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

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.

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

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

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)

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

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