The first few days...

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August 6, 2008

Greetings from India.

The flight here was absolutely chaos, but very entertaining and enlightening… perhaps I am not a fully enlightened Hindu just yet, but everything from the JFK international terminal to switching planes and terminals in Delhi without boarding passes, to peeing in ground toilets, to making the brave fateful step outside of our final destination’s airport, was unreal. Isn’t that funny about reality? It totally kicks you in the face yet is totally unbelievable.

I couldn’t have made the trek without my travel companions from K, Hannah, Barret and Erin. All Sunday morning getting ready, drinking my last cup of American coffee from a cheesy coffee mug with sea shells on it, thinking about my last supper the night before and good bye to a very important person, to zipping up the last haul for Dave to load in the car was like some bizarre ritual to some made up ‘leaving’ religion to which I had recently been converted. Leaving places—packing up, saying goodbye, being paranoid of leaving something crucial behind, and dwelling on the fact that I won’t have the physical presences of some of my favorite people, always stresses me out. This summer I had to leave my deeply loved roommates of Severn 103 for 9 months (some will be in Europe until February), I had to leave my family’s home and live in Kalamazoo for the miniscule summer I had, and then, after having a blast with the Lepley’s, Ellie, Gavin, Suzanne, Bryan and Ainsley, all summer, I had to leave them! It seems like I have so many homes these days, Kalamazoo, Chevy Chase Blvd, Grand Rapids, and in the presence of best friends, and now Kolkata, that I forget that I am plagued with my age and circumstance and am only a homeless college student. K college tries to positively spin that syndrome by cultivating a student population that is “at home in the world”… hm…

Anyway I am in Kolkata now living with my very entertaining host family. Sadly, their mother passed away a month before we arrived, but they have hosted IPSL students for many years and it was one of their mothers favorite things. Generously they decided to take us in and make us feel like an addition to their adjusting family. I live here with Barret (from K) and Roxanna who is from Arizona. “Uncle Roy” has two daughters, 19 and 16, and they are very lively and fun to talk to.

We have not started classes or service yet, but have been meeting with the other IPSL students and our professors. There are 12 of us all together and we have to choose our service sites soon. On the first full day we were here, after making the mistake of sleeping through all of it, we had a meeting with the group for the first time. Dr. Ray, as I’ll call him for lack of being able to pronounce or remember his full name, is this Gerry Garcia- look alike Indian man, who has long wavy hair and a beard. I think that he is very groovy… He is only with us for three weeks because he teaches at a Universitey in New Jersey in the US. He is an interesting guy—philosopher, historian, and giver of service, who helped Mother Teresa build her first service project in Kolkata, the home for the destitute and dying. Our other professor that we have thus far met us Prof. Arnab Ray… I guess Ray and Roy are very common names in India. He will be teaching us Bengali and traveling around with us on our fieldtrips.

In picking sites at which to work, we first visited the Rainbow School, a division of sorts, of the Loreto School. It’s a girls school that afflutent families send their children to, but also they include many NGO-service-charity-teaching programs, etc. We had this intense tour and lecture about the entirety of this deal, but it was very confusing. At any rate, the children we would have a chance to work with are very young and live at the Rainbow School. They live, eat, and go to school there until the program can release them into the mainstream government schools. Mostly they work on learning English. The school is run by this great nun of a woman, Sister Suri, and is inhabited by hundreds of kittens, volunteers, and children. Today one of the most interesting things we saw was walking through the kitchen… there were these two enormous pots… I’m talking like a meter or more in diameter… filled with lunch that is provided for free to the hundreds of kids who need to eat. They were these huge vats of brilliant yellow rice, lentils and vegetables.

Other than those things, life has been running smoothly. I am still hopped up on jet-lag, adrenalin, confusion, and some heightened emotion. Kolkata is a very enormous city and reminds me a lot of my time spent in Ghana in high school…on a much larger scale. Besides the constant noise and air pollution, my ability to grasp and deal with the concept of the next four months of my life being lived here is kind of overwhelming. I finally have internet access, and found some wireless… (much quicker than the cyber café I hit up yesterday), and I found a temporary method for calling home. Calling is a luxury and I think I will soon implament it as much as possible but it is also very hard to hear the sleepy voices of family and boyfriends and friends on the other end of the line and knowing that they are just starting the day that I am ending because we are half a world away form each other. When things settle in this won’t be so hard, I am sure…It just may take a while.

That’s all for now, I will update as I can. I miss you all and hope you’re soaking up the rest of your summertime in the states!

Love,

lisa


August 7, 2008.

While the wireless has been found, I have gotten into the habit of ‘blogging’ by night on Word and then copy and pasting it into my blog when I have a chance. Interesting about finding compouter access… our very helpful host sisters told us where to find the only wi-fi hot spot in their neighborhood, this trendy Euro coffee shop called Barista. All of their other exchange students went there to get access to their left behind western worlds, and they said it should work. We had heard this rumor from everyone else in this program. Anyhow, we stopped by their the morning after this glorious news and asked an employee if this was true… do you have wi fi? and he said “no. we don't’ have wi fi, our other location on Park street does”. So we slump away, stressed out by the fact that we’re having the “oh shit I’m in Kolkata for four months” blues and that we’ll have to use creepy slow internet cafés to type fragmented emails. Deciding to give it a test run anyway, the four K-ers and I took a laptop down there this evening and had great success with the wi fi. I then asked the employee if their wireless only worked sometimes or if they always had a wi fi connection and he said “no, we don’t have wi fi, our Park street location does though”….

