Thursday August 28th 2008 – Kolkata
It’s been quite an exhausting week. This is really our first full week of service and classes, after almost a full month of being here…it almost feels like the first week all over again, getting used to the schedule and rhythm of everything. We usually have Thursdays off, but we had a class this morning at the Tagore Gandhi Institute for cultural learning and service (TGI), where all of our IPSL classes are held. It’s a pretty sweet little building just down the road from our house. All eleven of us pile into this tiny room almost everyday for our classes on Indian religions, culture and Bengali language. It’s so hot and tiny that I am almost completely drenched in sweat by the time our two-hour classes are over with, but it’s interesting stuff all the same. We’ve been going through the major religions of India, discussing (more listening to lectures really) on Hinduism and Brahmanism, Jainism, Buddhism and today Sikhism. We are supposed to have our class on Ethics, Leadership and Morality at Loreto College tomorrow, but many of the Catholic schools and organizations are going on a sort of strike tomorrow because of some recent violence against a Catholic school in Orissa.
And we’ve still been trying to explore the city bit by bit. There is are two parks very near our house, and one has a small lake and stadium where people go to jog and walk in the mornings before it gets too hot and sunny. It’s sill really hot, humid and sunny at 5:30 AM, so we haven’t been able to make much use of it yet, hopefully when it cools down it will be nice to run around a little. So mostly we’ve been checking out good places to go shopping…and we’ve found that there seems to be a never-ending amount of them. We’ve seen Sudder Street, where most of the tourists and a lot of the volunteers working at missionaries of charity stay…and buy things. Right off of Sudder Street is an indoor type market called New Market full of all kinds of shops and people. Even before we entered the building where New Market is located people were ushering us inside telling us to come to their shops, offering us deals on various items, asking us what we were looking for. It didn’t stop there. For the entire hour we looked around, vendors and salesmen were following us around trying to get us to come to their shops and to buy all sorts of different things. It felt impossible to breathe let alone look at a shirt or necklace or pair of earrings. Even just a glance in the direction of an item hanging from a window would grant a call from the nearest shop owner or salesman. Even when we told people that we didn’t need help, that we really just wanted to look around and find things on our own they continued to follow us around trying to make sales offers or point us in some direction they thought we should go. I think we learned not to go to New Market with anymore than two people unless you’re actually looking for a whole lot of attention.
Buying biscuits and tea from street vendors is something I think that will never get old. There must be a man on every corner who is boiling a hot kettle of tea and has an assortment of different biscuits that he’ll pick for you out of glass jars. There are all sorts of markets along the streets too, as well as vendors selling hot vegetable and egg rolls, sweet shops with all kinds of different Indian cookie type treats and more. There is a market not far from our house, Lake Market where people sell vegetables, fruits, nuts, flowers and various household necessities (water bottles and clothespins) by candle light every night after seven when the sun has gone down. The nearest metro station is right in the middle of this market. We take can catch it there at Kalighat and take it to Park Street station where we can get to Loreto College as well as an array of nice restaurants, shopping mall type places and other larger main stores. There’s a Bose store and a music store called music world, as well as a huge dessert and cake restaurant type place called Flurries that our host family raves about.
We can’t stop hearing about the upcoming Pujas. They actually don’t happen for another six weeks or so, the middle of October, but apparently they’re THE time to be in Kolkata. We’ve even seen a few places where people are constructing stage like buildings for the fairs and parades that happen when they begin. Our host sister todl us that we will get sarees and all kinds of new clothes for the festivities, go out to dinner. She said it is like a week long party.....I can't wait!
Friday, August 29, 2008
Wednesday August 20, 2008 - Kolkata
This past weekend we took a trip to Orissa, the state/province just south of West Bengal, visiting Puri, Konark, and Bhubaneswar....
We returned to Kolkata at about 4:30 AM this morning after departing from Bhubaneswar at about 8 PM on Tuesday night. After leaving Kolkata this past Saturday night (the 16th), we spent the night on a train, arriving in Puri the next morning around 7 AM. We were then driven from Puri to Konark, along the country roads lining the East Indian coast looking out over the Bay of Bengal. We got to Konark after about an hour of bumpy winding roads, with all sorts of maneuvering in order to avoid hitting the many cows, goats, bicycles and people lining the roads. Konark was a pretty small place; full of arts and craft stands as well as booth after booth of vendors selling coconuts and various sweets and snacks. There were cows, goats and dogs all over the place (they really ruled the roads, much more so than any of the cars, bikes, auto-rickshaws, motos and people).
