Some photos from India that I didn't want to put on Facebook

 Me in my Jetstar-orange sari! You can't really tell, but I'm sweating profusely under all the petticoats - sick.

 Chris and his new best mate, Rahul (whose middle name is Jishu - 'Jesus' - oddly enough). He gave Chris the cap he's wearing (don't know what his mum had to say about that...)



On the roof with some of our favourite and most common visitors, taken by Chumki-Masi (see below)

 My lovely, lovely host Aunty Chumki (in blue) being kissed by her niece, my hilarious friend Gita.

View from our host house rooftop, Bediapara, Kolkata. The house on the right with the yellow saris hanging up to dry have a pet pigeon that the youngest son likes to hang out with on their roof. Whenever he saw us looking over at him he'd make the pigeon do tricks for us... poor thing (!)

 Crazy/hilarious kitchen door in our mud-brick house (the room behind it is the siz of a cupboard...not sure why they're drawing so much attention to it)

At the Bridges' orphanage in Odisha (Orissa) with my 'photography school'. These girls had never used cameras before - we had a great time!

 

Us and the K-team youngies on the night I flew out! Kenny, Meghan, Chris, David and I

The post from last week that I would've put up but the internet crashed. AGAIN.

SO.

Here I am. In Canada.

It’s been far, far too long since my last update – I will try really hard not to let this one be too long to make up for it.

I landed in Vancouver, B.C on Wednesday nearly two weeks ago after a hectic last few days in India. For those who don’t know, I actually nearly missed my flight due to a mistake in the time – I thought that it was the midnight between Wednesday and Thursday, not Tuesday and Wednesday, and it took a trans-international, frantic phone call from my Mum to me while I was in Orissa to get me to realise that I’d got my lines very, very crossed. So we cut short our time with the Bridge family and their gorgeous orphanage haven in Jharsuguda, trained back to Kolkata lickety-split and spent my last evening in India with Kenny, Dave and Meghan from the Servants team. Then it was a teary, tired and wretched farewell with Chris at the airport, then several haphazard flights through China and the States which spanned 27ish hours (34 if you count waiting around in airports), and I arrived on the same day I’d left India – oh timezones, you are cruel and confusing masters. I was searched while trying to get through Canadian immigration because they were suspicious of the combination of my age, my dishevelled Indian clothing, and the fact that I didn’t have a work permit. Yeah, fair enough I guess!

I was greeted and loved from the start – the Servants community here are a lovely hotchpotch of about ten people who live in two houses which share one property on East Cordova street, which runs right through what is called the Downtown East Side (DTES). It is a sprawling, heavily populated suburb which is riddled with drug addiction and homelessness, which often operate in tandem. Drugs are cheap, nasty and very public here – down the road from our houses is ‘ground zero’, an intersection which is something like a market for substances, particularly cocaine (crack cocaine), crystal meth and the ubiquitous heroin. The deals, administration, and overdoses all happen in the public eye – something I as a Kiwi had to get used to fast. The team moved here six years ago in a bid to be a different approach for the inhabitants of the DTES – something that wasn’t a shelter or a soup kitchen (there are hundreds of those), or a clinic, or a drop-in. They wanted to be an open community who spend time with their neighbours, get to know them on an equal basis and practice hospitality that empowers people, rather than disenabling them, which can happen all too often in a neighbourhood where so many handouts are available. There are structures in place which give the team a body and life – Mondays are team days, where we eat and pray together, and the team sorts out admin and plans new projects or talks about ideas. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays end with an open dinner at six, which anyone can come to – often neighbours who team members are tracking with will come, as well as friends from across the city. Tuesday nights, after dinner is Creative World Justice – a bible study-cum-activism project that focuses on God’s love for those oppressed under unjust political structures, both locally and internationally – take a look at their little website which will give you a better idea of what meeting like this looks like. What I love is that a lot of neighbours seem to really get into this and will stick around to get involved in political bible studies or creative actions. Wednesdays, some of us ladies will go out around nineish in the evening and spend some time wandering and talking to women who are out working the corners of this neighbourhood. There are many of them, and it’s a cold, depressing and often brutal job, so we invite those who’re keen to come back to the Servants team centre on Hastings Street and have hot tea and cake with us. It’s called Night Vision and it’s a lot of fun. Every day begins with prayer at 9am at the Team Centre, and from here the day begins. I’ve been doing all sorts – hanging out at Womens’ Drop In Centres (the food is great), going to an open pottery workshop run by Grandview Calvary Baptist Church (if anyone here listens to Tom Wuest, I believe it’s his church), it’s called JustPotters – check ‘em out. I’ve also been walking the streets and learning how to talk to God about what I see, hanging out with kids, going to public forums on working with those who have mental health issues, going on food collection runs (a LOT of the food that the team gets is donated, which helps when we have to cook on large scales three or four times a week), hosting community dinners, and trying to soak up as much as I can. It has been full on, and I am tired and a wee bit run down – but I am loving every second of this grimy, scary neighbourhood, and so far it is loving me back.

