The Calcutta Diaries: A Volunteer’s Experience
From a journal entry before I went to Bihar…
It’s 5:30 am, and I’m up, awake, and sitting in a tiny hole-in-the-wall coffeeshop that serves coffee that tastes like water and porridge at this early hour.
I’m up so early because the street-or, I should say, alley-under the windows of my room is being worked on and it’s very noisy. Actually it was worked on all night, and I pretended I was fine with it and that it wasn’t bothering me because I had no choice in the matter.
But now that it’s daylight, and as I have a choice, I’ve left the room and wandered to this little place, hoping to rid myself of my grumpiness and that the coffee will give me a jump start to what promises to be yet another long day at Daya Dan.
My porridge has arrived. It’s mostly boiled milk, with some bits of oats in it and I cover it with a thick layer of honey to sweeten it. The coffee comes, clear brown in color(you’d have to drink 10 cups of the stuff for it to take any effect) and I stare out the grating covering the window into the street.
I’m watching a man across the street. He’s there every morning that I am-his routine is the same, day after day.
He’s ridden up to a spot across the street on a bicycle.
It’s a black bicycle, heavy, almost industrial looking, covered in dirt, dust, and grime. Only it’s silver handlebars show any glint of it’s original color.
On the front are hanging two filthy woeven plastic market bags-the kind poor people use around the world to store rice and then get converted into shopping bags and sleeping mats-and each bag hanging heavily from a handlebar, completely black and thick with a layer of grease.
On the back of the bike, on either side, are two plastic drums, the type people catch rain in or store gasoline in, and they are the size of large trash cans, bright aqua blue in color, a color not found in nature. They are streaked with dirt and dust and oil, and at the top of these rests another container, a jimmy-can, also black, with the top cut off.
The man gets off the bike. He’s wearing a pair of knee length lavender- gray shorts which must have started out as a totally different color but have faded from daily wear; a short sleeved black button front shirt that is much too small, and a maroon and brown headscarf is wrapped around his head. He’s clean shaven with short cropped hair, and his skin is almost black in color, his teeth are stained red from betel-nut juice. The whites of his eyes are very bright against his very dark face.
He moves, swiftly, as he does every morning, unloading his bike of it’s containers and bags.
A burlap cloth that was wrapped around his shoulders he removes and places on the ground.
The moment the cloth is on the ground, the man is surrounded by a group of dogs.
One dog is especially beautiful, large and well built, muscular, looking somewhat like a beefy cross between a Golden Retriever and a Pit Bull. It wears a red collar and it’s muzzle is grizzled. It’s obviously the head dog of the pack.
The second dog is one of the most unusual dogs I’ve ever seen on my travels. It almost looks like a particular breed, but as it is a street dog, this is probably impossible. It’s a female, chocolate brown in color, shorthaired(almost hairless) with a thin, Greyhound like body, erect ears and seems to be the sort of dog Egyptians would have owned at the time of the Pharoahs.Her eyes give her a strange look, as they are exactly the same color as her coat, making her look like a dog from another time or world.
The third dog is a black, scruffy looking dog, with large, blunt square-looking ears that look as though they were cut off to look like that. She’s recently had puppies and she’s obviously still nursing them. She’s got a flower garland around her neck-the kind Hindus use on their statues and shrines, as well as on the occassional cow- and the garland is made of white jasmine flowers, red hibiscus flowers, adn yellow marigolds. She’s also been painted-or smudged, anyway-with orange and red paint, right in the middle of her forehead.
The last dog in the pack is very old, white and black, with almost no hair to speak of, one eye blue and the other brown, long floppy ears and a limping gait.
The man spreads the burlap cloth on the ground on the street and proceeds to dump each bag and container out on to it. Each container is full of trash and debris, food waste he has collected from the street.
He methodically sorts thru each pile of debris, creating four piles of edible trash from the enormous mound of trash. While he’s doing this, he’s hardly looking down, instead, he’s talking to a neighbor who also lives on that same section on the sidewalk, a man wearing a faded blue and white lungi and a bright white shirt, his torso and head wrapped in a hot pink and magenta scarf, drinking hot milky chai from a clay cup.
The four piles are not the same in size-two are larger than the others, I realize. Each pile has a few chicken bones, alot of rice, old bits of chapati and samosas, leftover bits of curry and streetfood…
He’s finished sorting the trash. He motions for all the dogs to come to him, and they sit quietly, tails wagging.
This food he’s sorted into piles-why, it’s for his dogs!
The dogs all line up at their place-the head dog and the dog who has had puppies take the two largest piles of food and the two smallest dogs take the the small piles of food.
I watch this man do this almost every morning- picking thru trash, starting at 4 am, collecting bits of this and that, trying to give his dogs the choice bits from the street, before the professional trash pickers come along and sift thru it all, or burn it looking for metal and bits of plastic.
Crows arrive, perching on the bike. They are large, greyish-blue, beautiful creatures, with large eyes.
The man screeches at them, shaking and waving his arms, scaring the off. Then he watches his dogs finish their meal.
Then, he loads up all his bins on to his bike again, folds the burlap around his shoulders, and rides off again, for one last foraging attempt before the city wakes up.
His dogs lie on the piece of sidewalk they share with him and wait.
gigi
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Your descriptions of the daily interactions, the struggles, and the small victories painted a vivid picture of the volunteer experience. It’s clear you’re not just there physically; you’ve invested your heart and soul into the community.