Our hired drive Singh took us at 10 AM to Mother Teresa's home where the Sisters of Charity live, and where she is buried in a simple marble tomb about 3 ft. high. On the top of the tomb was a simple dedication to her life and a few candles. All appropriate to what she'd have accepted (though more than she'd have approved I am sure.) I couldn't help but think how good it was that the Vatican didn't somehow manage to entomb her in Rome. How different her final resting place would have been. God called Mother Teresa to India and it is here she wanted to stay.
A few Indians came to pray quietly beside her tomb. Cameras are allowed only in this room, and out in the patio one is allowed to take a photo of a simple bronze statue of her, which had not even one candle or flower beside it. I was impressed by the restraint at this great woman's tomb as practiced by this order and by the local diocese.
About 20 minutes after we'd been sitting on a simple wooden bench looking the nuns came in, about 30 of them novitiates, mostly in plain white saris, about six in the white and blue of the confirmed order members. They began to sing in English to Jesus, the sweetest chorus of voices I've heard in a while. Since so many are young in their 20's, you can imagine the beautiful sound.
We then went on to the red light district of Kalighat, where Amistad has been working with New Light, a Calcutta NGO founded and led by Urmi Basu. Urmi is one of the planet's more amazing women I have met.
As we passed through the terrace we came into New Light, Urmi Basu's shelter for children of sex workers in the red light district (Kalighat) of Kolkata. This program was initially, and continues to be helped by Shadhika of Palo Alto, California. Amistad began to assist New Light in 2005. In 2006-7, Worthington, Ohio, SDA church, and Walla Walla University's Amnesty International chapter joined in our efforts. We especially thank Loren Seibold, Mrs. Hezeibah Kore, Hope for Humanity, Rachel Davies, Kathleen Erwin, Janelle Walikonis and their colleagues.
Coming up those dark stairways, which ascended from an alley of desperation and depravity into New Light shelter/clinic/school we knew that the name was well chosen.
L-shaped New Light is about 1,000 sq ft.. The first room is about 15X by 30, and is a combination medical clinic, play area, napping for the children, dining room, dishwashing, pharmacy, business office, and in the evening classrooms for tutoring about 50-75 kids. These are children of sex workers who come to the shelter during the evening hours when their mothers are working. Before New Light was born in 2001, the children either played in the alleys or slept under the pallets where their mothers were entertaining clients. Some of the children come for breakfast, others spend the middle of the day there playing. They also nap there and receive a mid day meal.
New Light was just pulsing with life this noon, but nothing compared to the activity during the late evening. In the evening the students bring their books to study and be tutored by several teachers hired to help the kids.
This morning, on one side of the room the New Light physician was counseling with two prostitutes. The sex workers are given free medical care for TB, STD, and AIDS, and more. I don't know what happens when they are need to be put into a hospital. We did meet a women who either tried to burn herself to death (or her husband tried to burn her, Urmi hasn't figured out the story yet) and Urmi did rescue her from the public hospital where she was laying on a bare sheet-less bed, with no pain medicine except one analgesic given 12 hours before, her burns already infected. Urmi got her to a private 'nursing home"...what Americans would call a private clinic. The woman was doing well when we met her when she came to see her little girl at New Light.
When we visited the Dalit New Light later same day, about 8 pm, literacy classes for the sex workers were over for the evening. These two programs are funded by Worthington SDA church through Hope for Humanity. Three women of the 30-35 women, who are taking literacy classes were still there that evening. One I spoke to is happy because she is learning English. Another was proud to say she is learning to read and write Bengali. Urmi's brother and co-director, Arnab, told us another valuable lesson they are learning is to show up at class on on time, a a new concept to the women. This small act of responsibilty is a new valuable tool for their lives if they are able to seek another type of employment such as a housemaid etc. They also learn to read bus schedules, and write their name.
Arnab showed us the computer architectural renderings done by an architect in Toledo, Spain who has been volunteering at New Light. He and other Spanish groups are helping New Light and recently purchased land outside of Calcutta ($40,000 USD), Next they will build a clinic/hospice for sex workers, family members with AIDS.
Since the women are paid less for their services if they demand that their customers wear a condom, there is little incentive for them to demand use of a condom. Still, New Light provides 6,000 condoms per month to the women, so some are insisting that their customers use them. Yes, the AIDS rate is high among the women.
Urmi came bustling in to the room, her red glasses framing her big sparking black eyes, salt and pepper hair, red scarf, worn so gracefully, an art that seems to be in the genes for French and Indian women. We had a happy reunion before we set out for Soma Home which is a home for 30 girls, daughters of sex workers. Amistad gave New Light the funds in 2005 to open this home. It is now sponsored by a Spanish foundation, Meridional, colleagues to whom we give enormous gratitude.
