What we did: Volunteered at Prem Dan
Budget: 3500R/$70; Spent: 2766R/$55
Patty:
Jeff accompanied me to the Mother House this morning, then
returned to the hotel by taxi.
I went to volunteer at Prem Dan. Again this morning, I
walked the 20 minute route to Prem Dan with Barbara through the slums of
Calcutta. We talked all the way there. I learned she had been married twice
before. Her first husband was a German fellow. When their daughter became old
enough, Barbara told him she wanted to do some travelling on her own. They
stayed married but no doubt this must have a paid a toll on their relationship.
She was on her way back when her husband encouraged her to visit Egypt.
Ironically, it was in Egypt she met her 2nd husband, a well-educated
Egyptian guy. She basically left her first husband for the Egyptian guy. She
told me her and the Egyptian guy were very happy together… not sure what
happened with them, she didn’t say.
Jeff watched The Hobbit, and just rested. He was feeling
better, but very weak from throwing up and basically eating nothing yesterday.
Jeff spoke to his parents over Skype and rested.
At Prem Dan again I spent the first part of the morning
doing laundry. I stood next to a Spanish lady named Carmen that I met the day
before. She is with about a group of 20+ people from Spain who are all
volunteering at the Missionaries of Charity. We talked for the whole time and
it made the laundry work go by so much faster. We got scolded once or twice by
a massy for not going fast enough. She told me she had been to Canada and loved
it. I asked her about the economy in Spain and if it’s as bad as we heard from
the Spanish couple we met a while back in Vietnam. She said it was in fact very
bad and that almost everybody knows someone that has lost their job or home
recently. She said that now, if someone wants to work there are simply no jobs
to be had. Before the crisis she said there was almost always something opening
up. We also talked about how the laundry doesn’t seem to get cleaned well
enough. There’s no time spent on getting the stains out of things, but perhaps our
standards of cleanliness are just unrealistic under these circumstances.
After laundry I went to find Shishubala and Dupali. Both
were sleeping right next each other. When I left them the day before they were
in totally different areas of the room so I was surprised to see them so close to each other. Dupali was
fast asleep but Shishubala was awake, laying in her bed. I sat down next to her
and we tried conversing. Of course we don’t speak the same language but none
the less we talk to each other as if we understand each other. We both nod a
lot to each other, repeat certain words as if we understand, but it still feels
like were communicating and it’s been fun. She has taught me some words in
Hindi like food “kana”. She often asks me for tea and food. She’ll talk to me
for a while, telling me stories. A few times she looked up and clasped her
hands in prayer. She must have been telling me about someone who died. I felt
like maybe I was getting a vague understanding of what she was telling me. Even
if I’m wrong about that, maybe it was nice for her to have someone to talk to.
I brought her some chai (tea) with biscuits and sat a bit
more. After she finished I asked her if she wanted to get up and go outside but
she pointed to her leg and motioned she wanted to stay in bed. A sister later
told me that the leg she pointed to is paralyzed. I left Dupali and Shushubala
inside and went into the sunroom and met Reka.
Reka is a burn victim. It was the first time I had seen her.
When I saw her sitting there by herself she seemed to be in pain. She was
constantly rocking herself back and forth and playing with her hands. I grabbed
a plastic lawn chair and sat next to her. I began looking at her face. Immediately,
a feeling of shock and fear overwhelmed me. She had patches covering both her
eyes. The patches had a yellow substance leaking through it which I think was
pus. Her nose was gone. All that remained were her nostrils. The skin
surrounding her mouth was burned and very dry and her lips were gone too. Her
right arm was severely scarred, oddly with gashes. I cannot fathom the kind of
pain she goes through all day. It seemed unrelenting. I sat with her and talked
to her. She spoke back. Unfortunately she doesn’t speak English either. I sat
beside her holding her hand trying to talk to her about silly things to perhaps
get her mind off of the pain. Some Indian music began playing and I could tell
she liked it. She began rocking back and forth to the beat. I kind of hummed
the tune since she liked it and when I did she leaned in close to me to hear me
humming. I continued sitting with her and began rubbing her back in
an effort to soothe the pain and conserve her energy so that she didn’t have to
rock and move around so much. Her movements became slower and as I rubbed her
back she held my other hand in both her hands and she began stroking it. We sat
there together for a while and then massy asked me for help with something.