I am struggling to marry my time in India with this crashing recourse through the troubles of Western neighbourhoods. The friendly poverty of my beloved homestay family and the team in Bediapara seems a long way away. I was re-reading my Servants intern journal the other day and read a small clipping that talked about the way that interns re-enter into their home cultures, and while Vancouver is DEFINITELY not my home culture, I can totally see how this all applies to me. There are several types of re-entry: Assimilators, Alienators and Integrators. Assimilators slide right back in like nothing happened – their experience gets lost in picking up the slack, in rediscovering the joys of soft beds and running hot water. The Alienators reject their home culture for a while, criticising and finding themselves angry at ever being a part of it. They succumb eventually, because they need a place to belong. Integrators expect dissonance upon their return, but are able to debrief it and identify the changes that have taken or are taking place within themselves upon ending an internship or homestay. They can make this experience count for the long-term, which is something I desperately want to do – but I feel more like an Assimilator. Things have moved really quickly, and every day I see opportunities to growthfully change slip through my fingers. Actually, maybe writing this is one step toward a more integrational approach… who knows.

To help stimulate more reflection on Kolkata, I will pop a couple of photos up at the bottom of this blog, but I’m all too conscious of the impact that photography has had on the privacy and lives of the poor, and I would be really stoked if no one reposted or reproduced these (or shows them to people who will). I’ll put photos of Canada on my facebook page, seeing as they are full of people who have facebook pages and don’t mind me pasting them all over the show.

I miss you all in Aotearoa – and Chris, of course, who’s still in India, hanging out with his long-lost whanau. Check out my facebook page if you haven’t already seen his lovely Taj Mahal umm… declaration!

Be well – I’ll try and be a bit more organised about this blogging thing.

Kia kaha.

 

 

Is it that time already?

In a week tomorrow, I will be flying out of Kolkata. Who would've thought?

A few things have happened in the last week - things have eased into something resembling a rhythm, which is going to make it harder to leave (I love domestic routine.... Secretly).

Before I left for India, I was set some challenges by the girls that I mentor back home in New Zealand. I unintentionally fulfilled one of those challenges, which was 'Go out dressed in a sari and with full makeup". On a whim, Gita decided that she was sick of the fact that I don't wear makeup ("Why you is this pale face?") and decided to paste me an inch thick like a Hindi soap star - complete with a bindi (called a thil - 'till' - in Bangla) and a dot of black eyeliner paint for a beauty spot. Completely inspired by this time, she dug out my new sari and ordered me into it, before parading me down the road to the bazar (market) with a couple of her friends. A 20 minute walk each way. In 35-degree heat and high, HIGH humidity. Despite the blatant stares and inappropriate comments. Oh well, at least I got the opportunity to wear the thing. Remind me not to get orange next time.

Chris and I also got the opportunity on Friday to go with Jane from the team here to another suburb called Girish Park, and visit her work Love Calcutta Arts, as well as the lovely and ubiquitously-popular Freeset, who make organic, fairtrade bags and t-shirts - and who run tours on Fridays. Freeset was our first stop - the day started with all the women gathering in the building's courtyard for singing and prayer before beginning work or counselling or training (all three are given by the trust to every worker) at ten. We were lead through the different rooms and up narrow sets of stairs to different rooms and introduced to some of the women and what they all do. It is a wonderful place and I thoroughly recommend including the tour to anyone travelling through Kolkata, although having been in a homestay and away from much Western contact for the previous few weeks, it felt weird to be so firmly 'othered' by being toured around with a bunch of other Pakehas in this gorgeous and tightly-knit community. Nevertheless, I was won and couldn't resist buying a tshirt before leaving. We also ran into an old friend from the New Zealand Baptist scene - Steve Pound, who coordinated my first short-term mission trip to Fiji five years ago! He and his family have been living in Kolkata for a couple of years now and working with Freeset. Accidental Aotearoa connections in India? Excellent.

The rest of the day was spent being shown around Love Calcutta Arts and the cool stuff they do. Think, one floor of guys designing and making portable, hand-operated water filters that can be used in a natural disaster (and even purify water from the Hooghly without any chemicals), and another floor of lovely ladies making bedspreads from recycled saris, stationery, beautiful cards and books, all eco-friendly and very, VERY easy on the eye. We got to spend a couple of hours working there too, folding paper to go into a new order of diaries. Please check out their website - unfortunately you can't order much stuff in small doses, but if you know a busines that needs things like journals for corporate packages or something similar, these guys would be excellent and very worthy.

There's also been a bit of puja (worship, festival) in our neighbourhood this week - from Saturday until today has been Shibtalapuja, which is a celebration honouring the goddess Shibtala. She brings health and wellbeing, and part of the festival also can involve atoning for sins (if you feel like you've been particularly bad). This involves putting on your best clothes and red paint on your face, making a number of processions as a group from the local temple to the closest pond or water source and splashing around a bit, then on the third trip to the pond completely dunking yourself in the pond, then moving back to the temple like this: take a couple of steps forward, then lie down face-first on the ground and draw a half-circle in front of yourself with a stone while other people sprinkle you with water. Repeat until you are back at the temple - however long that may take. After this, there are three days of celebration and general hullabaloo. Good fun, but often times like this are when family drama or fights happen, which, in high density housing, become everyone's business whether they like it or not.

Anyway, all in all a mildly busy, but satisfying week. Nearly all the kids who have befriended us have gone away to one of their family villages this week - they'll get back on Thursday though which will be nice. Secretly I'm a little bit happy for the increased peace and quiet.

We will leave our host family on Friday night, stay at the Team Centre, then on Saturday morning head out to Jharsuguda in Orissa (Odisha) to see some friends of Chris's family who run an orphanage there. Looking forward/mildly terrified of taking the train, although we've booked sleeper class tickets for the overnight journey back. We'll get back on Wednesday and I'll fly out that evening! How scary!

So, I guess I'm signing off for now. I'll try and post again before skipping the country!

Much love,

Me