Total road distance travelled: 5,255 km
Dearest friends and family – assalam alaikum from Bangladesh!! We can’t wait to share with you our most recent adventures and photos (check the photo gallery. We have managed to load some of Ciscos into the gallery this time!) We feel like the stars of some epic adventure movie or a National Geographic documentary. Its all still so amazing, breathtaking and simply WOW ...
We spent 10 days in Kolkata over Christmas and New Years Eve– we did some amazing work with charities, met and spent time with new friends from all around the world and celebrated (commiserated) the halfway point of our 4 month adventure.
We are now in Bangladesh which is a chaotic soup of unexplored excitement – but before we jump to that, here is the brilliant journey which lead us here....
Working at the Mother Teresa Mission (by Francisco)
I’ve always wanted to volunteer in Kolkata and was fortunate enough to do so at one of the ‘houses’ set up by Mother Teresa. The day after arriving in Kolkata, I left our guest house at 6am and walked through the back streets of Kolkata, making my way to ‘The Mother House’ – this is where Mother Teresa used to live. The streets were already alive with activity – chickens tied to bicycles being taken to the markets for slaughter , people washing on the streets, market stalls opening for the day, chai on the go, a hive of activity going on.
Arriving at the Mother House
I had no idea what to expect and anxiously waited outside ‘The Mother House’ with other volunteers – I met a wonderful nursing couple (David and Kajal), originally from New Zealand. We were summoned inside and directed to a hall where we waited for the 6am mass to end (mass is conducted every morning and is attended by around 100 volunteers from all over the world ranging from the age of 18-80 along with 120 nuns). We all received breakfast (a cup of chai, a banana and a slice of bread), said a morning prayer with the nuns and were then told which ‘house’ we would be sent to work at (there are around 8 houses in total, some caring for disabled children, others for lepers, AIDS patients, the dying and destitute). David, Kajal and I were sent to the Kalighat district (this is where Mother Teresa set up her first house for the dying and destitute – the house is known as Mother Teresa’s first love).
My experiences at Kalighat home for the dying and destitute
After a 15 minute bus journey and a 10 minute walk, we arrived at Kalighat (the building was colonial in style, old and run down from the outside). Beggars and sick people were at the entrance – we walked into the house and were instantly greeted by the smell of illness in the air. The house holds 100 patients (50 men, 50 women). On a daily basis, volunteers travel to train stations and walk the streets to find the patients living and dying in squalor conditions. The patients are brought to Kalighat to die with some dignity.
Stretcher beds littered the hall at the house , a scene often depicted on TV of suffering people in camps. We were not orientated into what we should be doing so simply took it upon ourselves to get on and help wherever we could. We were told to wear aprons – they had the words “Jesus is our All in All” printed across them. From then on, our duties included handing out breakfasts, feeding patients who could not feed themselves, handing out medication, sitting with patients to comfort them (the human touch is so incredibly powerful - the poor, dying patients clutch the volunteers’ hands with all the strength that they have), handing out more bread and more chai to the outstretched hands and cries of “brother, brother”, collecting the plates after breakfast (which sets the wheels in motion for us to all do the washing up and drying), followed by nearly 2 hours of hand washing clothes, sheets, blankets, towels, aprons and cloth in massive concrete tubs. All the laundry is taken to the rooftop and laid on the roof and washing lines to dry for the day. Before we know it, it’s time to hand out lunch, feed the patients that cannot feed themselves, collect the plates and start the washing up again.
David and Kajal applied their nursing skills by dressing wounds, administering intravenous drugs and helping with physiotherapy. A scene that I will never forget was that of a young volunteer carrying a very thin, weak woman across the street and into the house – it was so sad to see the desperation in the woman’s face. Later that day I learned from Kajal that the woman had a massive hole in her head with her brain visible, maggots crawling inside the hole. Kajal helped to pick out the maggots and dress the wound. One woman had an open wound on her leg, this too was infested with maggots. Most of the patients that we helped where suffering from Tuberculosis or had their toes or feet amputated. Kolkata has a large number of rickshaws that are pulled by men running barefoot through the streets. They cut their feet by running over broken glass or rusty wire. Their feet then become infected, they don’t have the money to care for themselves and so the infection becomes worse, leading to amputation.
I remember sitting and feeding an old, weak, blind man. He held onto my hand so tightly, he was crippled and twisted over. I looked down at him and only imagined all the pain that he has suffered through his life. He was the first person that I went to every day. I greeted him every morning by holding his hand and touching his head – he would slowly reach to his forehead , touching it as a sign of respect.......
I arrived early at the house one morning and began handing out the breakfasts – I heard a man dying, surrounded by two sisters and two volunteers – his desperate last breaths were hard to bear: he was around my age. The nuns prayed to him and gave him his last rights, he died a few minutes later. A second person died in the time that I volunteered, fortunately I did not witness that death. We were doing the laundry the next morning, four men arrived and carried the bodies past us to the crematorium. The bodies are accompanied by volunteers as the dead often have no families. Volunteering at Kalighat once again restored my faith in mankind – there are some truly incredible people in this world who help those less fortunate, who put other people’s lives before theirs. One elderly Italian nurse has been volunteering for over 10 years. She was constantly on the go, dressing wounds, administering drugs and just spending time with patients – she had a broken leg herself!
I met some incredible people during my time there – so good to see so many young people giving their time to help others.... This is an experience that I will never forget – I will certainly return and help where I can. I also questioned why I didn’t become a nurse or doctor – it was truly rewarding helping others. I think of so many of the patients daily....
