Jesus, etc.

This past Thursday Father Puthumai took us to the MC's house in Patiram, where Mother Teresa's miracle took place. In order for someone to become a saint, the Church has to verify two miracles attributed to them. While there have been many miracles attributed to Mother, this is the only one that has been officially seen by the Church, and was the cause for her beatification in 2003, making her half-way to sainthood. So here's the story: A Bengali woman named Monica was staying in a clinic run by the Missionaries of Charity (the religious order started by Mother Teresa) and had an enormous tumor in her stomach, big enough that she had to physically pick it up when she tried to walk anywhere. She'd been to doctors, and was receiving some treatments. One day the sisters put a Mother Teresa medal around her neck, she went to pray in the chapel, felt something cool in her stomach, and when she woke up the next morning her tumor was gone. The MCs run many different types of houses: TB clinics, rehabilitation centers, orphanages... Their house in Patiram was meant to be similar to Kalighat in Kolkata, a home for the dying, but there were so many people in the area that needed only temporary care that it has become more of a general clinic. Most of the patients have TB, which affects almost every household in this region where everyone works hard in the fields and malnutrition is commonplace. Many people who have the disease are afraid to go to the doctor or can't afford any care, so they work themselves to exhaustion before finally coming to the MCs. They get medicine, rest, and medical care until they are healthy enough to return home and to work, where they are likely to relapse. The sisters also have a few HIV/AIDS cases, and other severe patients. As we walked through the building it was incredible to see the joy on everyone's faces as they came to greet us, there was a strange mixture of joy and sadness in the air as we met many of the patients and the sisters shared their stories with us. There are many who doubt Monica's miracle, even her husband claims that her instantaneous recovery was due to the medical treatment she was receiving. But I say that the fact that a sick woman whose family is living in poverty has somewhere where she can receive free medical care and be nursed back to health, that's a miracle in itself.

On Friday Scott decided to have a practical lesson for his English class, so the morning class took us to the market. It was really fun to have a chance to walk around town in the morning, especially with our class pointing things out and chit-chatting the whole way. It was amazing because we didn't have to start a conversation once, the whole class really seemed to enjoy talking in a relaxed setting, in English, translating for each other when they needed help. At the market they helped Scott bargain for 2 kg of potatoes; everyone here knows that Scott loves potatoes, and they also really like it when he makes a scene. The evening class took us to the train station, helped us buy some music, and introduced us to some fun junk food.

Saturday morning Erin and I went to the MC house in Chanditola. This is a house for orphans, abandoned children, and unwed mothers, and we try to go there once a week when we're in town to play with the kids. This week Erin and I skipped English class in the morning and got to the MCs early enough to help with laundry. We hand washed everything in giant stone basins, then rinsed everything twice before it was hung up to dry. Afterwards the sisters made us tea and some treats, which I think might have canceled out the work we did. Since we've been going there on a somewhat regular basis, the kids all know us and get super excited when they see us coming. Sometimes I feel bad because we cause a bit of a ruckus while we're there, lots of running and yelling and screaming, but the kids really seem to enjoy it. They all hold their index fingers above their head when they want us to do the hokey pokey, and touch their heads and shoulders a lot when they want to do head, shoulders, knees and toes. We helped the kids air out blankets in the sun and played on the terrace for a while. They also had three newborns this week, two of which were born on the same day. Chanditola is a place where unwed mothers can come to have their babies and then be able to return to their villages, and all three of these babies were given up so will remain at Chanditola for a while before being moved to a larger orphanage in Kolkata or Darjeeling. There's also a baby there whose mother died in childbirth. She was premature and her family can't take care of her, so she'll stay at the MC's for about 6 months before she's healthy enough to be returned to her family. The sisters will often take in children who are sick, injured, or suffering from serious malnutrition, nurse them back to health for a few months, then return them to their families. It's amazing to be able to come every week and see the changes in the children: the kid who had scabies and would just sit and cry all day is now running around and laughing, the baby who was just about to roll over now flips himself over every few minutes. The work that the Missionaries of Charity do is very immediate, very hands on. It's a nice balance to the work that we're doing at SWI, which are long-term mostly education and awareness programs affecting thousands of people each month, working to change structures and mindsets in local communities so that people will lead healthy lives in the future. The MCs instead say "this one person is sick right now, we need to help them". Both are essential in working towards peace and justice throughout our world and are beautiful examples of work being done everywhere to accomplish this. And, you know, the redeeming power of God's love.

