and us. Speaking. In Bangla. We talked about everything we could communicate, joked about how Jed knew onek Bangla and I knew khub choto. Very little. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah wonderful.
In the morning - BOAT. Gorgeous. We went on a 500-rupee-a-person boat cruise around Sunderbans. We didn't see any tigers. But we saw monkeys and birds and a crocodile and deer and a funny-looking pig. Our tour guide was awesome. He didn't speak English, but that didn't matter 'cause we had Jed. He let me drive the boat. Jed had made aloo mattar and roti and brought it with him to Gosaba, so we had a picnic on the boat. Oh gosh it was wonderful.
Then four-hour bus ride back to Kolkata. Smelled like eggs.
On the way back down Sudder Street, I suddenly felt like saying hello to one of the beggar women - usually I don't greet them, because they'll follow me asking for money. I started to speak at the exact same time she did, and we simultaneously said "namaste, di" (me) and "how are you, sister" (her). For the record, "di" means "older sister." It was beautiful.
Fast forward. Kalighat the next day. The woman I mentioned earlier had been moved to a bed waaay at the end of the room, and had a namecard (Neda) and a sign posted next to her bed that said "please do not touch without gloves." And had what looked like sudden, massive scabies. Again, I asked another volunteer what was wrong with her. And she said, "oh, she just has HIV." Oooookay then. So I grabbed some gloves and sang to her for a long, long time. At one point, a sister walked past me, stopped, and I showed her my hands. She nodded and kept walking. Bhalo. Good.
Wow, this is taking a long panda time. And I'm not even close to caught up.
Last Wednesday, I left Apne Aap early (Muslim holiday, no girls) and went in search for my girls' slum. After an hour of wandering around Park Circus, I found it. Turns out 39 Tiljala road is nowhere near 36 or 41. Tik ache (it's okay). It was fun to find. I got to speak a LOT of Bangla. Their slum isn't a tarp-city like the one next to it - rather, it's a giant cement building in which they all live together. I didn't walk in, but it was nice to know where it is and what it looks like.
Thursday, Josefin and I went to the tarp-slum next to the Park Circus bridge. I could write for pages about this, and will, but not right now. We brought cookies, paper, crayons, a ball, and sweets, all hidden in Josefin's backpack, with the intent to find some kids (chelemeye kothay?) and play with them. We found a bunch of kids among the tarps, gathered them together, and I handed out cookies - ekta tumi, ekta biscuit (one you, one cookie). The kids were ecstatic. They started running away, bringing back other kids and pushing hands toward me. Only a few kids asked for more than one cookie. Maybe it was because I started saying "ekta tumi, ekta biscuit" early on. There was one kid who kept pushing his friends hands toward me, asking for cookies, and then only after all the other kids had cookies did he extend his own. And he was a little kid, not an older one who might feel obliged to take care of everyone else. Some mothers asked for biscuits for their children who were at school, so I said "ekhane ney, biscuit ney." Not here, no biscuit.
After hanging out with the kids for awhile, we moved on. Left the tarp slum, and wandered into the area of garbage-pickers next to the train tracks. There are hundreds of tarps set up next to the tracks, just like next to the bridge. I assumed it would be the same situation - nice kids, who just want to be kid-like. ...nope. Within minutes, kids latched on to me, a little too close to be comfortable. It was hot out. So I figured that ten kids or so was a good group to colour, and reached into Josefin's bag (which I was carrying) for paper. Within seconds, I was completely swarmed. Imagine a mosh pit of dirty children (and women) with me at the center. And this was before I even removed the paper and crayons. And it didn't matter how much I yelled "thamo (stop)" or "shanti (settle / peace)" or even "bas (enough)". They kept pushing in on me. Thank God I'm not claustrophobic. This went on for about twenty minutes. Nonstop. I couldn't get them off of me. And they were laughing, screaming, reaching, tearing the whole time - the children and the women. There was one man who tried to order everyone, but it didn't work. I thought maybe if I started passing out paper, they'd go away, so I pulled out one sheet - which got torn from my hands instantly. Twenty hands all grabbing at the same paper at the same time means no one gets it, not even counting the thirty or so who were too far back to reach. Another sheet. Same result. Another. Another. Finally, I gave up and tried to push them away. Fail. The kids / women ripped the entire pack from my hands. Oh well. We had more paper in the bag. The kids were all screaming for pens. I was still being pressed in on, squished, sugarcane through a juicer. I pulled out a few crayons. Hands. All crayons smashed. This would not work. I started pushing through, trying to get away. Thamo, thamo, thamo, and the kids yelled ney, ney, ney. Stop. No. There was one girl who kept grabbing my shoulders to pull me back. The others just ripped at my clothes. For once, I'm glad I bought such high-quality Indian clothing. It wouldn't tear. Pull pull pull pull...and I eventually broke free, only to be chased and resurrounded a few moments later. I yelled "just go" to Josefin over the crowd. She started walking away. If this sounds overly dramatic or chaotic - it was. If it doesn't, then I haven't described it well enough. We eventually ran back to the tarp-slum. The whole process took about a half hour. Josefin hadn't been as swarmed, thank God. I'm glad I had the bag.