Our hotel in Konark was about a 45-minute walk from the beach, so we walked past most of the stands on one of the three main village roads, past the entrance to the famous sun temple and down a road lined with beautiful green palms and other trees that hung over the road like canopies…to the sand and muddy water. It was so beautiful. The waves at the beach were like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Definitely some of the biggest and most treacherous looking seas I have ever been near. Of course we weren’t allowed to swim (unless us women had full body suit swim wear) because of the intensely strong undercurrent. We’d been told about all kinds of horror stories about people getting swept away, but there were still a few younger men out riding the waves not too far off the shore. We even saw some boats, fishermen on long canoe type boats that looked like they would be swallowed up at any moment.
It was a bit hard to walk around Konark though. We were forever being bombarded by people wanting to take our photographs or sneaking a ‘snap’ from their cell phones. And vendors would not leave us alone, it was impossible to walk down the street without being followed by someone trying to sell us something or else being called out to; ‘hallo Madame,’ ‘please come look,’ along with all sorts of other lines to get us to buy things from their trinket filled booths. Even when we went to visit the sun temple and were walking around with a tour guide, one woman came and stood amongst us as her husband took a picture, right in the middle of our guide’s speech. Sometimes it felt like we were getting more attention than the sun temple itself, a famous world heritage site designated by UNESCO.
It was an amazing temple, built in the mid-13th century. Konark is famous for this temple and the beautiful sunlight that it gets being so close to the sea. Our guide knew all about the carvings lining its surface and even explained the entire construction process. That which remained of the original structure was over 30 meters tall; around 90 feet, and our guide told us that it had originally stood at over 40 meters. That’s enormous! He explained how they had, had to construct one level at a time, covering it with sand as they went in order to build the next, using elephants to pull and push the stone up the sand to the proper position. One of the carvings on the temple showed this process, it’s unbelievable! He also pointed out many of the erotic carvings lining the outside walls. Some of the carvings were miniature pieces at the base of the structure, but some higher up were almost life sized. And there were so many different scenes; whole sequences portraying monogamy, polygamy, and androgyny, it was pretty interesting.
Apart from it being a somewhat exhausting experience just to stand and walk around, the temple was quite a sight. The temple structure was spread out into three separate buildings, a smaller structure in the front serving for a dance hall, the largest structure in the center for prayer or sort of holding/reception chamber for devotees, and a second smaller building in the back where the Surya (sun god) deity was kept. The center structure was designed like a chariot, with twelve wheels on each side, each around nine feet in diameter. The number of wheels were said to correspond with different increments of time, twenty-four wheels in total and twenty-four hours in the day. There were also seven giant stone-carved horses (seven days of the week) pulling the chariot, only two of which were still partially intact.
Another famous Temple in Orissa (the state/province just south of West Bengal) is in Puri. We didn’t get to stop and see any of this city though, only passed through on our way to Konark. But it is home to a sister like Temple to Konark’s sun temple. Puri’s Temple is even larger than Konark's and it is dedicated to the god Jagannath, god of dance. It is called the white pagoda, whereas Konark’s sun temple is referred to as the black pagoda. Our host family told us a lot about the Jagannath temple, non-Hindus are actually not allowed inside, but it must be a pretty amazing site. I guess the temple employs some 6,000 men and a Kitchen filled with 400 cooks serves almost 20,000 people everyday. I guess it is one of the largest kitchens in the world.
We tried to catch the sunrise on our last morning in Konark, got up at 4 AM in order to try and get to the beach on time. Although we ended up getting to the beach a bit too late to see the early rays, the sky was pretty cloudy and we wouldn’t have been able to see much of the sunrise. It was still a pretty gorgeous morning though and so we sat for a while, mesmerized by the ocean trying to wake ourselves up a bit more. We ended up talking with an older man who had been hanging out as well, Baba Punda as he introduced himself. He even invited us to have tea in his ashram not far from the beach, and so the seven of us who had gone to see the sun followed and chatted with him for a while. He had a cozy little stone gazebo-like ashram that looked out onto the water and so we sat on mats and sipped tea while he told us about all sorts of different visitors whom had crossed his path. He had a whole list of names memorized, probably over forty some odd that had stayed at his ashram, along with a book filled with notes from people all over the world.
