Kolkata & Mother Teresa House

The work began the next day, and I followed Jeff to Kalighat, the first house that Mother Teresa had set up that took care of terminally sick people. Mother Teresa House had around 7 different programs in Kolkata (and over 750 locations around the world- I think Mother Teresa is probably one of the finest social entrepreneurs and when I go to Wharton and learn management, would like to learn more about how the Missionaries Charity organization is run and how it got to where it is today & challenges it’s facing now etc). All the volunteers (there seemed to be around 70) met at the main headquarters to meet for breakfast of bread, banana and chai to start the day at 7am, where we also sing a farewell song for volunteers who are leaving that day and say a short prayer and hymn. I thought about how long I wanted to volunteer and decided to do one and half weeks. As I only had a month in India, I did not want to spend too much time just in Kolkata as I also wanted to hit Bodh Gaya, Varanasi, Agra, Jaipur and maybe Kathmandu and Dharmasala also, but I also wanted to spend reasonable time doing service because even during my Dragons program community service that was supposed to be one full week got shortened to only two days. And I also decided that I would like to do temporal tithing. I think it’s a great tradition that God asked Christians (or it may be Jews) to give at least ten percent of one’s earnings to the church and the community, and I have made it a goal for myself to try to give at least ten percent of my time and energy towards the community as well. Muslims also have a tradition of giving to their neighbors as one of their 5 pillars of duties, but I don’t think it’s as much as 10 percent and hopefully I’ll make enough money so I don’t have to worry about giving to others. Talking of giving to others, there are so many beggars on the street and one woman who hangs out in front of my hotel grabs me every time I go in/out of the hotel and it’s so annoying. I’ve bought her 150 rupee milk powder and two butter toasts because I felt sympathetic at first, but I learned at the Mother Teresa House that I should not be helping these people. Helping these people only makes them more dependent and a lot of them are professional beggars who just beg because it pays better than the money they can earn with more honest work. Even if you buy something for them, they sell it right back to the seller and so when you absolutely want to give to these people, I was told I have to open the package or food wraps so they cannot sell it back to the shops. There are also horror stories of blind kid beggars on the streets being blind because mafias have blinded them with bike wheel spooks, as these blind kids earn more money and when the sun goes down, all the money that these kids have begged goes straight to the pockets of mafias. I would be curious as to see if there are any microfinance organizations targeting these people on the streets. There are just so many of them and as my street has a lot of tourist hotels/ hostels, it looked like they were making pretty good money begging

I decided to do Kalighat, which is a house for the mentally ill, in the afternoon and Daya Dan, which is a house for mentally challenged children, in the morning. In retrospect, it was good to do these because I felt like I had one’s lifecycle covered, with kids in the morning and old men in the evening. For the first few days, I had difficult time adjusting to 7 hours of community service a day and I always felt exhausted throughout the day. But it was also interesting (I don’t know if this is the right word) to see people with terminal illnesses and some of the kids were so adorable. But as the excitement of doing something for the first time soon wore off, work began to feel rather burdensome. I even skipped one morning shift intentionally, but overall, 10 days flew by and by my tenth day I did not want to leave. I did not do anything special with the patients and kids. I do not have any medical skills nor speak Hindi or Bengali, so all I could do was manual work like doing laundry and dishes, and giving patients massage or just walking with the little kids. They told me during the orientation that they often find that volunteers are affected more than the patients after service, and that is somewhat true for me as well. I don’t know what I should feel while doing service, but it surprised me how foreign the concept of service was to me. Even when I was serving others, my own fun was important to me and many people had come to India just to volunteer at the Mother Teresa House, whereas I was giving only one and half weeks of my four weeks for service. I also felt like I did not have the gift of service, as I was often bored and tired. But it was also personal and rewarding experience feeding children and changing men’s soiled pants. In addition to these intense moments, my fellow volunteers were what kept me going as they were some of the most interesting people I have met. I’ve met people from Australia, Holland and Singapore, New Zealand, Italy, France, Argentina, Japan, Korea, the USA etc and have learned quite a lot about various places around the world. It was especially nice to meet Rich Raz, a young, big Seattlite who is the president of nutritional product company Univera which is interestingly owned by a Korean company Nongyang Aloe. We began and ended on the same day, and had the same morning and afternoon shifts so we spent a lot of time hanging out while working and he helped me through the ten days of service. It was also impressive to see the president of a corporation come volunteer at a place like this- he said he came here 12 years ago when he was in college and always wanted to come back- and he was also being quiet about his volunteering here now because he did not want publicity that his service would engender. On our day-off Thursday, I went to the Victoria Memorial with him. And a few days in, I also met two more Seattlites whom I hung out a lot with. (They were actually from NYC and Miami but did their masters program in existential psychology in Seattle together). As one can probably guess from somebody who had done such cool masters program, both of them were really cool also and we visited the Jain temple and the Flower Market together. And Jain temple was one of the most amazing religious architecture I’ve ever seen because it was the most colorful and bright religious buildings I’ve ever seen