Urmi deliberately chose a far away neighborhood across Calcutta so the Soma Home girls would not be able to easily return to their former friends and contacts. She also wants the girls to live in an area where a healthy life in the norm. Their mothers are allowed and encouraged to visit the girls but they must come to to the girls' new home. The mothers were all courageous to let their daughters go to Soma because they had been of potential economic value to the mothers. Often the girls in the Kalighat follow their mothers into prostitution.
Soma Home is located in a nice (by Calcutta standards) neighborhood. The homes are all 3-4 stories high. Lawyers, high tech, accountants, merchants etc. live here. A school bus comes each morning to deliver them to 2-3 schools they attend (depending on age and grade level.)
As soon as some of the girls saw us out the window about a dozen came running to greet us. The youngest girls came running first, and we were soon surrounded by about 15 girls from ages 6-12. Most of the older girls were doing their homework, tutoring the younger girls, or were themselves being tutored by professional teachers.
In India the educational system is so lacking that everyone who possibly can hires teachers to come to their homes after school to tutor their children. The Soma Home girls are no exception. They have access to all that middle class girls have, including dance and music. One girl is studying boxing! On the first floor is a computer lab. Their computer lessons includes all the basics for an entry level job that requires computer skills.
We passed one room where a psychologist was counseling with two teen girls, another service provided the girls. Soma's trained psychologist who is helping some of the girls work through complicated issues of their lives.
As we spoke with these graceful, open, smiling, friendly, pure-eyed, sweet young ladies and children, it was actually hard to imagine that may of them had, only months before, been living in the streets, witness to the harshest realities thrown at the unlucky. At least one of the girls we heard about had already been 'sold out', or raped. Now this young girl, who suffers from depression but is receiving help at Soma, has a life of hope. I wish that every donor could have been there with us to meet these girls, to know how very directly their gifts are literally helping to transform these girls' lives.
Urmi hopes to offer variety of careers to these girls, from computation, flower shop, airline attendant, etc. These girls are from mothers who are not part of a caste, therefore will not be able to provide a dowry to a potential groom's family. Therefore they are mostly unmarriagable by Indian standards. They must all have a career in order to survive. The oldest girl is 18 so the issue is urgent.
In 2005, I had asked Urmi what her dream was for the little children of New Light Shelter. She described for me how she wanted to create a home for the girl daughters of the sex workers. We listened to her dream and within several months, thanks to Amistad donors, Some Home was a reality, and there I was looking at the results! Now Urmi has another dream....she wants to create half way house for the older girls of Soma Home.
Urmi, in her rapid fire (amazingly American) English shared her new dream for these girls....
"This home would work as a half way shelter for graduating girls from Soma Home and also for other young women who have no safe shelter in this city to receive any training or further education to have a career that would allow them to have an independent life. The main idea is to assist them in getting education and training . If during the course of training they are able to earn some money they would contribute towards their upkeep. We have also thought about a name for the home taken from a collection of poems by Tagore ...Sonar Tori ..meaning the Golden Boat which signifies a journey from pain and suffering to the golden twilight of hope and future."
Hopefully, Amistad will help her be able to create this new and needed half way home for these lovely girls I was meeting.
Climbing to the roof top Soma Home, we saw what will soon become a new dining area and kitchen of about 10X 10, the cook was preparing a nice lunch for the girls in a closet sized kitchen.
Hopefully, Amistad will help her be able to create this new and needed half way home for these lovely girls I was meeting.
Climbing to the roof top Soma Home, we saw what will soon become a new dining area and kitchen of about 10X 10, the cook was preparing a nice lunch for the girls in a closet sized kitchen.
The Some Home housemother, who is about 40, and a mother herself, was up and down the stairs, gracious, friendly, schoolmarmish in glasses, looking carefully and watchfully at the girls.
Urmi hopes to open a shelter just like Soma Home equivalent for the sons of the sex workers. Sooner or later, order to survive, most of the boys emulate the men in the streets, which means becoming a combination pimp/alcohol-drug dealer and thief.
We met many of these boys later that evening, studying hard at the shelter during the evening tutoring session, still dressed in their school uniforms. They are clean, well groomed, smiling, open, non-hostile, respectful boys, eager to learn. A shelter for the boys is possibly more important that Soma Home for girls. Uneducated and unemployed males have the potential for causing more social damage through anti-social behavior than the girls (my opinion only.) When the boys no longer have the secure arms of New Light around them, they will be prey to the depravity around them and can easily descend into the hell of their mothers' lives.