On our way back to Kolkata we stopped to see a Buddhist temple called the peace pagoda just outside of Bhubaneswar, the capital city of Orissa. It was consecrated by King Ashoka centuries ago. He was known as a very violent and war-fareing king, but one day after an especially bloody battle on the Orissan planes, he had a change of heart and converted to Buddhism and a completely nonviolent lifestyle. This temple sits on a hill that over looks the plains where Ashoka’s famous battle is said to have taken place. I don’t think I have seen green like the green that covers these fields.
We also visited some ancient Jain caves just outside of Bhubaneswar. The Udayagiri and Khandagiri caves from the 1st century BC. I was expecting a few holes in a big hill with monkeys hanging around (Arnab our advisor sort of person told us that they had been taken over by monkeys). But they were incredible, there were tons of different caves, and each was an entire chamber carved into the stone surface of a towering hill. Some were giant open spaces like the rooms of houses and others seemed just big enough for someone to sleep inside. There were different architectural designs to some of them as well (pillars and different shaped archways…) and they were all covered with ornate carvings of animals, people and other figures and images.
This past weekend we took a trip to Orissa, the state/province just south of West Bengal, visiting Puri, Konark, and Bhubaneswar....
We returned to Kolkata at about 4:30 AM this morning after departing from Bhubaneswar at about 8 PM on Tuesday night. After leaving Kolkata this past Saturday night (the 16th), we spent the night on a train, arriving in Puri the next morning around 7 AM. We were then driven from Puri to Konark, along the country roads lining the East Indian coast looking out over the Bay of Bengal. We got to Konark after about an hour of bumpy winding roads, with all sorts of maneuvering in order to avoid hitting the many cows, goats, bicycles and people lining the roads. Konark was a pretty small place; full of arts and craft stands as well as booth after booth of vendors selling coconuts and various sweets and snacks. There were cows, goats and dogs all over the place (they really ruled the roads, much more so than any of the cars, bikes, auto-rickshaws, motos and people).
Our hotel in Konark was about a 45-minute walk from the beach, so we walked past most of the stands on one of the three main village roads, past the entrance to the famous sun temple and down a road lined with beautiful green palms and other trees that hung over the road like canopies…to the sand and muddy water. It was so beautiful. The waves at the beach were like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Definitely some of the biggest and most treacherous looking seas I have ever been near. Of course we weren’t allowed to swim (unless us women had full body suit swim wear) because of the intensely strong undercurrent. We’d been told about all kinds of horror stories about people getting swept away, but there were still a few younger men out riding the waves not too far off the shore. We even saw some boats, fishermen on long canoe type boats that looked like they would be swallowed up at any moment.
It was a bit hard to walk around Konark though. We were forever being bombarded by people wanting to take our photographs or sneaking a ‘snap’ from their cell phones. And vendors would not leave us alone, it was impossible to walk down the street without being followed by someone trying to sell us something or else being called out to; ‘hallo Madame,’ ‘please come look,’ along with all sorts of other lines to get us to buy things from their trinket filled booths. Even when we went to visit the sun temple and were walking around with a tour guide, one woman came and stood amongst us as her husband took a picture, right in the middle of our guide’s speech. Sometimes it felt like we were getting more attention than the sun temple itself, a famous world heritage site designated by UNESCO.
It was an amazing temple, built in the mid-13th century. Konark is famous for this temple and the beautiful sunlight that it gets being so close to the sea. Our guide knew all about the carvings lining its surface and even explained the entire construction process. That which remained of the original structure was over 30 meters tall; around 90 feet, and our guide told us that it had originally stood at over 40 meters. That’s enormous! He explained how they had, had to construct one level at a time, covering it with sand as they went in order to build the next, using elephants to pull and push the stone up the sand to the proper position. One of the carvings on the temple showed this process, it’s unbelievable! He also pointed out many of the erotic carvings lining the outside walls. Some of the carvings were miniature pieces at the base of the structure, but some higher up were almost life sized. And there were so many different scenes; whole sequences portraying monogamy, polygamy, and androgyny, it was pretty interesting.