Um… what? Anyway, the wireless might not be reliable, or maybe the language barrier is just so intense that neither party knows what the other is saying. I think that might be it. It is so interesting how these obnoxious American accents butcher the soft Bengali words that our family tries to teach us, and how it warps common English words in their personal dictionaries.

Anyway, today some IPSL students and I decided to brave the dreaded Kolkata Metro Rail. We took the underground train to the street that Loreto College is on, where we will be taking classes, so that we could familiarize ourselves with the school and buy books at the Oxford Bookstore that is around there too. So, there were seven of us, probably a bad number of increadibly white women from the us to be walking around together through the Lake Street Market rush, but we went for it anyway. While everyone stares at our alabastar skin glowing through their very colorful street market, they are very helpful. It was almost as if they knew what we were looking for “Kalighat Station? Keep going!”. The other amazing thing is that I am feeling more and more like a kid, or like a high schooler who just got their drivers license. As we get more and more familiar with this completely overwhelming city, we can do new little things, like take the metro, find the IPSL building, walk to a coffee shop, find internet access, shop for clothing. With these accomplishments comes great personal pride and excitement, when, at home, I could do all of these things and way more and probably do them better and not look like an idiot. Oh, wait, I’m in India. Everything I do will make me look like an idiot. I am going to constantly feel like a big, dumb, clumsy and confused person.

That is probably what Margaret meant by “Study Abroad is reality guys, reality.” And why we spent hours and hours talking in Carol Anderson’s class, Culture Nationality and Religion, about all of the idiotic stuff that the just then returning juniors did in their respective sites. But, even if we make fools out of ourselves, we are still learning and then can try not to make the same foolish mistake later. Each of these accomplishments are rewarded with a shower—Barret and I are up to two-a-day, and we are both girls who really would prefer not to shower. But it is so hot here… the paper yesterday said that it was about 100 degrees Farenheit and 100% humidity. It is insane, this monsoon season. But apparently by the middle of October it will cool down a lot and be in the 70s. I don't know how true that will be… at this point, I’ll believe it when it happens. It is so hot and humid here that it doesn't seem like it could ever not be.



August 8, 2008

Today has been a very taxing day already. The group went with Arnab, our professor/guide through India, to three of Mother Teresa’s places of prayer and service. First we went to Nirml Hriday, the home for the destitute and dying, then to the Motherhouse, where she and the sisters lived, and finally to Shishu Bhavan, the children’s house. All of the experiences were completely exotic, but not in the tropical drink by the pool sort of way, obviously. Nirml Hriday was the main reason that I applied for this study abroad program through K and the IPSL. Right about the time I became obsessed with going to India, I also became fascinated with this one of Mother’s missions of charity. Volunteering at the home is very popular among tourists, visitors and those making pilgrimages, but not so much among IPSL students. Being in there was much different than I had expected. I forgot that when you get old and have lived a devastatingly impoverished life, you tend to be extremely tiny, frail and lethargic. The women we saw today were all skinny skinny, many of them lying on their beds, some shuffling around, and others weeping. The home was very clean though and so were the patients. We only had the chance to observe the activity of the house and see volunteers walk around handing out medicine, holding the hands of patients and helping them dress and be comfortable. The time is coming where we have to decide which place of service we wish to attend for the four and a half months we are here. After my initial fascination with the home for the destitute and dying, I actually arrived in Kolkata and was overwhelmed and feeling less than confident in my ability to perform such a taxing and stressful job while still trying to assimilated to this culture. But, after going there, I have realized that my only reasons of insecurity about this job are very lame. I’m worried that I won’t do a good job, that I am not strong enough for this role. I suppose that the only way to find out if I am strong enough for it is to try it out. So, most likely I will end up there.

The motherhouse was another completely mind blowing experiences. We had a chance to see Mother’s tomb and offer a prayer for someone or something and the sisters would acknowledge it in their prayer rituals. Looking around the Motherhouse were other Europeans and some Indians all on pilgrimages to this really sacred place. Not being particularly Catholic, like the rest of my family, I still find it fascinating to go to mass with them and observe some deep Catholic rituals. Even though I am the scholarly skeptic, I still get very emotional when in a church or reciting some long-memorized prayer, and being inside of the Motherhouse was no different an experience. Walking around this open-air kind of home, you could hear the sisters in mass, it looked like, praying and singing in unison. The ethereal sound of their songs and recitations echoed through this building, making me unable to assume any kind of composure. It was truly beautiful and very moving, yet also confusing. They were doing everything in a peaceful unison, while the crazy traffic and movement of teeming Kolkata screamed below. Nothing moved them or disturbed them from their almost trance-like state.

The last stop was Shishu Bavan, Momther Teresa’s home for the poorest of the poor’s children. It’s an orphanage run by these sisters and houses all kinds of babies and toddlers. Standing out front of the building waiting to be shown around were a couple women with their tiny babies. These were really the smallest children I have ever seen—and the ones that were inside of the orphanage were just as small, many of them having physical deformities and potential handicaps later in life. After nannying for the perfectly proportioned, fed, and developed Ellie and Gavin this summer, seeing these babies with early marks of suffering that would probably continue for the rest of their lives, was really shocking. All I could think about was round, chunker Gavin, my 6-month-old boyfriend this summer, and all of his perfect fingers and toes.

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Comments

[catherine gernand]

my what a journey so far
I can't believe all that you are taking in. You must be ready to expolde:) Everything sounds so interesting. I can't wait to hear more about this adventure. Life here is boring comparativley. I still have to ready your blog all the way through and will send you another comment after I do. Busy day here.. Love and miss you tons. Auntie Cats