Yesterday (Monday) was a long, rough day for our whole team. I already wrote about the morning at Kalighat. I found out that I was not the only member of my team brought to tears that morning.
In the afternoon we got an introduction talk from the Missionaries of Charity for volunteers there. We signed up for which home(s) we wanted to start volunteering in. We are free to change later if we want to. For now I signed up to help at Nabo Jibon, a home for mentally and or physically handicapped boys and men. It is run by the Missionaries of Charity brothers. Todd, the other man on my team will also be volunteering there. My first day there will be Friday. Up until then our team will stick together at Kalighat and doing a few other things.
After everyone had registered, our team got on a bus to head home. Several difficult things happened while we were on the bus. First, Kristin got a call from Gloria, a member of the Nepal team that we had accidentally left behind. You can probably imagine how awful we all felt about that, especially since she is the only non-white, non-American member of either team (she's from Uganda). Anyway, she was able to take a taxi home and got there just a little while after the rest of us.
The bus we had been on was a very crowded bus, and one of our women was groped twice during the ride. Even if it hadn't been a long day, that would have been a hard thing to take. As it was, I'm amazed at how well she held together. After the bus we had a train ride, and the three of us guys did our best to block out Indian men from being next to our women. It helped that the train wasn't too crowded (in Kolkata that means you can stand without touching anyone) and that our women were able to stand on the edge of the women only section of the train.
That evening, after dinner, several members of our team had their first experiences with unstable digestive tracks. This can be quite awkward when there is only one toilet in the apartment and multiple people need to use it urgently for long periods of time. The result was several people running to another one of our apartments. I guess everyone was lucky and there weren't any disasters.
By the end of the day I think everyone was pretty worn out. Most of the team ended the day by taking a lot of personal time to pray and journal.
1 comment:
The whole attitude towards women everywhere is really heartbreaking - I took it as another sign of how badly Christ is needed there. I'm surprised that there's any trouble with the trains though - the city trains I saw were very clearly segregated by car.
And gastrointestinal problems...ugh. Don't worry, yours are definitely coming too.
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