Apart from it being a somewhat exhausting experience just to stand and walk around, the temple was quite a sight. The temple structure was spread out into three separate buildings, a smaller structure in the front serving for a dance hall, the largest structure in the center for prayer or sort of holding/reception chamber for devotees, and a second smaller building in the back where the Surya (sun god) deity was kept. The center structure was designed like a chariot, with twelve wheels on each side, each around nine feet in diameter. The number of wheels were said to correspond with different increments of time, twenty-four wheels in total and twenty-four hours in the day. There were also seven giant stone-carved horses (seven days of the week) pulling the chariot, only two of which were still partially intact.
Another famous Temple in Orissa (the state/province just south of West Bengal) is in Puri. We didn’t get to stop and see any of this city though, only passed through on our way to Konark. But it is home to a sister like Temple to Konark’s sun temple. Puri’s Temple is even larger than Konark's and it is dedicated to the god Jagannath, god of dance. It is called the white pagoda, whereas Konark’s sun temple is referred to as the black pagoda. Our host family told us a lot about the Jagannath temple, non-Hindus are actually not allowed inside, but it must be a pretty amazing site. I guess the temple employs some 6,000 men and a Kitchen filled with 400 cooks serves almost 20,000 people everyday. I guess it is one of the largest kitchens in the world.
We tried to catch the sunrise on our last morning in Konark, got up at 4 AM in order to try and get to the beach on time. Although we ended up getting to the beach a bit too late to see the early rays, the sky was pretty cloudy and we wouldn’t have been able to see much of the sunrise. It was still a pretty gorgeous morning though and so we sat for a while, mesmerized by the ocean trying to wake ourselves up a bit more. We ended up talking with an older man who had been hanging out as well, Baba Punda as he introduced himself. He even invited us to have tea in his ashram not far from the beach, and so the seven of us who had gone to see the sun followed and chatted with him for a while. He had a cozy little stone gazebo-like ashram that looked out onto the water and so we sat on mats and sipped tea while he told us about all sorts of different visitors whom had crossed his path. He had a whole list of names memorized, probably over forty some odd that had stayed at his ashram, along with a book filled with notes from people all over the world.
On our way back to Kolkata we stopped to see a Buddhist temple called the peace pagoda just outside of Bhubaneswar, the capital city of Orissa. It was consecrated by King Ashoka centuries ago. He was known as a very violent and war-fareing king, but one day after an especially bloody battle on the Orissan planes, he had a change of heart and converted to Buddhism and a completely nonviolent lifestyle. This temple sits on a hill that over looks the plains where Ashoka’s famous battle is said to have taken place. I don’t think I have seen green like the green that covers these fields.
We also visited some ancient Jain caves just outside of Bhubaneswar. The Udayagiri and Khandagiri caves from the 1st century BC. I was expecting a few holes in a big hill with monkeys hanging around (Arnab our advisor sort of person told us that they had been taken over by monkeys). But they were incredible, there were tons of different caves, and each was an entire chamber carved into the stone surface of a towering hill. Some were giant open spaces like the rooms of houses and others seemed just big enough for someone to sleep inside. There were different architectural designs to some of them as well (pillars and different shaped archways…) and they were all covered with ornate carvings of animals, people and other figures and images.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Kolkata
Wednesday August 13, 2008 - Kolkata
It’s been a week since we arrived in Kolkata, and it is definitely Monsoon season. It had only rained a bit since we first arrived, but yesterday we had the chance to fully acquaint ourselves with what monsoon season means. It started to rain as Erin, my roommate, and I were finishing lunch, just before we were about to leave for our 2:30 class. We were supposed to take the metro rail from Kalighat station, about a 15 minute walk from our house, to Park Street station and then walk about another fifteen minutes to Loretto College for an Ethics, Morality, and Leadership class we will be taking there. But it only took about ten to fifteen minutes after the rain began for the streets to be almost entirely submerged under water. And it took less than a minute after leaving the house for us to become entirely soaked through. We had to wade through water that at points almost reached our knees and kept stopping every hundred feet or so thinking ‘should we really go any further, they can’t expect us to show up for class in this.’ It really was unbelievable. I don’t think I’ve experienced rain like that ever before in my life. It truly was coming down in sheets. Except for a few people hanging out on doorsteps and under overhangs we were basically the only people out, walking around. I guess, yeah we could have taken the hint, but we finally ran into a few of our classmates who had turned around and were headed home. They had reached the Lake Market area, just before the metro station, and it was entirely flooded, they said that there were actually waves in the street. Taxis wouldn’t even take us to where we were trying to go. It didn’t take that long for things to clear up though. The rain, at least this time, had stopped within about an hour and the streets were for the most part clear only a few hours after that. So class ended up being canceled (at least that’s what we were told at first, until we talked with some of our other classmates who had made the entire trip up to Loretto and sat through an entire two hour class soaking wet) and we all just got to hang out, after deep cleaning our feet with this intense antiseptic soap Dettol, and hanging up all of our clothing, that had been drenched even through raincoats, umbrellas, and ponchos.
