Day 19

Today was, for me at least, the hardest day we’ve yet had.

We awoke at 6, readied ourselves and walked for half an hour to arrive at the Missionaries of Charity main building by 7. Upon arrival we were greeted by a surprising number of volunteers crowded into a basement area all talking in an unnaturally animated manner- considering the hour- and all enjoying the breakfast provided by the sisters: a slice of almost decent bread, a banana and a cup of hot, sweet tea. We, in customary fashion, sat in a corner, chewed silently and observed the many and varied faces.

Listening to snatched fragments of conversation and studying the faces and manners of expression it soon became clear that there was no predominant contingent. There was a considerable quantity of Japanese, a number of Spanish, French, quite a few Irish, some Americans scattered about (their whine always makes them instantly detectable), a group of English made conspicuous by their relative timidity and a number of other European and Asian faces. There were, in short, people from everywhere- everywhere it would seem, except Australia, which, bearing in mind their absolute ever-presence on the rest of the planet, is very curious.

Soon after we’d sat down, a man plonked himself down beside us. He happened to be the man whose bandana I’d been mocking for the past five minutes so I naturally tensed up a little. He was tall, rangy, with thin wire-framed glasses and an absurdly thin strip of gingery blonde hair that ran between his bottom lip and the tip of his chin. He had one of those large, expansive faces that when twinned with a poor sense of personal space serves to make looking at him rather difficult without visibly retracting.

He told us, without our prompting, his story so far. He is a Dutch missionary, a man who has lived in Newcastle for the past three years (hence his unfortunate command of English) working on a large vessel that is ultimately being primed to sail the shores of Africa with a team of doctors, nurses and gospel-spreaders. In return for medical care, the recipients must suffer the missionaries’ Christian zeal and eventually accept conversion. It’s a dubious process but one that I suppose is difficult to fault when considering the direct benefit many needy souls will receive.

After a time, people made to stand and the conversations abruptly came to a halt. A passage intended to steady the resolve of the volunteers was communally read from a large sheet hung from a cupboard- one, I assume, that Mother Teresa herself may have once penned or said herself- and a simple hymn something along the lines of: ‘We have our hope in Jesus (x3). We love the lord our God (x3)’ that was sung in a typically dirge-like manner. I abstained from doing either. A circle then loosely formed around a stubbly, pony-tailed Irishman, a man who would have looked far more at home playing a penny whistle on a pub corner than in the smooth-stoned interior of a convent. A song was then rather weakly and rapidly sung as follows:

‘We thank you thank you thank you!
We thank you thank you thank you!
We thank you thank you from our hearts!’ (x3)
‘We bless you bless you bless you!’ etc (x3)

The Irish man cringed with delighted embarrassment. It soon transpired that it was his final day of five weeks with the organization (though I was later to discover that a volunteer of even a day is entitled to the same treatment). A limp cheer, giggles and a pattering applause went up at the end. Then, with the ensuing energy of a team-talk completed, steel shutters were rattled up at the end of the room and we all filed out onto the streets.

We were heading for our morning session (8:00- 12:00) at Prem Dan, a hospital for the long-term sick, every one of which will have lived their lives on the streets of Kolkata. Besides these facts, we knew little of what was in store. Conversations with other people making their way alongside us suggested that, due to the transitory nature of most volunteers’ time, there was no orientation and no leaders as such. We were to just learn the process from the most confident-looking person we could find. We arrived after a twenty-minute winding walk through filthy, crowded streets lit by a milky sun that barely penetrated the city’s morning haze.

The building itself is situated behind perimeter brick walls and is roughly the size of a large municipal sports centre. The surrounding concreted space around the building is similar in space and size to a substantial quad and is mostly covered in construction materials- sand and stone piles, etc. A number of the patients were sat around on benches or wheelchairs. The most arresting sight as you enter the area is the centre of the building (as it faces you) where, in an enclave two-storeys high, a towering figure of Jesus, robed and glowing, looks compassionately upon all he surveys. As the hospital is split by gender we followed our respective sexes to the opposite ends of the building.