Working with the children of prostitutes:
In the afternoons we spent some time at New Light – which is an orphanage/refuge for young children of prostitutes. Kolkata is the Indian capital of prostitution – many of the young women are bussed here from small villages in Nepal after being promised husbands and/or jobs: neither of which eventuate. In time these women have a litter of unplanned offspring, and because the women are forced by their pimps to work around the clock to pay off imaginary debts, the children are left unattended and vulnerable on the streets. Many end up abused and/or in the same trade. The orphanage we worked with provides a place for 40 of these little kids to sleep and play. It was so wonderful to compare these happy, talkative and clean children to those we see sleeping on the street and picking up sacks of rubbish. All the kids wanted was love and attention – which wasn’t hard to give when they were so special.
New Years Eve Indian style:
We spent New Years Eve and the nights leading up to it with some cool travellers we met: Kajal and Dave from Noo Zillund and Pete from Australia and Anais from France. On the rooftop of the Guest House we drank Indian red wine (Yippee! Finally!) and “He-Man 9000” Bengali beer before we walked into the madness on the streets and joined a local party on another rooftop (accessible only by a bamboo ladder – give me strength) which was pumping with renditions of the omnipresent frenzied Bollywood dancing from the big screen.
Apart from coming to know the strength of a He-man hang-over, from our new friends we also learnt the value of having a useful profession: Kajal and Dave are nurses so were able to provide some really useful medical assistance at Mother Teresa’s, while Pete and Anais are street performers (who busk their way around the world - amazing) and gave the kids at New Light a circus show that children in their position never usually have the good fortune to see.
Unfortunately, and somewhat surprisingly, neither of the charities had many requirements for IT Project Plans or Investment Business Cases (shame....) but we helped with our time, energy and love which are luckily still useful commodities wherever you are in the world.
What we have learned about poverty in India:
Poverty in India is hard to face. Despite the awful heart wrenching examples of human suffering we see on a daily basis, we have always tried to help by giving money or food or water or clothes and walk away hoping that we have made some small difference to someone’s day, even if its just a full tummy or a warm body.
Sadly we have been learning there is much going on beneath the surface of the “begging industry” that its no longer clear who we are helping when we try give to those who need it most. Here is the sad truth we have learnt so far:
· Many of the beggars have “beggar masters” who control their begging takings in exchange for “protection”. These ties and networks often work all the way up to the police force so trying to take a beggar off the streets or giving him/her a meaningful job is no longer just about money when this many corrupt people have an interest in the life (income) of each beggar. How can we hope to help when for even the police the best & only place for the beggar to be is on the street?
· We see so many people on the streets who are missing arms, eyes, legs or have extreme disfigurement. These people lie on the pavement moaning and crying – often waving their stumps and writhing in pain. It is simply heart breaking to see and we always have given them women. We were shocked to learn that most of these poor souls had been enticed to the city from villages at a young age with promises of jobs, taken to beggar masters who maim them, drug them and force them to work as their employees on the streets for the rest of their lives. Its just too horrible an existence to comprehend....
· The young women in ragged saris clutching tiny dirty babies asking for “no money – just milk powder” rent the babies from poorer families as props and have arrangements with stores to sell the unused powder back to the shop for a percentage of the price. Again, this money feeds up the beggar master chain to anyone but the woman and the little baby...
· The young children living and begging at railway stations are orphaned after they have been taken from villages and promised a job in the city, only to be used as slaves for disgusting groups of men. Some of these children escape and have no choice (or hope) but to head for a railway station and try to beg for enough food to eat each day. Some of these children we have seen have been as young as two or three years old. Often these kids have become glue addicts – we’ve been told by Indians we know that this is to block out the pain of what they have been through and to numb the hard corners of each day. We have sadly witnessed the effects of this glue sniffing on little children: some are in a trace, some are acting in a bizarre fashion and some are already in the grips of being crippled by the glue. So heart breaking to see.
Exploring Kolkata:
Kolkata is a cool city – based on what we had read we had been expecting destitution and poverty, which sadly of course is there, but it is also surprisingly modern. There is a clean (what?!!) and organised (thanks to the men with guns) Metro system which connects most parts of the city. There are also trams and buses which are neither clean nor organised, but this is why we loved them for our fix of drama and excitement.
We spent our free time here walking everywhere our legs would take us: local markets, the villages in the old Chinese part of town, crazy bazaars and tropical parks; the best places were definitely not in the city and not in any guide book. One day we jumped off a bus outside town and discovered the most amazing village into which I would bet no foreigners had ventured in recent years. We had an amazing day here and Cisco got some brilliant photos of villagers going about their daily lives. These people were so poor but so humble – we got invited for chai so many times and never once was payment expected or accepted. In Hinduism a guest is equivalent to God – which I think we in the West could (and should) learn from.
Speaking of hospitality we were so lucky to spend a brilliant day with our friend and colleague Jayanta. He treated us to an excellent tour of Kolkata, fed us amazing Chinese food and ice cold beer– but mainly it was so good to meet him and hang out after working with him remotely for the last 18 months. We’re definitely hoping to see him again on our travels...
Moving on:
We stayed at Mooch-Ville (aka Hotel Paragon) which seems to be the Kolkata magnet for long-term loafers, bearded hippy drifters and 4am callisthenic lovers. We could go back in 2 years and continue the same conversation with the same people. One scraggy old Korean woman has been living in the shared dorm for the last 16 years... (she of 4am aerobics fame). Although we are indeed bearded drifters we didn’t see the point in sleeping our days away so were so excited and to get on the 5am bus to Bangladesh on 4th January, with no idea what lay in store for us on the other side of the border or in the weeks to come..... the second half of our adventure begins!
Lots of love Chloe and Fra xoxoxo