Around four o’clock this morning we were woken by yet another downpour. This one lasted about two hours and the thunder was even more earth shattering than it had been during yesterday’s monsoon. We hadn’t received a call by the time we were supposed to leave for service, so we headed out into the yet again flooded streets to meet the group, off for my first day of service (everyone else had started on Tuesday when I had to trek out to the airport to pick up my bags). I think it was a bit deeper this morning, but at least it had stopped raining by the time we left the house. We kept trying to walk in areas that weren’t fully covered in water, but had to keep dodging the few cars that were still barreling through the mostly flooded roads. The basement to the apartment building where we are living was probably under about a foot of water. And our host sister, Ahana, told us that last year there had been a storm so bad that it had been entirely flooded, all the way to the ceiling. I can’t even imagine.
I was finally able to get my bags yesterday morning, before the monsoon, but only after about an hour taxi ride out to the airport and having to search through a pile of nearly a hundred other lost and unclaimed bags that had been thrown chaotically into some back room inside the Kolkata Airport International Terminal. Of course I had to obtain all of the proper signatures and passes from the airport manager, various security guards, the man working at the lost luggage office, customs, and Air India agents in order to simply enter the building and find out where my bags were being kept. But getting there and coming back was a whole ordeal in itself. The airport is about 45 minutes from where we are staying, that’s about an hours drive if the traffic is good. It only cost me Rs 450 to get there, but then I got stuck into taking a cab for Rs 900 on the way home, totally ripped off. Then about a block from home on the way back as I was trying to direct the taxi driver to the house, he ran into the back of a motorcycle that had weaved it’s way in front of our car. He didn’t hit it hard, only bumped it. I am sure there was not even a dent, it didn’t even start forward or anything, but the two men on the motorcycle jumped of the bike and started yelling and screaming at the taxi driver. Then they came over to his window and started slapping and punching him in the face, it was crazy. I sort of got out of the car, and people started to come around to see what was going on. The guys finally got back on their bike and I got in the car. Although the taxi driver’s eyes were all blood shot and he was obviously shaken up, he wasn’t bleeding and still helped me get my bags out of the car and to the house. It was pretty frightening.
I think the most terrifying thing so far has been the traffic. It’s even a bit scary to try and cross the street sometimes. Last week we visited all of the possible sites for our service work, and so we got to drive all over the city. IPSL has three main cars that they using to cart us around, and it’s been fun to try and talk with Babloo and Devah our ‘drivers.’ Devah speaks some English but not Babloo they’re real sweet though a funny pair as Devah is almost two feet taller then Babloo. They’re blast the Indian radio for us in the car, but that’s definitely been something to get used to, having drivers and gatekeepers and house helpers. There’s no air conditioning so we have to keep the windows down all the time in the cars and no seatbelts either except for those sitting up front. The driver is on the right side of the car and you drive on the left side of the road here, just like in the UK. But there aren’t really any lanes on the roads here, and even if there are, they don’t mean much. There are a few traffic lights, not really any stop signs or those kinds of road signs or rules, and the roads are full of holes and bumps as well as people walking, bicycles, stray dogs, foot pulled as well as auto-rickshaws, and various carts full of all kinds of things. A lot of Kolkata police direct traffic at large intersections, but other than that most drivers simply honk their horns at cross sections and the various obstacles rather than stopping or even sometimes slowing down.