First off, we had a mountainous paddling pool’s worth of hand-washing to do. This was performed by a number of us who busily slapped and kneaded the sheets and disinfectant-stinking garments around on stone slabs beside deep basins. The remaining water was then wrung out of each item and handed to the permanent Indian staff that hung it out to dry.

Once completed, I followed a couple of people into the ward itself. It wasn’t so much a ward in the conventional sense, it was really just a poorly-lit room say, ten beds deep and thirty across, that had glass-fronted cupboards lining the walls and a curtained-off area which I later learned led to a toilet and wash area. It had the feeling of a sprawling, hastily arranged refuge.

The people that lay on the beds were in various states of debilitation but most seemed too weak to move around independently. There were a few young teenagers and men in their early twenties but most were aged and decrepit. Some seemed to show signs of suffering from mental illness- rocking, repeating sounds, spontaneous screaming, etc. Nearly all of them were shockingly skeletal. One man I passed when weaving through the beds, familiarizing myself with the patients and layout, was in a state as near to death as I could ever imagine.
This man of around seventy lay straight on his back, arms by his side, with his entire body lain beneath a brown blanket that was taut, un-creased and shroud-like against his bones. His emaciated head was tilted back as if to open up his airway and make the task of his breathing a little easier. Each breath was the breath of someone whose lung capacity had been reduced to that of a small dog- every inhalation and exhalation a laboured and insufficient snatch at the air around him. All his energy seemed devoted to this desperate and seemingly futile effort of simply breathing. The indefatigable spirit of the man, against all reasonable expectation, was pushing his existence to the absolute boundary of its limits.

I discovered some latex gloves in a cupboard and after asking an efficient-looking man what I might do to help, he suggested taking some oil from a shelf and offering patients a massage. This greatly appealed to me, as it would yield immediate results with the added bonus of allowing me to become better acquainted with some of the patients.

I went to work on the nearest man I could find. His legs seemed to be troubling him, so I gestured for him to lie back and sit in a semi-supine position. I put some oil into my gloved hands, rubbed them together and gently took hold of his calf muscle. Unfortunately, he didn’t really have one. His thigh muscles were much the same when he pulled the legs of his trousers back. He was quite literally skin and bone. I pressed my fingertips against the meager strips of what I could find and rubbed delicately in a circular motion. He seemed to enjoy it well enough.

The day wore on, a few more massages, taking a man to sit on a toilet stand and washing his bottom after he’d defecated on the floor, offering food and water when it arrived, holding proffered hands and listening to the incomprehensible Bengali that was eagerly spoken at me. At one point, as the food was being served, I entered a small back room occupied by seven men some of whom were clamouring for water. An old man in the corner was laid on his bed wearing nothing but a thin vest top and seemed paralysed but for his right arm. He had rice strewn all over his body between the dish, which lay by his outstretched hand by his side, and his mouth. He was gawping like a fish in a vacant manner. It was quite a shocking scene of what I thought to be neglect. I strode outside and asked another efficient-looking person why someone wasn’t in there feeding him and why on earth the men hadn’t been given water. ‘You don’t worry about them’ he said in a heavy Spanish accent, ‘That is the TB room- we don’t go in there. Leave it to the Indians.’ Crikey.

By the time 12:30 came, we’d finished and regrouped. Lucy had shared much the same experience but had a rather harder time of it as after food had been served an unprecedented number of the patients had bouts of spontaneous explosive diarrhoea- mostly all over the freshly laundered sheets of their beds.

We agreed almost immediately that the work was perhaps a little too much for us. Some people (especially the Irish) just seemed to thrive on energetically attempting to relieve the inconsolable state of the patients: boisterously joking with them, encouraging them to get up and dance, shouting lewd remarks across the room. Our characters just seemed ill equipped to cope. We decided to look to another of the centers for something more suited.

Our afternoon session was to be spent in Kali Ghat, a centre for the dying destitute (as opposed to the supposedly curable destitute at Prem Dan). We were apprehensive about encountering the same sort of situation but resolved to continue. Thankfully we had nothing to fear.

Kali Ghat is a dignified, calm and peaceful place run in an orderly and efficient manner by the dedicated sisters in charge. The patients were much the same and a similar routine to Prem Dan followed but the steady way in which it ran created a great sense of satisfaction by the end of the day.