Nearly every prostitute we saw on the street was under the influence of a chemical, drug or alcohol. She is expected to provide alcohol to her client. Being drunk is the only way she can force herself to entertain 5-10 clients a night, receiving 30-50 rupees per client (75 cents to $1.25) (depending on her age and beauty). Many of the women are Nepalese by birth, either trafficked or somehow ended up here. Nepalese girls are stolen or sold to be house maids by their parents. These Nepalese prostitutes are sought by Nepali immigrant workers and young Indian men who prefer Nepalese beauty to Indian women's beauty.
After Melanie and I visited Soma Home we returned to the Kalighat district as the sun was setting. We then visited the shelter for Dalit (untouchable caste) children, also located next to a Hindu temple complex. Walking from our car up through a passage way lined by various styles of bas relief and painted Hindu art, the passage opened into an open paved courtyard of about 150X150 ft. On the left was a temple facade, to the right bigger Hindu temple.This was the Hindu Keoratala burning ghat..a Hindu crematorium where dead bodies are burnt on wood pyres. All the people who work there are traditionally of the untouchable caste ..who are denied all opportunities of main streaming.
Straight ahead was an ornate gate, leading out to a polluted river just ahead feet away from the temple. About 20 ft from this gate was the New Light Dalit evening shelter for children and literacy program for adult women.
We walked straight ahead to a building alongside a filthy river toward the shelter. During monsoon season the river floods the entire neighborhood of Kalighat during monsoon, flooding the streets, alleys, and homes to a depth of 2-3 feet twice a day.
Arnab told us they must enter and leave New Light only when the enter and recedes, according to the tides. They have to time their activities accordingly to the tides. I'd have to have thick fishing boots before I'd walk those streets during monsoon. If you can, imagine the sewers in your town joining a large creek and then flooding your home two times a day for a few weeks. Add to that cocktail some mosquitoes, malaria, typhoid and cholera. Consider that no one has protective shoes or boots, only flipflops or plastic shoes. Imagine if you happened to have to a small cut on your foot or leg?
Arriving at New Light Dalit shelter about 6Pm about 30 children began to arrive, settling themselves quietly on the woven floor mats. On the right side were tables serving as storage for teaching materials, dinner trays etc. After the children does lessons with their teacher, a big evening meal is served.
We noticed one skinny little sad looking girl about 8, short haired, dressed in a dirty drab olive sweater. Urmi mentioned this child's mother had either tried to commit suicide or was set afire by her husband in January '08. The child left the room about 6:30 and I wondered where she'd gone by herself (it was quite dark by then). In about 15 minutes a woman in a yellow sari appeared at the doorway with the little girl coming in just ahead of her. The child plopped back down on the floor with a big smile on her face. Her mommy had come to school! What a change on this child's face to have her mother there. It was impossible to imagine painful experiences this child and her mother had gone through since January. I could see the hands of this mother, Deepa Sikdar, were still bandaged and there was extensive scarring elsewhere on her body. It is not uncommon for men to burn their wives in north India, or for women to commit suicide by burning or hanging.
Over to the right was a pretty girl of twelve with enormous 'diamonds" in her ears smiling while working on her homework assignment. Urmi mentioned she'd love to bring this child, Puja Sardarto, to Soma Home. But the girl lives with her grandmother and is the only help her grandmother has and therefore won't let her go to Soma Home. Once she finishes grades school her grandmother wants her to work. ( I didn't ask what type of work.). This is the reality. And every one of the 30-40 children sitting before us has an an equal story of pathos.
After we'd spent a while at this shelter of hope and love, we returned to the larger New Light shelter where about 70 children were studying with the teachers Urmi hires for evening tutoring. The meal would be served later. Serving food in at schools run by charity is common. If the charities don't provide food, the parents often won't send the children. It makes more economic sense to put the children to work.
The next day Melanie and I flew from Calcutta to Delhi, then after nearly 4 hours in security lines (there was a terrorist threat in Delhi that day necessitating multiple baggage and document and person search) we left on an 19 hour flight (plus a 3 hour stop in Chicago) to California. Stepping from the airport luggage area into the San Jose afternoon, I never realized before how sweetly the air smells in the Bay Area.
"India--monsoon and marigold, dung and dust, colors and corpses, smoke and ash, snow and sand---is a cruel, unrelenting place of ineffable sweetness. Much like life itself." quote from Traveler's' Tales India.
Urmi hopes to open a shelter just like Soma Home equivalent for the sons of the sex workers. Sooner or later, order to survive, most of the boys emulate the men in the streets, which means becoming a combination pimp/alcohol-drug dealer and thief.
