Welcome To West Bengal!... via my eyes and ears, a few neurons in my struggling brain, an Internet cafe and the wonders of cyberspace. I've got a 2-year mission, should I accept it, to help nurture joy and stength within the HIV+ community of West Bengal, to learn from them and hopefully to share some of my own skills...
I'll be living and working in Kolkata (formally known as Calcutta), but will also be working throughout the state of West Bengal. I will be working through VSO, who are a development charity with almost 1,500 skilled professionals currently volunteering in 34 countries. The organisation I will be working with is an umbrella organsiation for networks of people living with HIV throughout the state. These networks aim to work towards improved life chances and life experience for all people living with HIV in West Bengal. Positive people working for positive change for other positive people. Sounds great to me! My role is to work with the staff of the umbrella organisation in terms of their proffessional development. It being a small under-funded organsiation, I also hope to be able to do some much broader work on developing service provision, but we'll see.. fundamentally it depends on the needs I find when I arrive.
I'm hugely excited about the professional challenge ahead, not least because it necesitates me learning Bengali which I think is very cool. I'm also however, blown away by the enormity of the personal challenge. Bizarrely, on some days it feels like more of the same, after all, I've moved to new cities and had to remold my life on plenty of occasions before, but of course, there are numerous reasons why this will be something much bigger and scarier - the language; the distance from home and you gorgeous people; a modest income; different and potentially challenging working practices; cultural nuances; extreme humidity; a whole set of unfamiliar and potentially dodgy creatures, from bacteria to crocodiles; and not least, a very different set of societal norms around status, rights and opportunity - to name but a few. Having said all that, I am very much aware that everyone of those things is also, and indeed predominantly, a wonderful thing providing a multitude of gorgeous experiences just waiting to happen. Hurrah!
Welcome to the next chapter of my life!

The views expressed in this blog are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of VSO

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