Elephant Love Medley

Last week we celebrated Durga Puja, one of West Bengal's biggest festivals, honoring the Hindu goddess Durga. The city is filled with lights and giant bamboo structures called pandels are built throughout the city, kind of like temporary temples to house elaborate clay statues of Durga, who has ten arms. There are also huge bamboo archways covered in lights over the streets (our power's been going out a few hours a day for the past month so that the city has enough electricity to power everything this week). Everyone buys new clothes and spends four nights going "pandal hopping," going to worship and make offerings at all of the pandals and also to check out all the lights and junk food and everyone else's new clothes. SWI is closed during the festival so Erin, Scott and I decided to take the whole week off and do some traveling up in the hills. But before I get too carried away, I'll fill you in on a few things that happened the week before we left:

• CRS sent us a last minute project proposal to send to the Clinton foundation so we had an all day work party to write/edit a proposal to increase HIV/AIDS testing for children in the Malda district.
• We visited a few interesting places nearby: A nearby rock quarry to see their working conditions and nearby homes (in the car Father had already started talking about what could be done to study their health conditions and increase awareness of nearby services), a Jesuit physical therapy clinic where they have only herbal medicines and practice a lot of alternative medicine, and an old age home that is completely cared for by the elderly that live there.
• Monasi, one of the girls we live with, is in charge of the health division of SWI, where Erin has been helping. Her new project to increase child immunizations in the entire Raiganj diocese (Uttar Dinajpur, Dakshin Dinajpur, and Malda districts) was just passed for funding by Manos Unidas in Spain, and it's already started in full force. The supervisor training was held while we were gone, and the field staff will be trained later this week, so we'll be spending a lot more time in the field and setting up data entry as the project begins.

And now for our trip... We drove up to Gorumara National Park to try and catch some wildlife, stopped in Siliguri to pick up our special tourist visas for Sikkim then hopped on a bus to Gangtok, where we spent two days before driving back down to Darjeeling for another two days. It was a really good trip, lots of mountains and tea, and I think the best way to explain it is just to cut and paste Scott's list of highlights:

• Listening to Phil Collins, Bryan Adams, Michael Jackson as we climbed to over 13000ft, while our driver sang along
• Watching people carry giant bags of tea from a backpack that you strap to your head...a head pack
  
• Hiking to the top of a Mt. at 13000ft in the Himalayas and seeing gorgeous views of Lake Chungu and the mountains, while wondering why all the other tourists are just sitting by the lake
• Watching a cultural program in the shrubbery
  
• Riding yaks
• Having countless "photo shoots" with Indian tourists, while feeling like some sort of celebrity
• Drinking tea from a lookout tower overlooking the jungle at our hotel
  
• Getting a private serenade from the people sharing our jeep
• Eating the best Chinese food ever, because we were basically on the Chinese border
• Watching the sunrise in the Himalayas
• Seeing animals like the snow leopard, rhino, elephant, red panda and most importantly Peacocks!!
  
• dressing up like traditional Nepali's
• watching an Indian water light show
• sleeping next to the Pleasure Palace
• Hearing a certain Whitney Houston song while eating Thai food
• Watching 1000s of Indians dance like Evan, Steve, Doug etc.
• Going to a real Bollywood movie-Bhool Bhulaiyaa
• Seeing amazing statues of Hindu deities
  
• Watching countless Indian music videos
• Almost getting stuck in Gangtok
• Eating amazing pot stickers, chowmein and Samosas (no not smores) from a small hotel that didn't expect any tourists
• Getting the best rum ever from a local bar for about 40cents per shot
• Bus almost leaving with out me in Siliguri, while Erin and Andrea and my luggage wondered where I was
• Seeing HSM 2 in Hindi
  
• Fresh Darjeeling tea in a tea field
• Frolicking in a stream with our driver Matthias
  
• Baby elephants at Rhino point
  
• Visiting the first ever Tibetan Refugee Camp
• Eating Pan, which I'm pretty sure is made from the Betel Leaf
  
• Visiting the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute and seeing really neat artifacts from the original Everest summit
• Tibetan Butter Tea is nothing like I imagined Butter Beer in Harry Potter, it is mainly just butter with water
  
• Seeing the first white people in a month
  
• Learning that when the hotel offers you tea, even though they are making you late because they were not ready when they said they would be, it still means that they will charge you room service price for the tea
  
• Getting our picture taken with Indian Military and having them tell us we look "Superfantastic" while holding up the OK sign

We arrived back in Raiganj just in time for the last day of Durga Puja when the streets fill with processions of people bringing the Durga statues to be submerged in the river. We walked around town a bit in the evening to see the pandels, then sat outside SWI wearing our new puja wear, bought a few egg rolls, and watched the longest, loudest, dancingest parade ever. All in all, it was a pretty good week.

Walk by Faith

One funny thing about all of the religious houses that we visit (convents, rectories, seminaries, missions...) is that they all have inspirational posters - always framed- that have some sort of inspirational message in English such as "Laughter is the Beauty of Today's Moment and the Hope for Tomorrow's Promise" or "Winners never Quit, Quitters never Win". This message will be written across some sort of scenic picture - sometimes its a palm tree on a beach, or a house set in a meadow. Usually though, it's a picture of creepy babies. Sometimes they're Indian babies, sometimes they're American babies. Sometimes they're dressed like babies, sometimes they're dressed up like grown-ups. Most of the time they're holding flowers. You know how Angela on "The Office" has that poster by her desk of the babies wearing sunglasses and playing saxophones? Now imagine that "You are the Light of the World" is written across the bottom and it's framed and hanging in the dining room of the Sisters of Charity. It's not only babies though, there are posters of kittens and puppies too. I definitely saw one that said "Walk by Faith, not by Sight" with a picture of a Golden Retriever. The poster that I'm looking at right now has three babies (although I'm pretty sure it's the same baby transposed three times) crawling in a field of yellow flowers wearing diapers and straw hats covered in flowers. Across the top it says, "Every Eye has its own Crystal". What does that even mean?!?
Creepy.

