past half way. really?

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16-19 October 2008

I’ve been having trouble blogging lately. From a few entries ago I had been in the middle of being sick, tired, and at a bottoming-out point in my trip. I was kind of anticipating that lag in energy and desire to be in India. Climbing out of that was helped by the Pujas and a week and a half off of school and service. During that point all of us had the opportunity to kind of dictate our own schedules—as all of the teenager-young adult aged people in Kolkata go a little bit crazy during Durga Puja. Our host sisters were running around with boys and their friends all day and night, and we were kind of let off of the surveillance hook as well. The excessive control over our lives has been the hardest cultural adjustment, I think. After two years of college—where, in the US you typically move out of your parents house to attend University instead of still living at home, sharing a room with your 16 year old sister—Barret and I, at least, haven’t lived at home with a questioning family and dinner times and a desired control or knowledge over our lives. It is much harder than I thought it would be to deal with. It was kind of easy at first—everything was so insane that I didn't notice this difficulty as much. Now that we are two and a half months in, I am feeling the build up of the situation, I think.
Anyway, the Pujas gave us some life back. We got to wake up early and go running at the lake near our house EVERY DAY (the absence of running and really weather that makes running permissible was making me STIR CRAZY) and then eat breakfast and then usually pack up our Ospreys with computers, headphones, books, and school work and just get out of our house for the whole day. That is: we got to eat lunch and dinner when we wanted to, and we weren’t force-fed weird gray vegetable mess and rice, or boiled bananas. And we weren’t given the third degree about whether or not we “loved the food”. Meal conversations usually happen like this, after completing dinner, trying to leave the table unnoticed and then getting trapped by Uncle Roy, who is usually tipsy, telling us long-winded and convoluted stories and then interrogating us about dinner:

Uncle Roy: Ah, Hello, Ma’ams. The men-oo tonight is rice, Bhat, boiled vegetable, torkari, pish (fish) for Barret and Roxanna, and soybean preparation for veg-Lisa and green salad.

Us: Yes it was very good.

Uncle Roy: Were you loving your dinner tonight?

Us: Yes, it was very good.

Uncle Roy: You were not loving it?

Us: No! It was soooooo good.

Uncle Roy: Sorry darlings, you are in West Bengal, you must eat Bengali food.

Us: Yes, but we liked dinner.

Etc, etc etc.

That is starting to get a little better…but if we don’t get questioned after we eat then he will sit at the table and watch us eat and when our plates near empty a big pile-o-food is dumped on them.

So, the whole point of describing that scene was to illustrate the elation with which we found ourselves during our week off. It is quite humorous—our interactions with Uncle Roy. They are getting increasingly frustrating, but I think it is mostly because living in a culture for two and a half months where it is so hard for us to communicate, sleep, and maintain our health has jaded us. As our experience here lengthens it makes external life in Kolkata—walking down the street, going out to dinner, not getting lost, riding the metro and getting taxis, bargaining better at the market, finding place to run or check our email, and figuring out how to manipulate the available electricity during load shedding—easier. Conversely, our internal experience here—family life—has gotten harder. But I suppose in a weird way, it’s normal: children get annoyed with their annoying parents, right? Especially children who have lived at college for two years and then have to move home for an extended period of time. It’s kind of like that.

So anyway, this week brought us back to our legitimacy in India: service. After a week and a half off it was time to get back to the grind for a week (next week we are going on a field trip to Purulia to see folk dances and get out of the city). It was strange going back—many of the volunteers who had been at Kalighat for the summer months ended up leaving while we were gone. Now there were new faces to get used to everywhere: patients, sisters, and volunteers. I’m sure we looked like new faces to the people who’d been there for the week and a half we weren’t, but somehow we knew where everything was and the names of half the patients. It is kind of sad though to go to work every day and have the mentality that you’ll be around for four and a half months (only two more) but you keep making new friends from all over the world who will only be with you for a week or two. Oh well, my facebook networking is branching out, right?

I don't know how to talk about service very well on this blog—I’ve explained the functioning of the operation, but I don't quite know how to talk about the experiences I have every day. Most of them are confusing because no one speaks the same language. It is also getting harder because I feel like I need to cater the retelling of my experience to the blog world—the people I am actually writing this for and then the anonymous and often times annoying and commenting audience that is the rest of the world. It’s hard to complain about that though, as a blogger. I did sign up for this; I might as well deal with those consequences. It is confusing as well because I keep feeling like I need to write positively or put a rose-colored glasses spin on everything that happens, so that when I look back at the blog or my personal journal I don’t dwell on the steaming shit I seem to illustrate. But—even if I have skewed perspective from living here and being jerked around by things I don't understand (aka, Indian culture and hospitality), the capture of my very emotions, be they influenced or not, is important to me. A lot of the time, too, I verbally exhaust an analysis of every day happenings with my roommate, Barret. It is draining but necessary, and then I sit down at my laptop to try and then hash out on paper what happened and I am completely blank. Even Barret, K College and Uncle Roy’s golden child, 4.0 Biology major, premed, etc, has been feeling the stimulation overload, concentration overload, and TRYING overload that comes with living here. We’ve all reverted to mush-brain it seems like and we crave activities that are mindless. I may have ruined Barret’s chances of getting into a good med school by introducing her to the hit show, Gilmore Girls. I busted out the secret-emergency entertainment set of DVDs (a gift from Dave, of course) when I was sick about a month ago and slowly everyone in this program has caught up on season seven, the last season, in a matter of about three weeks. The show is completely unrealistic, of course, but it showcases a fake small town America, fall leaves, cute clothing, and a diner. I’d like to blame my increased emotional attachment to the show on the fact that I’m completely deranged here in India, but I think I was predisposed to this condition. But I digress….


