Bits and pieces

I thought that things reached a new low on the rat front the other day: there was a half eaten rat outside my front door. It literally was half eaten, but I won’t go into gruesome details for you. But then yesterday I was talking to Lakshmi and Tabassum and I realized actually I have nothing to complain about. It is monsoon season at the moment – although the rain hasn’t been as torrential as I expected there is still enough of it around. And in the slums this means flooding – Tabassum says it sometimes the water comes up to her waist. And with the flood waters the rats come out. I came across Lakshmi laughing with another girl in Bengali, and I asked what was funny. It was this: Lakshmi lives in a one room house with 7 people and one bed – so she has to sleep on the floor, with rats running around. She can’t sleep, she can’t cook, she can’t keep things dry. All she can do is laugh about it. And for Tabassum - when the shacks flood there is no place to cook so they have to cook on a shelf above their bed. Some people in their slum shelter in a primary school when things get too bad, but there is never space for Tabassum and her family because three of them are disabled. I thought I was beyond crying, I thought I had reached a subconscious level of acceptance of the poverty here, but how can I accept this? What can I do? These are no longer just work colleagues, they are friends, and I am powerless to help them in any substantive way. Kolkata is really challenging some of my most basic beliefs – it is not possible to always be the good Samaritan, the extent and level of suffering means that in many cases I do have to walk on the other side. But then, more positively, it never ceases to amaze me the tenacity of the human spirit, and the way the girls are able to continue living and smiling, even in such awful circumstances.

There have been two telling bits of news in the last week related to India and poverty – the first is that an Oxford research report has concluded that 8 states in India (including West Bengal) have in total more poor people than 26 of the poorest countries in Africa. Unbelievable. And almost on the same day it was reported in the Indian news that DfID may significantly reduce aid to India. They cite the reason as being the India’s substantially growing economy. Why has India’s wealth not trickled down to people living in circumstances that can best be described as inhumane? Why can I sit in a rickshaw next to a girl using an Iphone and drive past a little boy suffering from diarrhea on the street, as he has no other place to go?

I didn’t mean for this to be a really depressing blog, because actually I have been more positive recently. I have less than two months to go, so I am trying to relish every minute (well, as far as that is possible with the heat, humidity and rats) as I know I will miss it when I am back home. And, after 3 months of living here, I am finally becoming more comfortable with Kolkata as a city – I am enjoying wandering around the market after work now instead of getting stressed about being run over etc. And I am going on holiday soon to Ladakh!!

I will finish with some things I have learnt in the last couple of weeks:

- how to slam the door and assertively walk away from a taxi driver who shouts at me insisting I pay triple fare (as well as learning ‘I may be a foreigner but I am not a fool’ in Bengali and Hindi)
- how to hold a conversation in three languages (I speak in English, someone whose mother tongue speaks in Bengali, and someone whose mother tongue is Hindi speaks in Hindi, and we all kind of understand)
- how to work in an organization when at one point only 2 other people spoke English
- where to get good food – there is an expensive restaurant down our road which we went to the other day – we all ended up with swollen and itchy feet due to MSG. From now on I will stick to the outdoor fast food vendor – at least if I get ill I’ll know it is because of good old dirt.
- h ow to deal patiently with bureaucracy (keeping my temper when I have to fill out exactly the same form twice, with exactly the same information that the official already has in triplicate in front of him. Once I had filled it out he ticked my answers, obviously making sure that the colour of my eyes (yes, really) and my father’s name hadn’t changed since last time.

A haven of peace, ponds and palms

It felt very much like a ride at a theme park: an Indian jungle adventure. I was sitting in an auto-rickshaw, tightly squeezed between two Indian ladies, being alternately shaken up and down and lurched from side to side as the auto crashed its way down a mud and brick jungle footpath. Lush green vegetation, palm trees, bamboo, and banana trees encircled our route, and we could almost see the steam rising, so intense was the humidity: it had just stopped raining.

Twenty bone-shattering minutes later and we had arrived at the end of the auto-navigable path. Where there was no brick, the monsoon had created a muddy swamp of a path, so we had to continue on foot. A couple of minutes later, however, and we had reached our destination village. Behind a pond, where women were squatting cleaning their pots and pans, were a cluster of houses, some made out of mud, and some out of a combination of bamboo, plastic sheets and brick. I had to pinch myself to ensure I was really here, it was so like going back in history, or walking into a museum on rural life.

In spite of the beauty of the area, the whole situation spoke of intense poverty. Houses made of mud, women cleaning kitchen implements in a pond, a 45 plus minute walk to a road: life must be hard. And for a woman who was unable to walk for much of her childhood: the challenges must have been almost unimaginable. We were here to meet Moumita, who had suffered from polio as a baby. For many women, such a combination of circumstances would result in absolute dependence on her family and isolation within her house. Not so for Moumita. She was introduced to me as the only woman in her area who had completed higher secondary school, who had graduated, and who now was studying for a Masters in Social Work. Up until the age of 15, her mother had carried her to school – first to her primary school, and then the 45 minute walk to the main road where she caught an auto. But in class 11 she was introduced to AWWD, who were able to provide her with callipers. These enabled her to walk comfortably, thus changing her life: she was able to continue her education.

