Pre Calcutta Thoughts..
In less than 24 hours, I’m on my way to hopefully be what will be an experience of a lifetime. As the time for departure has gotten closer, I’ve found myself searching the Internet for stories by people that have been there. They are few and far between, especially by people around my age group (the 40 plus age group!).
Most of the blogs I’ve found haven’t been all that inspiring. I’ve found one or two that were very good and caught the emotive side of working with the Missionaries of Charity on Bootsnall–but other than that, pickings have been sadly slim. I haven’t found any blogs that have gone into any depth about the intellectual richness of the city, either. Volunteers blogs about their time there seem to focus exclusively on the day to day volunteering and the various forms of escape they’ve needed to sustain themselves in what must be a very challenging situation.
Many volunteers only go to help out on their way to another destination, or perhaps go for no more than a month. I haven’t found any blogs by anyone who has been a very long term volunteer like I am planning on being (I am planning on being there for 5 months, with a view short breaks thrown in for my sanity).This is why one of my major goals while there is to write a blog with daily journal entries describing the experience of both volunteering and of being in the city itself– so that future volunteers can read it and get more of a visceral, immediate idea of what it will be like.
I wonder what it will be like to be in this dirty, crazy, and polluted city for so long and how it will impact my state of mind, spiritual life, and health.
I think right now my biggest worry is about health and the risks that I am about to take. Even on the streets of Calcutta, rickshaw-wallahs have the cough of tuberculosis, let alone in some of the homes Mother Theresa established that I will be working in. And that’s just one of the many contagious illnesses that I’m about to expose myself to. I even worry about simple things like food poisoning so on, because I’ve had the luxury to prepare my own food for over a month now and I am no longer accustomed to having to eat whatever is served to me.
I think about my own spiritual life and path, and I wonder how will being in a place with so much suffering day after day fit in with my beliefs? What will it be like to live for months on end where people practice a caste system and people are doomed to the be the lowest of the low because that was who their fathers and grandfathers were? How will this experience change how I look at humanity as a whole?
I worry about the noise, the lack of privacy, all the people packed together in tight, stifling conditions. I think of the strong smells, the choking fumes of car exhaust, the mud and the human excrement in the streets…I can only imagine what it will be like, and even my imagination fails me now.
I worry about how I will deal with taking care of myself, with validating taking care of myself, when I will be surrounded by people who literally have nothing and are dying on the street. How will I walk by them everyday? How will I look at that child lying in the street with nothing? How will I look at myself?
I think about why I have wanted to go be a longterm volunteer in Calcutta for years and years, and now that I’m actually going to do it, I wonder what put it into my mind as a young girl. How did she think such an experience would impact her young life? Now that I’m actually doing it, how will it impact me and everything I think and believe about who I am–my identity?
I think about the growth ahead, for which I am both excited and nervous. I have the sense that a tremendous amount of self growth will happen in the five months ahead, and I have no idea who I will be when I am done. It’s scary and tremendous all at the same time.
At the same time I am thinking about all of this, I think about the tremendous cultural capital Calcutta is. I think of the challenge of learning Bengali… of meeting writers, artists, and poets … Of watching films and going to book fairs… How can all of this exist next to the other side of Calcutta?
I’m about to find out.
gigi
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illuminate.gigi
We love Kolkata, although we are here under different circumstances. I couldn’t find your nationality but if you are American, stop by the U.S. Consulate at 5 Ho Chi Mihn Sarani and register yourself as residing in the area for the time you will be here.
The Bengali people are very warm and friendly. Kolkata is a city of extremes: the very poor with the very rich, the old architecture represented by the Victoria Memorial in a city with a booming IT industry in Salt Lake. It is one of the few places left in this world where you will have an authentic and meaningful experience. There will be incredibly good days and incredibly bad days – but definitely memorable ones!
You are coming at the best time of year the Puga season and the end of the monsoons. Be careful and enjoy!
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Reading about your worries and expectations is like reading my own thoughts. I’ve got 3 weeks until departure and will prepare by reading everything you’ve written.
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