I am signed up to work at Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity school/orphanage, Shishu Bhavan. I am hoping to switch into another Mother Teresa center, Kalighat or Nirmal Hriday, the center for the destitute and dying. They are both extremely filled with volunteers at the moment as many people are here over their summer break and so hopefully things will sort of calm down within the next few weeks. Shishu Bhavan is home to over one hundred kids. There are two main buildings one in which there is a room for children with special needs as well as very young babies and toddlers. The second building holds the larger group of about seventy little kids; I think they are all mostly under 10 years old. It’s really kind of a surreal place, the rooms are just lined with yellow metal cribs, with a little bit of space in between every other one for the volunteers and sisters to walk through. The room where the older kids live has a classroom on one side and the toilets and wash area on the other side. When we visited they were playing very loud children’s music. When we went to register there were tons of other volunteers there just to register, a whole group of English speakers, from England, the US and Canada, another group of French, Italians, and Chinese. It was kind of an intense process, as they called us up one by one to talk to Sister Karina, who was doing the actual written registration. She asked us where we were interested in volunteering and if we were ‘ready to commit’ to volunteering with them...I guess so. So far it’s been tough, I have been working in the section for children with special needs and sometimes there are just so many other volunteers that it is hard to find things to do. Also, being new, I don’t really know how things should be done and it feels as if we’re almost more in the way of the sisters working there than actually helping them.
I am living with Erin another girl from Kalamazoo and our host family is wonderful. I guess our host mother is kind of a big deal. She runs a Bengali magazine for women and used to be a very well known dancer. She doesn’t dance any more, but she still critiques and covers dance performances and other art exhibitions in the news and in her magazine. She took us to an art exhibition last Saturday. It was a collection of paper collages by this woman named Shakila, who is from a very rural area and has never had any formal training in art. Her collages were like paintings though, the detail was incredible and all the paper had been ripped by hand. We live in a second floor flat, with our host mother Sharmila, her daughter Ahana, and the woman who helps out in their house, Jabba. Our host mother’s brother also lives in the apartment, but we don’t really ever see him. He is an artist - painter, and Ahana told us that he is on a very different schedule than the rest of them, so we’re really around when he tends to be. Sometimes he has friends over to the house and we’ll hear drumming and other music coming from his room. They are all incredibly sweet. Our host mother works a lot, almost everyday except Sunday, but she always has her friends come over, we meet a local fashion designer and this couple who own a big toy store in town. Erin and I share a room and we eat hot food at every meal except for breakfast, the food is wonderful, spicy and so different from home. I can’t tell the difference between all of the dishes, but we eat a lot of fish, rice and chatu (basically the American naan with whole wheat flour) also a lot of okra and potatoes. A lot of the food is fried too, veggies, potatoes and sweets. Our host sister Ahana kind of has a sweet tooth, so we went out for ice cream with her the other night. I guess it was actually gelato, from this place called Mammamia, I think it’s kind of like a more upscale ice cream chain. Our family also has a driver and there is a gatekeeper for the building. It seems as if Jabba cooks for everyone, there are people it seems always coming over to speak with Sharmila or Jabba or to get food or drop off groceries or something else. I feel like we are forever being fed, always a cup of tea in the morning with cereal toast and some fruit, lunch between 12 and 1pm and dinner very late. We usually eat with our host sister between 8:30 and 9pm and our host mother eats even later than that, so she usually just sits with us for a bit while we eat.
Only seen a few cows so far, most of them out by the airport, but we saw a couple wandering the streets by our house the other night. We have geckos on our walls and there are stray dogs all over the streets, just hanging out. One morning the crows woke us up, so many of them, screaming so loudly, it was like nothing I’ve ever heard before. And the other night during one of our IPSL orientations, we got to sit up on the rooftop of the building where we have class and there were bats the size of ravens flying around gobbling up the hoards of monsoon mosquitoes.
This Saturday we are all taking a four-day trip to Puri, Konark and Bhubaneswar in West Bengal’s neighboring state Orissa. Puri is home to an enormous temple for Jagannath, the god of dance (our host family has a statue of Jagannath in their living room), and Konark has an incredible sun temple not far from the beach. It’s supposed to be a very peaceful place.
So much more to come soon...