Sons and Daughters

Erin and I spent the past week in Bolaigaon, about 45 minutes from Raiganj where we stayed in a convent with the Sisters of the Divine Saviour. Most of the convents or missions here have the same formula: somewhere for the priests/sisters/brothers to live, a dispensary where they provide free healthcare and hand out medicines, an elementary school, and a hostel for children from the villages who go to the school. There are four sisters that live in the Bolaigaon convent, Sr. Mini who runs the dispensary, Sr. Solly who teaches third grade in the school, Sr. Mukta who runs the hostel (if you’ve never had 90 elementary aged girls as your upstairs roommates, it’s pretty fun) and Sr. Anisha who brought us to the different villages everyday.

We had come to spend the week traveling to nearby villages and seeing the health programs that the sisters were implementing. When we arrived, Sr. Anisha had called all their health workers to greet us and to have a meeting to plan out our week. Let me back up for a minute. The programs in Bolaigaon (and most of India from my understanding) are based off of self-help groups. These self-help groups consist of 5-10 people (usually women, although more men’s groups are starting) in rural villages who join together to open a savings account. They are based mostly on economic reasoning, so each person in the group will pay a set amount each month (most of the groups we met were saving 30 or 40 rupees per month) which the group will then deposit in a bank account. Then if one of the members needs a loan to buy some land or a cow or something, they can get a loan from the group. Lots of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) have been starting these groups all over rural India (SWI has about 2000 self-help groups that they oversee) and the government has been working to start them as well. The health workers in Bolaigaon are women from the villages who are involved in these groups; each worker oversees about 10 groups in villages near where they live. So the health workers not only help to run the self-help groups, but then they also teach lessons during the group meetings. The topics for the lessons range from health and hygiene to social issues. The workers are all women from the villages, and it’s a very blended group; some of the women have never been to school, some got through first or second grade, and some got all the way to tenth. The sisters have about 28 health workers and four supervisors who run self help groups in every village within 3 panchayats (counties) and have seen a lot of successes in their programs. It was amazing to see the health workers during our meeting, they were so excited to meet us and ask us all sorts of questions about where we’re from and what we do and tell us all about their programs and what they’ve accomplished. It was really incredible to be surrounded by so many empowered women.

Every morning Erin and I would wake up early for Morning Prayer with the sisters, have breakfast, and get ready to start our day. Around 9:00 one of the supervisors would come to meet us and then we would head out with Sr. Anisha for one of the villages. The first day we visited the nearby villages, the other days we would walk for about an hour, hour and a half. When we got to the villages we would walk around to a few people’s houses, and then meet with most of the women in the village. They would ask us a lot of questions, like whether we grow rice where we’re from and what our climate is like and we would ask them questions like what type of agriculture they had and what other projects their groups had been involved in. We probably visited about 8 or 9 villages during the week and it was amazing to see all the differences in how they built their houses, what language they spoke, and the different ways that they have incorporated these self-help groups into their villages.

Bondita, one of the supervisors that had been bringing us to some different villages, invited us to her home. It was very similar to most of the homes that we visited: it was built sort of like a compound, with a courtyard in the middle that the rooms opened into. There would be one or two rooms that the family lived in, a kitchen, and a storage area. Most of the homes are built out of mud, some have bamboo supports within the mud walls (sort of like re-bar) and they mostly have straw, clay, or aluminum siding for roofs. Bondita’s house was the first one that I had been in where they had built their walls of aluminum as well. When we got there Bondita surprised us with some lunch, which was quite the feat considering that she had been with us since 9:00 that morning which means she had woken up super early to prepare this for us. We didn’t eat much, but she had made some wonderful treats for dessert, kind of like mini crepes with cinnamon which we filled our mouths with while her adorable 7 year old daughter Birnali danced for us and played with my camera.

Scott came out to join us during the weekend and it was fun to fill him in on some of the adventures that we’d been having and show him some of the villages. We got to take a boat on a rope across a flooded road, ride on a bicycle van (kind of like a bicycle with a truck bed on the back of it), eat sugarcane that we got fresh from a field, all sorts of fun stuff. On Sunday we went to a blessing of a new chapel that had been built in one of the villages, and to get there we each got to ride on the back of a different priest’s motorcycle. After Mass the kids from the hostels performed some dances which were all really good, I’ll try to get the videos up when I have a chance.

All in all it was a really great week. It’s nice to be back in Raiganj and we’re planning a lot of exciting things for the near future, but I’m definitely going to miss the Sisters and all the people in Bolaigaon and I’m sure I’ll go back there at least once more while we’re here.