We went back to the first group, regathered the kids, and gave them white paper and crayons. One each. They drew and were happy. I taught some older kids to write their names in Bangla and English. Happy happy. One woman yelled at us for not bringing them more food. The other women shrugged and smiled at us. The kids were gleeful.
Why the stark contrast? They're both groups of kids. Living in the same condition, in two slightly different places. Why does one group have kids who bring their friends over for one cookie each, and the other have kids who rip paper and form mosh pits? What's the difference between these two groups of children?
Also, I don't understand why I wasn't bothered by this experience. Josefin was deeply affected, and I...well, it didn't surprise me. The kids at Apne Aap mosh pit me all the time. Somehow, events like this don't bother me, but the girl in the train station who doesn't eat the bread I give her - that bothers me. The man on the street with the infected leg wound, who refuses treatment because the wound means he's a more effective beggar - that bothers me. Thirty kids flash mobbing me for coloured paper? Nah.
Gosh, I still have more to write.
The song Worlds Apart, by Jars of Clay, has pretty much been my theme lately. I swiped Peter's guitar and play it all the time.
I finished a journal a few days ago. Thanks to Domtar for the new one. :-)
I should mention the weather. Apparently it's been 90/95 degrees here every day. I checked the weather online for those numbers. It's been hot. I walk a lot. Strangely, at the end of the day, my clothing smells like sugar. I think it's because of all the chai I drink.
Apne Aap show. Ohhhhh man. When I started working for Apne Aap two months ago, Sraboni told me that she wanted me to teach a drama class on Friday afternoons. The women didn't show up for five weeks straight, so we started the class a few weeks ago. No one speaks English. 30/40-year-old-women, who live in the slums with a bunch of children. The first rehearsal, we played Pass the Clap and Boom Swish, to get them comfortable working together and being LOUD. The next rehearsal, I sat down with them and, through two layers of translation, asked them about their frustrations and hopes. One woman in the group can write Bengali, and Zareen can understand spoken Bengali. So we had a woman write down what everyone said, read it to Zareen, and Zareen translated it to me in English so I could write it down. That was tedious, but reeeeally awesome. Last Friday, at rehearsal, I tried to ask the women what they wanted the show to look like, the format, what they wanted to make sure was communicated, etc. And they told me NOTHING. Again and again, they said "Ani writes the show, we perform it" (in Bangla and Hindi). What?! I don't live their lives. I don't speak their language. But they trust me to be their voices? Okay. After pushing them for more information, emotion, ideas, anything, I talked with Sraboni, who said the same thing. Write the show.
So I wrote it.
I'm not going to post it on here. It's too long. They wanted it to be a half hour / hour long show. It has tabla, a Greek chorus, masks, a dance-fight. Oh, and it's in Hindi. I wrote it in simple English, and two Apne Aap teachers and I have been working on translating it every day. Saboushni speaks fluent Hindi, a little Bangla, and a little English, Mr. Computer Sir (my girls' name for him) speaks fluent Bangla, moderate English, and moderate Hindi, and I read and write English and speak a little Bangla. Together, we can slowly translate my English into transliterated Hindi. We don't need it written in Hindi characters, because the women can't read. They'll be memorizing the show aurally, which means that I need to learn to pronounce my entire show in Hindi.