It’s been a week since we arrived in Kolkata, and it is definitely Monsoon season. It had only rained a bit since we first arrived, but yesterday we had the chance to fully acquaint ourselves with what monsoon season means. It started to rain as Erin, my roommate, and I were finishing lunch, just before we were about to leave for our 2:30 class. We were supposed to take the metro rail from Kalighat station, about a 15 minute walk from our house, to Park Street station and then walk about another fifteen minutes to Loretto College for an Ethics, Morality, and Leadership class we will be taking there. But it only took about ten to fifteen minutes after the rain began for the streets to be almost entirely submerged under water. And it took less than a minute after leaving the house for us to become entirely soaked through. We had to wade through water that at points almost reached our knees and kept stopping every hundred feet or so thinking ‘should we really go any further, they can’t expect us to show up for class in this.’ It really was unbelievable. I don’t think I’ve experienced rain like that ever before in my life. It truly was coming down in sheets. Except for a few people hanging out on doorsteps and under overhangs we were basically the only people out, walking around. I guess, yeah we could have taken the hint, but we finally ran into a few of our classmates who had turned around and were headed home. They had reached the Lake Market area, just before the metro station, and it was entirely flooded, they said that there were actually waves in the street. Taxis wouldn’t even take us to where we were trying to go. It didn’t take that long for things to clear up though. The rain, at least this time, had stopped within about an hour and the streets were for the most part clear only a few hours after that. So class ended up being canceled (at least that’s what we were told at first, until we talked with some of our other classmates who had made the entire trip up to Loretto and sat through an entire two hour class soaking wet) and we all just got to hang out, after deep cleaning our feet with this intense antiseptic soap Dettol, and hanging up all of our clothing, that had been drenched even through raincoats, umbrellas, and ponchos.
Around four o’clock this morning we were woken by yet another downpour. This one lasted about two hours and the thunder was even more earth shattering than it had been during yesterday’s monsoon. We hadn’t received a call by the time we were supposed to leave for service, so we headed out into the yet again flooded streets to meet the group, off for my first day of service (everyone else had started on Tuesday when I had to trek out to the airport to pick up my bags). I think it was a bit deeper this morning, but at least it had stopped raining by the time we left the house. We kept trying to walk in areas that weren’t fully covered in water, but had to keep dodging the few cars that were still barreling through the mostly flooded roads. The basement to the apartment building where we are living was probably under about a foot of water. And our host sister, Ahana, told us that last year there had been a storm so bad that it had been entirely flooded, all the way to the ceiling. I can’t even imagine.
I was finally able to get my bags yesterday morning, before the monsoon, but only after about an hour taxi ride out to the airport and having to search through a pile of nearly a hundred other lost and unclaimed bags that had been thrown chaotically into some back room inside the Kolkata Airport International Terminal. Of course I had to obtain all of the proper signatures and passes from the airport manager, various security guards, the man working at the lost luggage office, customs, and Air India agents in order to simply enter the building and find out where my bags were being kept. But getting there and coming back was a whole ordeal in itself. The airport is about 45 minutes from where we are staying, that’s about an hours drive if the traffic is good. It only cost me Rs 450 to get there, but then I got stuck into taking a cab for Rs 900 on the way home, totally ripped off. Then about a block from home on the way back as I was trying to direct the taxi driver to the house, he ran into the back of a motorcycle that had weaved it’s way in front of our car. He didn’t hit it hard, only bumped it. I am sure there was not even a dent, it didn’t even start forward or anything, but the two men on the motorcycle jumped of the bike and started yelling and screaming at the taxi driver. Then they came over to his window and started slapping and punching him in the face, it was crazy. I sort of got out of the car, and people started to come around to see what was going on. The guys finally got back on their bike and I got in the car. Although the taxi driver’s eyes were all blood shot and he was obviously shaken up, he wasn’t bleeding and still helped me get my bags out of the car and to the house. It was pretty frightening.
I think the most terrifying thing so far has been the traffic. It’s even a bit scary to try and cross the street sometimes. Last week we visited all of the possible sites for our service work, and so we got to drive all over the city. IPSL has three main cars that they using to cart us around, and it’s been fun to try and talk with Babloo and Devah our ‘drivers.’ Devah speaks some English but not Babloo they’re real sweet though a funny pair as Devah is almost two feet taller then Babloo. They’re blast the Indian radio for us in the car, but that’s definitely been something to get used to, having drivers and gatekeepers and house helpers. There’s no air conditioning so we have to keep the windows down all the time in the cars and no seatbelts either except for those sitting up front. The driver is on the right side of the car and you drive on the left side of the road here, just like in the UK. But there aren’t really any lanes on the roads here, and even if there are, they don’t mean much. There are a few traffic lights, not really any stop signs or those kinds of road signs or rules, and the roads are full of holes and bumps as well as people walking, bicycles, stray dogs, foot pulled as well as auto-rickshaws, and various carts full of all kinds of things. A lot of Kolkata police direct traffic at large intersections, but other than that most drivers simply honk their horns at cross sections and the various obstacles rather than stopping or even sometimes slowing down.