Talking of cool people, the Korea writer for the Rough Guide (a travel book- Rival of the Lonely Planet) slept next to me and it was chill hanging out with him as well. He is originally from England but he had been away from home for over 7 years and he described himself as a ‘compulsive traveler.’ Unlike China which has six writers, he said he wrote the Korea book himself and I was told writers get about 9000 pounds per book plus seven percent of additional income after the book sale meets the bottom line. I was also told that guidebooks lose money on 2/3 of their books. Whereas Lonely Planet make books that lose money anyways, the Rough Guide in contrast only makes books that are profitable (ie China India etc) so he had to write a special proposal to get the job to write about Korea. And once he got the job, which he called a ‘dream job,’ he spent more than a year in Korea researching and he even had a chance to visit North Korea for five days (he said it was $1600 but you need guanxi to go in). He got a fake name and fake beard, and he told me he got drunk with the guide every night and pretended that he wanted to join the NK communist party so he could learn more about North Korea. He also showed me the pictures of North Korea and it was interesting to see the huge ceremony they held for Kim Jung-Il and Pyong-yang’s skyline had one of the highest hotels in the world but the French who were building it pulled out when North Korea started their nuclear program so it was also interesting to hear that the huge black triangular building is empty inside. He said in Korea his favorite place is Jejudo because people are so cute there, and he also mentioned that he used to hate Seoul but now he loved it because there were so many different aspects to the city. He also pointed out that the Lonely Planet writer for Seoul had been harsh on Seoul, and he said that bias was due to the fact that that writer lived in Busan. When I expressed my Korean complexity to him- that ‘I don’t think Korea is as interesting as Japan or China”—he responded that although neither Korea nor Japan had as much interesting and magnificent historical stuff as China, it had fascinating contemporary society and he really enjoyed meeting people from these countries. He also mentioned how Korean apartment blocks have no character (which I agreed to) but said Gangnam’s starting to look really cool as we’re getting more and more funkier and cooler buildings. And another fascinating person I met was father Abello, a brother affiliated with the Mother Teresa House who spent his last 40 years in India. We spent four hours chatting with him on our day off Thursday, and it was the first time I heard an intellectual argument for Catholic church’s position against using contraceptives. I don’t remember his exact arguments, but it was something about how using natural rhythm forces men to control their lust and have to listen to women more, and he sent me a ton of articles so I have to check them out sometime. I also enjoyed hearing about Mother Teresa from someone who knew her first hand. She lived such a simple lifestyle, and her room was so simple and she didn’t even have fans or mosquito nets in her room despite the sizzling heat of the Kolkata summer. It was also interesting to hear that she got her first two buildings from Muslims and Hindus for free- as she shared her vision with believers of other religion, they all shared her vision and gave her the resources for free

So as I have to wrap up my life in Kolkata (taking the train to Bodh Gaya in 5 hours), another metaphor to describe my life here may be the Fall from purity… :p. When I first started volunteering, I went to the 6am mass, did morning and afternoon shifts, and even attended 6:30pm adoration. I always thought that Catholic masses were too rigid for my taste but these masses were wonderful and the sisters had a wonderful angelic voice so I really enjoyed the services. However, as I began partying at night on the top of my hotel Paragon till late (with some substance use- and those guys were so chill and loved music and chess so I couldn’t say no), I began to skip the morning and evening masses, and even went to some of my morning and afternoon shifts late. My fall from grace culminated on my second to last night, when I got a massage from a guy and he tried to go anal on me. It was a rather traumatic experience and Jeff told me later 90 % of masseurs in India are prostitutes or something so I’m going to be more careful about getting massages. I’m a little scared about going into my 10-day meditation (www.dhamma.org) where I’m not allowed to talk, eat a lot, read, listen to music nor run- and I love all these and I don’t know if I’ll keep my sanity if I’m not allowed to do all these. But I’m also looking forward to a time of deep self reflection and break from overeating, alcohol and other stuff so it should be good time. And some of my friends and family have been really supportive so hopefully I’ll make it through! My goals for life at this point is student turned (social) entrepreneur turned professor turned mystic and hopefully the meditation will get me started on the last phase of my life