We'll be performing it on the street at the beginning of April. I'll bring a camera. :-)
Okay, I think that's it.
No it's not! Jeff and I decided mine and Josefin's room needed a window, so we watercoloured one on the wall. It's pretty.
Time to go get chai and teach.
Love and many words,
Stephanie
So.
Gosh, this will take a long time and be super-sporadic.
Here goes!
In chronological order, from two weeks ago...
A day before I left for Sunderbans, at Apne Aap, my girls and I were like "psssshhhh we don't feel like learning anything today." So we ran upstairs to the little kids' classroom on the roof, turned on the radio, and had a dance party. It was fantastic. They were all "dance, di, dance!". For a brief moment, the thought "wait, I can't dance, I don't know how to dance" crossed my mind. And then I realized that my body has been crafted to dance to Indian music. Everything in Indian dance makes so much more sense to my muscles. The arm movements (kinda like you're spinning a balloon), the hips, the smoothness of it all - gosh. As opposed to the overt sexuality in Western dance, Indian dance is more subtle sensuality. It's beautiful rather than awkward and provocative. And all my girls were so excited about dancing with me, and we all sang, and then the Ring Ring Ringa song came on - the one they taught me a month ago, when I traded them for Sufjan Stevens. I firmly believe that part of my soul resides in the Ring Ring Ringa song. We danced in a circle, each girl had her chance to start a foot / arm pattern that we all copied, they stopped to teach me when I had difficulty picking something up. And though my mind was like "what?" my body was like "shut up mind, I know how to do this." ...then I French braided my hair to keep it back and my girls freaked out. Hair thrown at me from everywhere. I don't remember the Hindi word for "braid," but I heard it about a zillion times. So then our dance party turned into a hair braiding party. It was like a fifth grade sleepover.
New topic. Sorry for the jumpjumpjump, but there's a lot I want to write.
I prayed and thought a lot last week about this passage:
"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,' when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye." - Luke 6:41-42
First off, the image of a plank in my eye is funny. What would I look like walking around with a plank in my eye? And how ridiculous would it look if I tried to get a speck out of Josefin's eye with a plank in my eye? I'd probably jab her in the face. And there's no way I'd be able to see clearly.
I've been thinking about this from the perspective of giving advice. If you know me, you know that I don't really hesitate in advice-giving. I completely ignore the whole "don't give advice until you're asked" idea. But then again, I often am in no place to give advice. There are planks in my eyes. Last week, I made a list of my major planks, and I'm trying to figure out how to get them out of my eyes. To extend the ridiculously easy-to-extend metaphor, I've learned that removing planks involves a good mirror. Thankfully, going to Adoration as often as possible is helpful.
I should explain Adoration. Literally, it's a bunch of volunteers and sisters sitting in a room praying, with a consecrated wafer in a little golden stand on a table at the front of the room. If you walk in and don't know what's going on, it looks like a lot of people staring at a cookie. I purposefully started going to Adoration because it didn't make any sense to me. Cookie. Gold stand. Saying the Rosary, plus silent prayer halfway through the hour. What?
And when I got there, I realized why Adoration is super. This might sound strange, but the spiritual density in that room is absurd. It's ridiculous. It's overwhelming. It felt like walking into a room in which you know God is sitting. I almost fell over. Praying in that environment is mind-blowing. I don't know why. I can't explain it. And I really don't understand the whole God-in-a-wafer thing. But I do know that Adoration, for me, has become a for-sure way to make sure I'm in focused prayer for at least an hour a day. I've started going to Adoration at Kalighat, which is even more amazing. Five sisters, five/six volunteers...oh man. It's wonderful. I don't think I've ever had more focused prayer (scheduled prayer time? whoa.) in my life.
In response to questions, yeah, I pierced my nose. Safely. I sterilized the needle. It's completely healed. My girls think it's great. I like it. Mmmkay, that's all about that.