When I got up she smiled and said don’t worry and told me to continue sitting
with Reka.
Lunch time rolled around and I wasn’t sure if Reka would
need help eating. Turned out she was capable of feeding herself and it seemed
like it was her favourite part of the day. She devoured her meal and it made me
happy to see her appetite was still there. I left Reka to go see Dupali and
Shishubala. I fed Shishubala and then went over to Dupali who was still
sleeping to feed her too. It was difficult to wake her up. She was quite weak. She
can’t speak and she can’t see. All she can do to communicate is make sounds.
She seemed displeased when I tried lifting her to prop her up against the wall
so she could sit up. I ended up trying to hold her head with one hand and feed
her with the other. She wouldn’t open her mouth to let the rice in. So all the
rice just kept falling out. I couldn’t tell if she perhaps she couldn’t open
her mouth or if she just didn’t want to eat. I eventually gave up and let her
go back to sleep.
I returned to the hotel around 1pm. I was exhausted again,
but this time was determined to make it to Daya Dan, our second shift of the
day. Jeff decided that he was good enough to accompany me, but I think he
mostly just didn’t want me to take the metro by myself, especially since I
didn’t know where I was going and would need to walk a distance to the house.
Jeff:
When it was time to go, we took a taxi to the metro stop at
which we were supposed to meet Barbara and some other volunteers.
Unfortunately, when we arrived, there was no one there. We thought that they might
be in the metro down below, so we went down there. But, we saw no one as we
bought our tickets, passed through security, and boarded the train. This was
going to be a problem since we had no idea how to actually get to Daya Dan.
We hopped in a taxi at the correct Metro stop, but the taxi
driver had no idea where he was going. He dropped us off at a street he claimed
to be the one we were looking for, but asking some people on the street we
quickly discovered it wasn’t the right street.
We stopped to ask a couple people, but were only pointed
vaguely in one direction or the other. The thing about Indian people, men in
particular, is that they are never wrong and will never say they don’t know
something. So when you ask them directions, they will give you some, even if
they don’t know what the hell they are talking about. OK, this is a
generalization…maybe 80% of them do this. Still, high enough.
While we were talking to one police officer, a man walking
by stopped to ask us where we were going. He had an English accent and spoke
perfect English. We explained where we were going and he told us he’d show us
the way. I had a weird feeling about him from the beginning, but he didn’t do
anything odd. We chatted with him as he walked us there. Turns out he had gone
to university in England and currently owns a home there, but is living in
India doing some research on “production processes” or something like that. He
was pretty vague. He was certainly chatty.
We randomly met Barbara wandering around on our way to Daya
Dan. It was lucky, too, because she was lost, but not too lost, since we were
only minutes away at this point.
We said our good-byes to our guide, whose name is Satish, I
believe.
When we walked into Daya Dan, we weren’t sure where to go.
We were already quite late by this time and none of us had volunteered here
before. Eventually we were directed to the second floor where several nurses
were preparing to feed the kids. Jeff got paired with a very cute, very sweet
little girl named Rosa. Patty was paired with an older girl, but she can’t
remember her name. We spent the next 45 minutes or so feeding the children.
Rosa took the longest to eat and Jeff was sitting with her in the empty room
trying to get her to drink some water. He wasn’t very successful. After
finishing, Jeff took Rosa to her bed for a nap.
It seems most of the kids have either physical or mental
disabilities. It wasn’t clear that anything was wrong with Rosa, so we’re not
sure it’s a requirement for kids in the home to have a disability of some sort.
We spent the rest of our time at the home spending time with
the children. Jeff got along quite well with two girls who he ended up chasing
around for most of the afternoon – they were playing a mix of tag and
hide-and-go-seek. Jeff was accompanied by one very sweet little boy who was the
son of one of the workers. He knew the girls very well and would accompany Jeff
when he would look for the girls. The little boy would hold out his hand so
Jeff could take it and would often lead Jeff to where the girls were hiding.
He’s a smart kid!
We also spent some time with a young girl who pinched
everyone she came in contact with. There was clearly something not quite right
about her, and it wasn’t clear she thought the pinching was a game. We tried to
just hold her hand and calm her down, but this was very difficult.
Overall, our experience at the
home was mixed. There were no organized activities for the kids, so that was
disappointing and there wasn’t a lot to do with them on our own. It was a kind
of boring place. It would be nice to see the kids get more things to do, or at
least some education of some sort.