The closest universal communication is English, or some fragmented English-Bengali-Hindi mix. Throw in some senile old person muttering, and that’s really the new language I’ve learned while in Kolkata. It is like working at a nursing home—the joint is filled with the smelly patients, the crazy patients, the funny patients, the patients who are pretty high functioning but are stuck to their bed with arthritis and have no living family left to take care of them, and then there are the naughty ones who try to pull the wool over your eyes about how much tea they can get and whose mishti (sweet) they can snatch during breakfast.

There is Loki who is everyone’s sweetie grandma and who calls all the volunteers over to her bed to kiss their hands and smile a mostly toothless grin them. But, just when I think that she is the sweetie-grandma I catch her standing up, hunched over of course, waving her cane and yelling at her bed-ridden neighbor, Shanti, for stealing something of hers. I’m not sure how Shanti could be sneaky enough to take anything of Loki’s with her crippled legs and even more toothless smile, but apparently she’s very stealthily. Then, between Loki and Shanti is Laila’s bed. Laila is this constantly sad and weeping old lady who can’t really speak in any kind of coherent language and she just sits perched up on her cot reaching her long skinny arms up to you as you pass by and letting out a muted wail. You stop, and she stares at you, grabs your hand and pulls you to her, and then sits there, in this crying, moaning state. She holds out her hands in defeat, accepting some invisible salvation she knows isn’t really coming—perhaps the root of her relentless sadness, or maybe it’s just senility—and then buries her forehead at your shoulder or chest or arm and cries. Her sadness breaks everyones’ hearts but we also find it completely adorable, a conflict that is just one example of how much working here in Kolkata for Mother Teresa, the two facts about this study abroad experience of mine that people seem to remember, seems like exploitation. I especially feel particularly exploitative when I blog about service and the patients—like I know what I am doing here. I don’t, and I’m sure the majority of us participating in IPSL don’t know what we’re doing. The other day my friend Taylor got an email from some friend at home that said, “I hope India has been everything and more that you wanted it to be”. The interesting thing about that wish is that we had and have no idea what we wanted it to be and obviously still no idea about what it is at this point. It’s hard to respond to those wishes and statements while we’re here—and they imply some undertone of exploitation, of my greatness and Kolkata’s abundance of shit, and my ability to fix it or feel good about “serving” or pilgrimag-ing or something. The reality is that volunteer work, and I can only speak for my particular case of working for Missionaries of Charity with the “poorest of the poor”, doesn’t really make you feel good about the socio-cultural-religious world. It makes you feel kind of hopeless. I mean, there are beautiful points to the day, the toothless smiles and kisses from beautiful and strong women, and the intricacies of the festivals and the usual warmth of the surrounding culture. But every day slaps you in the face with India’s situation of a huge gaping social gap, a huge and gaping problem that is totally global. It reminds you of all of the injustices and festering social problems throughout the world. And, when you go to work each day to care for the immediate needs of those affected by the shit of the gap, knowing that you’re not preventing problems or reforming policy or changing the social structure so that maybe, eventually somewhere down the road (if the globe and human society survives some kind of obvious or alleged environmental and climate disaster—y’all can decide how you feel about it) people won’t have to go in and do emergency relief missions, or do a leveling of the playing field for social problems, because there won’t be these emergencies, unleveled playing fields or social issues. Right.

That sounds very low, right? Like I’m not seeing the validity of my job or the small and localized importance of this kind of work. It is only logical that while we are working on this world issue of tragedy and social injustice—sex and drug trafficking, prostitution, abuse of women, highly stratified social classes, racism, etc—that there have to be people who do the “clean up” for the individuals who are suffering and might not live to see the righteous affects of policy or cultural mentality reformation. I do see that every day, and yes it helps me in my situation, the reality is that mostly I see the negative side of it. We all see the negative side of it. A lot of the time. It makes you aware of the vastness of the crappiness of society, but also aware that you really only know the half of it, probably even a lot less. And, if I am interpreting this as pretty crappy, and it’s only a small part of the crappiness, just how crappy is everything? How is it that this kind of work—in the name of God or nature or humankind, whatever—makes you so callus to the hopeful potential of the world? I mean, it doesn’t make us not want to go to service or abandon our self-appointed positions in this journey, but it sure makes the journey hard. I don’t know if this makes sense. It probably doesn’t—I’m getting worse and worse at articulating the every day here. It is getting harder and harder for me to relay the delicate situation at hand and account for my often less than positive blog entries, emails etc. I’m sorry.