At Kalighat two weeks ago, there was a 20/30 maybe year old woman. Newly arrived. Stunningly beautiful. Big brown eyes. Could be a model. She doesn't speak. I spoke with her, but she didn't respond verbally. Every time I walked near her, she caught my gaze and followed me with her eyes. So I bent down, placed my hand in hers and asked "gan?" (song). She barely squeezed my hand. I sang Come Thou Fount. She looked a little happier, not that she ever seems to have any facial expression besides entranced. She's gorgeous. I asked another woman there what was wrong with her, and she shrugged. She said that the woman had just arrived a few days before, so the only thing they knew was that she had terrible FGM, enough that she needed a catheter. I don't want to talk about it. Look it up.
Sunderbans. Wow. Gorgeous. Jungle. We were only there for two days - we all took the weekend off from our Momma T assignments, which was good because I didn't have to miss Apne Aap at all. Our group was Matias (Chile), Jed (Colorado OMG he went to Brown and knows Talia Stein!), Josefin (Sweden), and Daniel (Cuba / Miami / Seattle). We woke up super-early, and took a train / auto / boat / auto / boat combination to get there.
I had a slightly heartbreaking experience at the train station. There were beggar kids all over the place, because there are a ton of beggars at train stations in India. This one girl, holding a baby, started "auntie, auntie, canna"ing me. Which means "auntie, auntie, food." There were two pieces of bread in my bag, so I shrugged and figured sure, why not? I didn't need those two pieces of bread. So I dug through my bag, found the bread, and handed one piece to her and one to the baby, who looked old enough to chew. And...the girl looked at the bread, looked up at me, looked down at the bread, looked up at me, and said "canna, canna?" And I said, "hai, eta tomar canna" - "yes, it's your food." And she just kept asking. All the while, the baby tore the bread into little pieces and dropped it on the floor. We walked away. A few minutes later, the girl found me again, and still asked me for food - still holding a torn up piece of bread, which crumbled on the floor as she asked for food.
I don't understand.
Anyway, train to Canning. Auto to shore. Giant ferry canoe to somewhere. Auto to somewhere. The auto had two rows of seats, facing each other - one backwards, one forwards. I was sitting in the seat facing forwards, on the right side. So, when we almost got hit by a giant bus, I was the one who saw it coming. By almost, I mean the auto driver nearly hit it head on, and then swerved to the left at the last moment. We two-wheeled it on the left side for about five seconds, all threw ourselves to the right, and then stopped to get Daniel's bag, which had fallen out. Daniel probably should have gotten badly injured - it would have made sense for him to get a foot caught up and tangled in the wheels. But nope. We were all shaken (not stirred) but fine. Super.
Then another boat, and we were in Gosaba, where we found a pink guest house with bucket showers and giant beds with mosquito nets, bartered the rooms down to 200 each, and set out adventuring. I. Adore. Gosaba. Nearly no one there speaks English. Fortunately, Jed speaks a lot of Bangla, so we were able to communicate. We drank sugarcane juice and ate street fruit. Jed and I walked over to the shore, where we discovered the grossest, most absolutely superb mud I've ever seen. Our feet sunk nearly to our knees every time we stepped. Naturally, I decided that meant we should roll up our pants and walk the thirty meters or so to shore. GROSS. But fantastic. And three kids joined us, and we all went "ew ew ew" and it was great. I have videos.
Then Jed and I walked to the village-y section of Gosaba. Where everyone on the tiny island lives. We wandered at random, walked past goats, chickens, cows, and green green green. Eventually, kids started following us, so we spoke Bangla with them. After some time, a woman stepped out of her house and called to us. We followed. She invited us in for chai, and pulled chairs out so we could sit on her porch. There ended up being about ten women, three men, and a half dozen children - and us. Speaking. In Bangla. We talked about everything we could communicate, joked about how Jed knew onek Bangla and I knew khub choto. Very little. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah wonderful.
In the morning - BOAT. Gorgeous. We went on a 500-rupee-a-person boat cruise around Sunderbans. We didn't see any tigers. But we saw monkeys and birds and a crocodile and deer and a funny-looking pig. Our tour guide was awesome. He didn't speak English, but that didn't matter 'cause we had Jed. He let me drive the boat. Jed had made aloo mattar and roti and brought it with him to Gosaba, so we had a picnic on the boat. Oh gosh it was wonderful.