We left with a big group of
people. Most of the volunteers had arrived late, I think because it’s such a
difficult home to find. The Indonesian ladies had come, as well as a woman from
the United States and one from Poland. They were all very nice and we got along
with them fine.
On our way back to Sutter St. we
all decided to have dinner together at Raj’s Spanish Café. We had a nice dinner
together, although Jeff was feeling sick the whole time. He spoke a little with
Barbara. She talked for some time about her diet. She has removed meat and
dairy products from her diet. She does not eat meat because she disapproves of
how animals are raised and killed. She doesn’t eat dairy because she believes
adults are healthier without it. She’s a 70-year-old woman in great shape…she
must be doing something right!
Patty and the other girls,
meanwhile, were having an interesting conversation about many of the criticisms
of Mother Theresa and the homes she founded. Although most volunteers seem to
acknowledge there are many areas in which the homes should improve, most seem
pretty appalled that people would criticize a woman who had done such life-changing
work. We had read a blog about a man
who had volunteered at the home for the sick and dying (Kalighat) and he had
witnessed one worn out volunteer nurse improperly give one patient a needle.
Apparently, the air bubbles had not been removed from the needle and the
patient had died shortly after. He was obviously quite disturbed by this, as
would any person who knew the dangers of doing such a thing. He also witnessed
some other sad things, like neglect and borderline physical abuse, from volunteers
and workers/nuns, alike. While this is of course horrible
and reprehensible, I find the greater picture extremely complicated. There are
so many instances where things could improve in this organization, but it’s not
that simple. There is nothing simple about the prospect of caring for society’s
most neglected people. There is so much to say on the topic and so many
opinions that only a large book could do talk about this topic justice. There
are some things that I would like to say.
On the topic of providing better
facilities to these people with the money the organization clearly has, my
perspective is that this is simply not the mandate of the organization. Allow
me to explain. Mother Theresa founded the Missionaries of Charity in the spirit
of providing love and support to the most neglected in society, and she
intended to reach as many people as possible. To paraphrase her motivations,
“Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody: I think that is
a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing
to eat.” It is in this spirit, I would suppose, that she tried to give people a
sense of human dignity, even if it is just in death. It may be impossible for
me to understand how I might feel if I were dying of leprosy in a gutter on the
street, ignored and neglected by all those around me; but what I think I could
understand on the most basic level is the improvement in my quality of
existence in changing from that state to one of being looked after even at the
most basic level…being cared for, fed, being part of a community. Calculating
changes in human suffering is not something we are readily able to do, but it
seems to me that moving from a state of neglect and abandonment to one of being
cared for, even minimally, is a gigantic decrease in human suffering. Perhaps
the biggest difference we can make in the lives of the most neglected in
society is simply not to neglect them, to make them feel part of humanity once
again, and to provide only basic services. If the greatest return on investment
(i.e., the greatest decrease in human suffering) is attained through providing
minimal services to the greatest number of people possible, then it is simply
rational to not provide anything but basic services to those being helped.
I think humans are not used to
thinking in these terms, especially us in the West. We come from a place of
such privilege that we cry foul when people do not receive the highest of
medical attention. Is it a human right to receive such attention? Even if it
actually increases human suffering in the world? Our resources are limited. By
providing one person with excellent care, we could be denying hundreds of
people of basic necessities and actually increase human suffering. No human has
devised a way to determine these sorts of questions, but that doesn’t mean they
don’t have an answer and that we should strive to find it. I, for one, think we
will eventually come to terms with providing individuals less so we can provide
the group with more.
Mother Theresa started out with
the goal of helping one person at a time, but not necessarily to save them from
death or poverty or disease; she simply wanted to improve their lives. And,
perhaps, serving people in this way got her the biggest bang for her buck, so
to speak, in terms of decreasing suffering. I, for one, can comprehend this
position; perhaps, in time, and with thought, I will come to believe it is the
best way to help at this particular period of human history.
Without a doubt there are other
concerns within the organization, though none that I have heard that don’t
exist elsewhere, even in North America. There is certainly room for
improvement, but an important question is, who will determine the direction of
the change? Hopefully he or she or they are qualified to make that call and
comprehend the goal of the organization as I have explained it above.
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