Day 18

Sunday 15th October

And so the adventure continues. We are now two and a half weeks into our Indian experience and all is going well. A lot has happened in this last week and we haven’t had much time to sit down and catch up with our thoughts so it feels like I’ve got an awful lot to babble on about. We continued our work at Sealdah train station every morning and it definitely became easier. We established relationships with the children and the nasty smells and sights seemed to blend into the background whilst we were concentrating on feeding, washing and working with the kids. Don’t get me wrong, there were still plenty of moments when I had to stop and breathe deeply when faced with a new horror but generally we coped much better.

A new volunteer, Charlotte, arrived last weekend from Bangkok. She’s been away from her home in Eastbourne for ten months traveling the world and India is her final stop off, I’m sure she’ll have plenty to tell her parents over the Christmas dinner.

Friday the 6th was yet another Hindu festival, the Laksmi Puja. We spent the day upstairs with the family cooking and preparing for the evening’s feast and watching Deba absorbedly paint the floor with Hindu symbols. The family fasted throughout the day until eight o’clock that night when we sat down to enjoy a tantalisingly tasty ten course dinner followed by hours of fun with sparklers and fireworks. It was a truly wonderful day shared with the Happy Home children as they joined us at the house for prayer and dinner.

Teaching at the Happy Home school for the local village children didn’t begin until Monday 9th so the week before was fairly lazy. We managed to occupy our time with trips into the city where we walked by the monstrous and murky river Hooghly and watched the locals bathe, we haggled for gifts in the fantastic New Market and sampled fine vegetable curries in one of our favorite eateries yet, The Gupta Brothers Vegetarian Restaurant. (The spicy samosas and the vegetable burger at the snack bar downstairs are simply delicious).

When teaching finally did begin, we’d arrive back from Sealdah around eight in the morning, have a jolly good wash, sit down to breakfast, maybe squeeze a half hour nap in after scrubbing our clothes and begin classes at eleven. The children are very sweet, (some sweeter than others) and range in age from four to fourteen. Jonny and Sheena , along with one of the resident Bengali teachers, took the older group and Charlotte, myself and another Bengali teacher took the younger group.

Our lessons began well but as the week progressed we started to feel at a loose end. Often many of the children don’t turn up for classes as they’re needed at home to clean, cook and help with younger siblings and as volunteers are constantly coming and going (you can work for Smile for as little a time as two weeks) the children find it hard to concentrate. Taking on board so many new faces would prove difficult for any child to cope with. The school certainly doesn’t need six teaching staff when most days only eight of the twenty children turn up and we felt that only long term placements (six months or more) should be available for the Happy Home project to keep the disruption of the children’s education to a minimum. We sat down with Deba on Friday at the end of week meeting and told him how we felt. He recognised the problems and told us that usually when there are too many volunteers he moves some people to the Vocational Training Center project. The VTC is only half built and volunteers assist in the construction of the building. However, as September and October have been unusually wet this year progress cannot be made on the somewhat flooded site. It seemed like we’d arrived to work for the charity when really we weren’t needed and Deba was aware of our frustration.

He commented on how well we had taken to the Sealdah project and said that compared to most volunteers we’d coped with and handled the work extremely well. Maybe we’d feel more fulfilled if we could find similarly satisfying work elsewhere in the city lasting longer than the hour and a half we spend at the station each morning. It was a difficult decision as we’d planned for so long to work for Smile and had paid for our stay in advance but the weight of the argument in favour of finding alternative work that would make better use of our time was strong. After all, we knew that the money we’d raised was going to a great cause. As neither of us could stand the “hanging around like a spare part” feeling we decided, with Deba’s blessing, to move on.

So, here I sit in our new home, the Paragon guest house in central Kolkata. We have our own room facing onto a central courtyard where volunteers and travelers mingle and share tales from afar. You tend to meet all walks of life in these funny little hostels. There’s a sixty nine year old South African chap chewing the ear off a fresh faced, extremely young looking Japanese boy, telling dreadfully boring tales of his whereabouts over the last few years and across in the communal dormitory a young Buddhist monk plays the recorder… practices playing the recorder. A bearded fellow drums his bongos and a girl wearing far too many beads strums along with her guitar. Walking clichés. You have to laugh.

We start our new job on Monday morning working for the Mother Teresa Missionaries. We’ll meet with the group at seven in the head office then move on to the hospital for the homeless with long term illnesses. We’ll be assisting the staff with the taking care of the patients, feeding and washing them, listening to them talk and helping with the many menial jobs like laundry. We leave the hospital at twelve for a two hour lunch break then we head to a hospice for the homeless by the side of the river Hooghly where we continue with similar jobs until five o’ clock. I’m not quite sure what to expect but I believe the work we’ve experienced at Sealdah will certainly prepare us.

We both feel happier now knowing that our time and energy will be put to better use. If we can help to make a patients last few days a little easier then all the better. After being taken in by the missionaries from the streets where he was dying, one patient said, “I have lived my life like a dog but now I shall die like an angel”.

We’re going to keep in touch with Deba and if we feel after a week that we can manage it, we shall continue with the early morning work at Sealdah.