We met many of these boys later that evening, studying hard at the shelter during the evening tutoring session, still dressed in their school uniforms. They are clean, well groomed, smiling, open, non-hostile, respectful boys, eager to learn. A shelter for the boys is possibly more important that Soma Home for girls. Uneducated and unemployed males have the potential for causing more social damage through anti-social behavior than the girls (my opinion only.) When the boys no longer have the secure arms of New Light around them, they will be prey to the depravity around them and can easily descend into the hell of their mothers' lives.
Nearly every prostitute we saw on the street was under the influence of a chemical, drug or alcohol. She is expected to provide alcohol to her client. Being drunk is the only way she can force herself to entertain 5-10 clients a night, receiving 30-50 rupees per client (75 cents to $1.25) (depending on her age and beauty). Many of the women are Nepalese by birth, either trafficked or somehow ended up here. Nepalese girls are stolen or sold to be house maids by their parents. These Nepalese prostitutes are sought by Nepali immigrant workers and young Indian men who prefer Nepalese beauty to Indian women's beauty.
After Melanie and I visited Soma Home we returned to the Kalighat district as the sun was setting. We then visited the shelter for Dalit (untouchable caste) children, also located next to a Hindu temple complex. Walking from our car up through a passage way lined by various styles of bas relief and painted Hindu art, the passage opened into an open paved courtyard of about 150X150 ft. On the left was a temple facade, to the right bigger Hindu temple.This was the Hindu Keoratala burning ghat..a Hindu crematorium where dead bodies are burnt on wood pyres. All the people who work there are traditionally of the untouchable caste ..who are denied all opportunities of main streaming.
Straight ahead was an ornate gate, leading out to a polluted river just ahead feet away from the temple. About 20 ft from this gate was the New Light Dalit evening shelter for children and literacy program for adult women.
We walked straight ahead to a building alongside a filthy river toward the shelter. During monsoon season the river floods the entire neighborhood of Kalighat during monsoon, flooding the streets, alleys, and homes to a depth of 2-3 feet twice a day.
Arnab told us they must enter and leave New Light only when the enter and recedes, according to the tides. They have to time their activities accordingly to the tides. I'd have to have thick fishing boots before I'd walk those streets during monsoon. If you can, imagine the sewers in your town joining a large creek and then flooding your home two times a day for a few weeks. Add to that cocktail some mosquitoes, malaria, typhoid and cholera. Consider that no one has protective shoes or boots, only flipflops or plastic shoes. Imagine if you happened to have to a small cut on your foot or leg?
Arriving at New Light Dalit shelter about 6Pm about 30 children began to arrive, settling themselves quietly on the woven floor mats. On the right side were tables serving as storage for teaching materials, dinner trays etc. After the children does lessons with their teacher, a big evening meal is served.
We noticed one skinny little sad looking girl about 8, short haired, dressed in a dirty drab olive sweater. Urmi mentioned this child's mother had either tried to commit suicide or was set afire by her husband in January '08. The child left the room about 6:30 and I wondered where she'd gone by herself (it was quite dark by then). In about 15 minutes a woman in a yellow sari appeared at the doorway with the little girl coming in just ahead of her. The child plopped back down on the floor with a big smile on her face. Her mommy had come to school! What a change on this child's face to have her mother there. It was impossible to imagine painful experiences this child and her mother had gone through since January. I could see the hands of this mother, Deepa Sikdar, were still bandaged and there was extensive scarring elsewhere on her body. It is not uncommon for men to burn their wives in north India, or for women to commit suicide by burning or hanging.
Over to the right was a pretty girl of twelve with enormous 'diamonds" in her ears smiling while working on her homework assignment. Urmi mentioned she'd love to bring this child, Puja Sardarto, to Soma Home. But the girl lives with her grandmother and is the only help her grandmother has and therefore won't let her go to Soma Home. Once she finishes grades school her grandmother wants her to work. ( I didn't ask what type of work.). This is the reality. And every one of the 30-40 children sitting before us has an an equal story of pathos.
After we'd spent a while at this shelter of hope and love, we returned to the larger New Light shelter where about 70 children were studying with the teachers Urmi hires for evening tutoring. The meal would be served later. Serving food in at schools run by charity is common. If the charities don't provide food, the parents often won't send the children. It makes more economic sense to put the children to work.
The next day Melanie and I flew from Calcutta to Delhi, then after nearly 4 hours in security lines (there was a terrorist threat in Delhi that day necessitating multiple baggage and document and person search) we left on an 19 hour flight (plus a 3 hour stop in Chicago) to California. Stepping from the airport luggage area into the San Jose afternoon, I never realized before how sweetly the air smells in the Bay Area.
"India--monsoon and marigold, dung and dust, colors and corpses, smoke and ash, snow and sand---is a cruel, unrelenting place of ineffable sweetness. Much like life itself." quote from Traveler's' Tales India.