I had come to AWWD’s rural office to interview girls for some case studies, and Moumita was not the only inspirational lady I met. Deep in another part of rural west Bengal, after a 30 minute walk meandering through lush green fields I met a proud proprietor of a village shop. Niberdita can’t walk at all: she can only get around by crawling. It is difficult to imagine a more challenging set of circumstances - being unable to walk would be unbearably difficult in any situation, but living 30 minutes from a road in a poor rural area - the mind boggles. But Niberdita is living with dignity and determination, and greeted us with a beautiful smile. AWWD had provided her with a loan, which enabled her to expand a shop, so now she is selling all sorts of groceries. She says: 'I meet with many people every day and this is very interesting. I cannot go outside and I cannot stay in the home alone. But now I can meet people who come to my shop'. And Sikha too, can’t walk. She gets around using a hand operated tricycle, which she uses to get to work - an hour journey either way on the awful mud and brick footpaths. And she has not missed an AWWD monthly meeting, even though to attend them involves a 12 kilometre journey in either scorching sun or torrential rain, depending on the season.

It was an immense privilege to meet these women who have faced challenges I can't even imagine, yet are still smiling and have an impressive zest for life.

I stayed for a week in the rural office in a little village called Subhi, which was really wonderful (apart from the toilet, a point to which I will return to later). The office had two bedrooms, so I slept there, as did several of the field staff. Every morning when I stepped outside I could see lush green fields, cows, palm trees and lemon trees. That was wonderful.

However, the whole village could also see me as I made my way blurrily to the bathroom, (which was actually four walls and a roof which contained a few buckets of water), which was less wonderful. And I don’t know whether you have ever had to use an outdoor toilet in a monsoon, situated next to a pond and with no light, but I wouldn’t recommend it. What made the whole situation even worse was that often at night dogs would prowl around, and I had nightmares of being trapped inside the spider-endowed toilet with yapping dogs outside, or venturing out and getting rabies. Neither of those untoward events happened, thank goodness, but it did make life that little bit more interesting.

One wonderful lady cooked for us in the evening. At first I tried to help, but I was obviously superfluous, and often ended up observing and writing notes in my little book instead (don’t expect wonders of Bengali cooking when I return, however, as I tried cooking tonight. The end result was a soggy green mess with bits of charcoaled garlic. Not quite the effect I was intending). All food was bought fresh – there was no fridge. We used to chop up the vegetables on the path outside the kitchen (complete with ants crawling around). But the end result was absolutely delicious: there were invariably three dishes and rice: how Mina managed to do this with only two gas hobs I do not know.

Another noteworthy aspect of life in rural West Bengal was both the variety of the types of transport available, and their capacity to expand to take an ever-increasing number of passengers. At the bottom is the lowly bicycle – you may assume that a bicycle can only take one person, but you would be mistaken. I espied a bicycle carrying four people, although admittedly one of them was child. One person was pedalling, one was sitting on the crossbar, one above the rear wheel, and a child balanced precariously between them. The next step up is a bicycle attached to a wooden platform on wheels. This platform is designed to carry a vast variety of items, from bricks to people. One evening when we were coming back from the field six of us clambered on to one of these wooden carts and one guy cycled us back to the office, which took about 30 minutes. Slowly meandering through the lush green West Bengal countryside was a wonderful experience for me, less wonderful for the cyclist though – beads of sweat were standing on his forehead. He did boast that he could take a max of 8 people on this crate. Below is a picture of one of these bicycle crates just visible below a rather large load of hay:

The next step up is the motorcycle: there were a fair few of these whizzing down the narrow lanes with little regard for pedestrians or animals in the way. And a similar form of wooden crate could be attached to the back of a motorcycle, which seemed to be able to take about 20 people in total. And a level above this contraption is the auto rickshaw. It was not uncommon to squeeze 5 people in the back and 5 in the front, plus a couple hanging on to the back for good measure:

And then there are the vans, which seem to be able to squeeze an ever expanding number of passengers. The picture below is of a van where the field staff wanted me to hang on to get home (it was rush hour and there were few options). As adventurous as I am, I downright refused to do this. Not only would it be difficult to hang on, but the buses come down the narrow roads at tremendous speeds, often passing other vehicles with only inches to spare. Being squished between two vehicles would not be a pleasant way to die.

Anyway, I won’t end on that less than cheerful note – I will say that experiencing this for a week: re-energised and motivated me to better deal with the craziness of Kolkata traffic.