Let's start with right now. I'm feeling a bit out of place. It seems almost as if Seattle is not quite real. Or, more accurately, it feels like this is my vacation. My heart has this idea that in a week or so, I ought to be on a plane back to Kolkata, back home. I know with my head that that's not true; that's definitely not a possibility right now. But emotionally, that's where I am. I feel a bit out of place, lost, confused about what is going on around me right now. Seattle doesn't feel like home at the moment and I'm not sure when, or if, it will again.
But enough of that. I promised you more stories. I had a list of things that I was going to right about and I'll do my best to remember what they all were, but no promises that this will be a comprehensive account of my time.
I'll start with something I remember well and have been thinking a lot about. I'm sponsoring a child (financially) who lives in one of Kolkata's outlying villages through Children International. Her name is Rina Santra. She is 5 years old and will be 6 on October 31st. She lives with her father, a rice farmer, her mother, and her older sister. She and her sister are both going to school. Her mother is a housewife.
Since I knew already that I would be in Kolkata, I arranged with Children International to visit her while I was there. I scheduled the visit for one of my Thursdays, knowing that I wanted to be with my Shishu kids every day I possibly could and not wanting to give up one of those days for the visit.
We left around 11 am Thursday morning. The ride there was pretty spectacular, I think. Once we got outside of the main city and got on the freeway, we hit crazy traffic. The woman who was acting as my guide and translator, Sunita, told me that she hasn't seen such bad traffic on the freeway in quite a while. It was festival season and people had already begun preparing pandals for Durga Puja, so we assumed the backup was do to people moving materials in and out of the city. Our driver was born and raised in Kolkata and had been driving for CI for about 20 years, so he was definitely a Kolkata driver. And thank goodness, too. We ended up driving along the side of the freeway for most of the trip, weaving through bicyclists and other drivers and pedestrians the whole way. It was wonderful and got us there much quicker than had we stayed on the freeway. Leaving the city also made for beautiful scenery. Once you get out into the area where all of the villages are located, everything gets significantly more green. We drove through fields of rice, potatoes, tamarind trees and a number of things I didn't recognize. Gorgeous, really.
Our first stop was at the local CI headquarters. I met with the director of that site. From what I learned through Sunita, this man is pretty amazing. When the site first started out, they had found about 25 children who qualified for the program. Now, a few years later (I don't remember exactly how long they said it had been around), they are close to the 200 children mark. In addition to their work with the children who are already sponsored, the social workers and director go out to the villages and interview the families in the village to see if their children qualify, then go through the process of helping the families organize the paperwork necessary to enter the program. That's a spectacular amount of work for the 4 social workers and the director to perform, so reaching the 200 mark is extremely impressive.
After chai and biscuits, we headed out to Rina's village to meet her and her family. We drove past the school and they pointed out to me the backpacks some of the children were carrying that had the CI logo on them. Backpacks was one of the gifts given to the children for one of the recent holidays.
The visit itself was, honestly, a bit awkward. We got to their home, which was one room with a bed, a small table, and a large cabinet containing things like the girls' school books, dishes, and other things they had collected over the years. Their room is connected to a series of other rooms from which a number of other villagers emerged, so I got the impression that there's a number of families living in the building and there is some sort of communal kitchen in one of the rooms.
Rina was still at school when I arrived, so I talked (through Sunita) to the parents a bit about her. They told me that she is extremely well behaved and enjoys her studies. She has a few friends at school and when she isn't studying or helping out in the house, she plays with her friends. The basic stuff. She's a normal kid. When she arrived, we talked for a bit. It was hard, though. Rina was quite shy, probably because all of the people who lived in their building were hovering around at the window and the door to the room. I'm also a rather shy and quiet person, in case you weren't aware, so conversation was short and awkward. Sunita kept trying to get me to say something more or ask more questions, but I just didn't know what else to say. Nor did Rina, really. She did recite some Bengali poetry for me, which was beautiful, and we worked through the English alphabet for a little while.
After visiting the home, we all went back to the CI headquarters for lunch. This, for me, was the most awkward part. My lunch, as well as Sunita's, were served on nice plates but the family was served on the standard metal dishes found all over India. We also got significantly more food than the family. I just didn't feel right about all the pomp and circumstance. I have been to a couple of friends' families' homes in Kolkata and I understand that they like to treat guests with the best of everything they have, but I just didn't feel like this was the proper place for it. I thought the point of doing these visits was to allow the sponsor and child to connect on the same level, not to show the sponsor off as some important, wealthy Westerner. I, personally, would have preferred to have been treated as another human being, not someone of great importance. But this is India, after all. What to do?
After lunch, we headed back and had a much quicker drive. I talked to Sunita a bit about her own family and we talked about the holiday season. I also ended up taking an unexpected nap. I didn't even realize I was falling asleep until I woke up. We got back to Sudder St. around 4 pm and parted ways.
Let me tell you, though, why I've been thinking about this so much. I started out in Kolkata volunteering with Mother Theresa's Missionaries of Charity. Mother Theresa spent her life as a nun doing her best to help those most in need, the poorest of the poor, the seemingly unloved of Kolkata. I work with mentally and physically disabled children who have been abandoned by their parents because of inability to care for the child or because of superstition around the cause of the child's disability. Some of these kids may one day get a chance at a somewhat normal life. Many of them will spend their rest of their lives rotating through Mama T's homes.
Rina has a mother and father and sister who all love her. She has a roof over her head. She was going to school before I started to sponsor her and probably would continue to with or without me. Her family is definitely impoverished, but they still lead a relatively good life in comparison to many thousands of people in India. I just don't feel like she really needs me all that much, at least in comparison to so many other people. I feel like there are better things my money could be spent on. Jenn brought up the point that there are different levels of need and that this family does still need help, but I just don't think that I'm the person to offer that help. My heart is dedicated to people, specifically children, who are in need not of financial support, but in need of love. So (and this is also somewhat selfish as well) I feel like saving my money to go back to Kolkata and to Shishu is a much better thing to be doing. That said, I'm going to continue my sponsorship of Rina for now because I believe at this moment that I can save enough money for my next planned trip and still give her some of it. However, if it comes to choosing between Rina and spending the amount of time in Kolkata that I'm hoping to be able to afford, I will choose saving money for that trip.
Wow. That took quite a while to type out. I'll think I'll leave this post at that for now. More stories to come.
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