I am signed up to work at Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity school/orphanage, Shishu Bhavan. I am hoping to switch into another Mother Teresa center, Kalighat or Nirmal Hriday, the center for the destitute and dying. They are both extremely filled with volunteers at the moment as many people are here over their summer break and so hopefully things will sort of calm down within the next few weeks. Shishu Bhavan is home to over one hundred kids. There are two main buildings one in which there is a room for children with special needs as well as very young babies and toddlers. The second building holds the larger group of about seventy little kids; I think they are all mostly under 10 years old. It’s really kind of a surreal place, the rooms are just lined with yellow metal cribs, with a little bit of space in between every other one for the volunteers and sisters to walk through. The room where the older kids live has a classroom on one side and the toilets and wash area on the other side. When we visited they were playing very loud children’s music. When we went to register there were tons of other volunteers there just to register, a whole group of English speakers, from England, the US and Canada, another group of French, Italians, and Chinese. It was kind of an intense process, as they called us up one by one to talk to Sister Karina, who was doing the actual written registration. She asked us where we were interested in volunteering and if we were ‘ready to commit’ to volunteering with them...I guess so. So far it’s been tough, I have been working in the section for children with special needs and sometimes there are just so many other volunteers that it is hard to find things to do. Also, being new, I don’t really know how things should be done and it feels as if we’re almost more in the way of the sisters working there than actually helping them.
I am living with Erin another girl from Kalamazoo and our host family is wonderful. I guess our host mother is kind of a big deal. She runs a Bengali magazine for women and used to be a very well known dancer. She doesn’t dance any more, but she still critiques and covers dance performances and other art exhibitions in the news and in her magazine. She took us to an art exhibition last Saturday. It was a collection of paper collages by this woman named Shakila, who is from a very rural area and has never had any formal training in art. Her collages were like paintings though, the detail was incredible and all the paper had been ripped by hand. We live in a second floor flat, with our host mother Sharmila, her daughter Ahana, and the woman who helps out in their house, Jabba. Our host mother’s brother also lives in the apartment, but we don’t really ever see him. He is an artist - painter, and Ahana told us that he is on a very different schedule than the rest of them, so we’re really around when he tends to be. Sometimes he has friends over to the house and we’ll hear drumming and other music coming from his room. They are all incredibly sweet. Our host mother works a lot, almost everyday except Sunday, but she always has her friends come over, we meet a local fashion designer and this couple who own a big toy store in town. Erin and I share a room and we eat hot food at every meal except for breakfast, the food is wonderful, spicy and so different from home. I can’t tell the difference between all of the dishes, but we eat a lot of fish, rice and chatu (basically the American naan with whole wheat flour) also a lot of okra and potatoes. A lot of the food is fried too, veggies, potatoes and sweets. Our host sister Ahana kind of has a sweet tooth, so we went out for ice cream with her the other night. I guess it was actually gelato, from this place called Mammamia, I think it’s kind of like a more upscale ice cream chain. Our family also has a driver and there is a gatekeeper for the building. It seems as if Jabba cooks for everyone, there are people it seems always coming over to speak with Sharmila or Jabba or to get food or drop off groceries or something else. I feel like we are forever being fed, always a cup of tea in the morning with cereal toast and some fruit, lunch between 12 and 1pm and dinner very late. We usually eat with our host sister between 8:30 and 9pm and our host mother eats even later than that, so she usually just sits with us for a bit while we eat.
Only seen a few cows so far, most of them out by the airport, but we saw a couple wandering the streets by our house the other night. We have geckos on our walls and there are stray dogs all over the streets, just hanging out. One morning the crows woke us up, so many of them, screaming so loudly, it was like nothing I’ve ever heard before. And the other night during one of our IPSL orientations, we got to sit up on the rooftop of the building where we have class and there were bats the size of ravens flying around gobbling up the hoards of monsoon mosquitoes.
This Saturday we are all taking a four-day trip to Puri, Konark and Bhubaneswar in West Bengal’s neighboring state Orissa. Puri is home to an enormous temple for Jagannath, the god of dance (our host family has a statue of Jagannath in their living room), and Konark has an incredible sun temple not far from the beach. It’s supposed to be a very peaceful place.
So much more to come soon...
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