This has become more apparent lately. Taylor’s father flew into Kolkata on Wednesday to visit her for the week. As an avid world traveler, he had never been to India or any place quite like Kolkata. He also happens to be staying at the nicest hotel in the city, which, I might suggest is not a very good thing to do if you are planning to volunteer for Mama T or some NGO, or if you are going to visit your daughter and her friends who have been doing that for two and a half months. IT only skews your perspective and your brains capacity to take it all in so much. For reference—when a few of us went to the hotel the other day to have dinner with Mr. Keegan we experienced the extreme of reverse culture shock. Walking in the lobby was a total mindfuck, to be quite frank. Having time to sit and talk with this good ol’ American dad was completely needed and also fascinating. I think he’s been having a really hard time following around his already assertive daughter, who has gained even more of an air of confidence and ownership of her own self since arriving here. How is it that you send your kid to college with all of these tools you’ve verbally and materially bestowed upon them the past 18 plus years and then, after doing famously at a school in the US decide to leave it and everything they’re good at to go and completely suck at life in another culture? And then they get decently good at this thing they once sucked at two and a half months ago and you go and visit them and suddenly they’re telling you what to do, heckling prices for you, hailing cabs for you, telling you shortcuts giving you advice about walking in the market as a 6’ 3” tall, white, touristy looking male? Seriously… what? And on top of the role reversal, and knowing that nothing you could have brought to Kolkata to help your kid cope with the crazy situation on their hands is something that he or she hasn’t already figured out or implemented, you see the streets and you smell the garbage and you see people staring at you and yelling at you and you’re afraid, by the looks of the bumpers on all of the taxis, that you or she will be mutilated by an oncoming vehicle, and you know that every day the fruit of your loins goes to work to deal with stuff that you never had to deal with in your first three years of college or adult life, even. And it is a weird feeling—because it’s not necessarily admiration of all of the “good doing” in which your kid is participating. Because it’s the farthest thing from “good doing”. How can warping your space-time continuum with a 14 hour flight that uses up a great deal of nonrenewable resource and pollutes the atmosphere while it’s at it be doing good? And how do you deal with that—and explain to your wife on the phone or your coworkers and family members when you get back the us U.S. about what exactly you saw and what your kid was exactly doing. Because it’s not what you thought it was and you’re pretty sure it’s not what you thought it was. There is no verbal explanation or flow-chart you can draw of the Kolkata process, or even the “Study Abroad” process in general. It is bound to become a muddy little mess when you try to put it to paper or transcontinental phone conversation. It’s bound to frustrate the kid trying to tell the parent what is up. And it is also bound to frustrate the parent when they interpret what the kid is doing or how the kid is reacting to his or her age or maturity or jadedness. Because, really, the reality is that anyone, not just the young, limber, and probably privileged (if you look at the price of that international plane ticket) college kid, would start to get really bad at blogging.

Besides watching Taylor’s father go through the insanity we went through and in many ways are still going through, having the opportunity to visit with him as he visits his daughter has been excellent. His presence has kind of calmed the collective nerves of us all. I am’ not sure how it worked out as such—because I think his travels have made him a little bit of a basket case, and basket cases calming other basket cases just seems illogical—but it has. Maybe it’s just that we know he’s from freaking Pennsylvania and was just, six days ago, actually looking at the actual Appalachian Mountains, a scene I at least would die for right now. Or that he represents some comfortable thing from home and we are transferring our homesickness or longing for our families onto this poor guy. Or maybe it’s simply that we can talk to him about what is happening to us and he has this empathy that none of our host families, professors or contacts back in our Study Abroad offices have because he is here. And we can have fluid conversations with him in which all parties have a tight grasp on a common language so the issue of connotation and translation isn’t a threat. That is, the conversations are simulating but don’t require too much extra effort—like a mental break. I like mental breaks sometimes—that’s why I like the Gilmore Girls, the most mentally recessed television show ever.

But, despite my rant and rambling, a stylistic theme of this trips documentation (oops), service is still very great. It’s great in that it keeps me moving and busy and functioning—not only do I have less time to dwell on ME or my petty problems (at least while I am there and elbow-deep in the business of the day), but I have a very intuitive and brilliant support system at my fingertips right here in Kolkata. The best part is that they’ll be back in the US when I get back—and we’ve got these relationships going now that are …well… adult. And we’ll have this experience and these moments of bliss and misery, comfort and discomfort, for the rest of our lives.

Leaving for our last fieldtrip tomorrow to Purulia to see some freaking sweet folk dances…so hopefully I’ll update soon after we return on Friday. Missing everyone, my bed, and fall weather.
Cheers.

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