Then four-hour bus ride back to Kolkata. Smelled like eggs.
On the way back down Sudder Street, I suddenly felt like saying hello to one of the beggar women - usually I don't greet them, because they'll follow me asking for money. I started to speak at the exact same time she did, and we simultaneously said "namaste, di" (me) and "how are you, sister" (her). For the record, "di" means "older sister." It was beautiful.
Fast forward. Kalighat the next day. The woman I mentioned earlier had been moved to a bed waaay at the end of the room, and had a namecard (Neda) and a sign posted next to her bed that said "please do not touch without gloves." And had what looked like sudden, massive scabies. Again, I asked another volunteer what was wrong with her. And she said, "oh, she just has HIV." Oooookay then. So I grabbed some gloves and sang to her for a long, long time. At one point, a sister walked past me, stopped, and I showed her my hands. She nodded and kept walking. Bhalo. Good.
Wow, this is taking a long panda time. And I'm not even close to caught up.
Last Wednesday, I left Apne Aap early (Muslim holiday, no girls) and went in search for my girls' slum. After an hour of wandering around Park Circus, I found it. Turns out 39 Tiljala road is nowhere near 36 or 41. Tik ache (it's okay). It was fun to find. I got to speak a LOT of Bangla. Their slum isn't a tarp-city like the one next to it - rather, it's a giant cement building in which they all live together. I didn't walk in, but it was nice to know where it is and what it looks like.
Thursday, Josefin and I went to the tarp-slum next to the Park Circus bridge. I could write for pages about this, and will, but not right now. We brought cookies, paper, crayons, a ball, and sweets, all hidden in Josefin's backpack, with the intent to find some kids (chelemeye kothay?) and play with them. We found a bunch of kids among the tarps, gathered them together, and I handed out cookies - ekta tumi, ekta biscuit (one you, one cookie). The kids were ecstatic. They started running away, bringing back other kids and pushing hands toward me. Only a few kids asked for more than one cookie. Maybe it was because I started saying "ekta tumi, ekta biscuit" early on. There was one kid who kept pushing his friends hands toward me, asking for cookies, and then only after all the other kids had cookies did he extend his own. And he was a little kid, not an older one who might feel obliged to take care of everyone else. Some mothers asked for biscuits for their children who were at school, so I said "ekhane ney, biscuit ney." Not here, no biscuit.
After hanging out with the kids for awhile, we moved on. Left the tarp slum, and wandered into the area of garbage-pickers next to the train tracks. There are hundreds of tarps set up next to the tracks, just like next to the bridge. I assumed it would be the same situation - nice kids, who just want to be kid-like. ...nope. Within minutes, kids latched on to me, a little too close to be comfortable. It was hot out. So I figured that ten kids or so was a good group to colour, and reached into Josefin's bag (which I was carrying) for paper. Within seconds, I was completely swarmed. Imagine a mosh pit of dirty children (and women) with me at the center. And this was before I even removed the paper and crayons. And it didn't matter how much I yelled "thamo (stop)" or "shanti (settle / peace)" or even "bas (enough)". They kept pushing in on me. Thank God I'm not claustrophobic. This went on for about twenty minutes. Nonstop. I couldn't get them off of me. And they were laughing, screaming, reaching, tearing the whole time - the children and the women. There was one man who tried to order everyone, but it didn't work. I thought maybe if I started passing out paper, they'd go away, so I pulled out one sheet - which got torn from my hands instantly. Twenty hands all grabbing at the same paper at the same time means no one gets it, not even counting the thirty or so who were too far back to reach. Another sheet. Same result. Another. Another. Finally, I gave up and tried to push them away. Fail. The kids / women ripped the entire pack from my hands. Oh well. We had more paper in the bag. The kids were all screaming for pens. I was still being pressed in on, squished, sugarcane through a juicer. I pulled out a few crayons. Hands. All crayons smashed. This would not work. I started pushing through, trying to get away. Thamo, thamo, thamo, and the kids yelled ney, ney, ney. Stop. No. There was one girl who kept grabbing my shoulders to pull me back. The others just ripped at my clothes. For once, I'm glad I bought such high-quality Indian clothing. It wouldn't tear. Pull pull pull pull...and I eventually broke free, only to be chased and resurrounded a few moments later. I yelled "just go" to Josefin over the crowd. She started walking away. If this sounds overly dramatic or chaotic - it was. If it doesn't, then I haven't described it well enough. We eventually ran back to the tarp-slum. The whole process took about a half hour. Josefin hadn't been as swarmed, thank God. I'm glad I had the bag.
We went back to the first group, regathered the kids, and gave them white paper and crayons. One each. They drew and were happy. I taught some older kids to write their names in Bangla and English. Happy happy. One woman yelled at us for not bringing them more food. The other women shrugged and smiled at us. The kids were gleeful.
Why the stark contrast? They're both groups of kids. Living in the same condition, in two slightly different places. Why does one group have kids who bring their friends over for one cookie each, and the other have kids who rip paper and form mosh pits? What's the difference between these two groups of children?
Also, I don't understand why I wasn't bothered by this experience. Josefin was deeply affected, and I...well, it didn't surprise me. The kids at Apne Aap mosh pit me all the time. Somehow, events like this don't bother me, but the girl in the train station who doesn't eat the bread I give her - that bothers me. The man on the street with the infected leg wound, who refuses treatment because the wound means he's a more effective beggar - that bothers me. Thirty kids flash mobbing me for coloured paper? Nah.
Gosh, I still have more to write.
The song Worlds Apart, by Jars of Clay, has pretty much been my theme lately. I swiped Peter's guitar and play it all the time.
I finished a journal a few days ago. Thanks to Domtar for the new one. :-)
I should mention the weather. Apparently it's been 90/95 degrees here every day. I checked the weather online for those numbers. It's been hot. I walk a lot. Strangely, at the end of the day, my clothing smells like sugar. I think it's because of all the chai I drink.
Apne Aap show. Ohhhhh man. When I started working for Apne Aap two months ago, Sraboni told me that she wanted me to teach a drama class on Friday afternoons. The women didn't show up for five weeks straight, so we started the class a few weeks ago. No one speaks English. 30/40-year-old-women, who live in the slums with a bunch of children. The first rehearsal, we played Pass the Clap and Boom Swish, to get them comfortable working together and being LOUD. The next rehearsal, I sat down with them and, through two layers of translation, asked them about their frustrations and hopes. One woman in the group can write Bengali, and Zareen can understand spoken Bengali. So we had a woman write down what everyone said, read it to Zareen, and Zareen translated it to me in English so I could write it down. That was tedious, but reeeeally awesome. Last Friday, at rehearsal, I tried to ask the women what they wanted the show to look like, the format, what they wanted to make sure was communicated, etc. And they told me NOTHING. Again and again, they said "Ani writes the show, we perform it" (in Bangla and Hindi). What?! I don't live their lives. I don't speak their language. But they trust me to be their voices? Okay. After pushing them for more information, emotion, ideas, anything, I talked with Sraboni, who said the same thing. Write the show.
So I wrote it.
I'm not going to post it on here. It's too long. They wanted it to be a half hour / hour long show. It has tabla, a Greek chorus, masks, a dance-fight. Oh, and it's in Hindi. I wrote it in simple English, and two Apne Aap teachers and I have been working on translating it every day. Saboushni speaks fluent Hindi, a little Bangla, and a little English, Mr. Computer Sir (my girls' name for him) speaks fluent Bangla, moderate English, and moderate Hindi, and I read and write English and speak a little Bangla. Together, we can slowly translate my English into transliterated Hindi. We don't need it written in Hindi characters, because the women can't read. They'll be memorizing the show aurally, which means that I need to learn to pronounce my entire show in Hindi.
We'll be performing it on the street at the beginning of April. I'll bring a camera. :-)
Okay, I think that's it.
No it's not! Jeff and I decided mine and Josefin's room needed a window, so we watercoloured one on the wall. It's pretty.
Time to go get chai and teach.
Love and many words,
Stephanie
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