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The Trouble with Time
7/25/09
This weekend we will do a short debrief and say goodbye to the families that have supported us as a team. Then we’ll depart early on Sunday morning for Bangkok to join the other Asia teams.
Our team is still amazingly positive; as a former camp counselor, I have to say that I am super impressed by how well we get along and how supportive we continue to be of one another.
It’s hard enough to achieve that with a group of ten campers, but we are twenty students who take responsibility for our own actions, and it has been fantastic. Every family has its quirks, but we are uniformly good-hearted, curious, flexible and deeply interested in getting to know one another and the culture better.
It has been hard for me to balance time between the placement and our intentional community, since both are valuable experiences in such different ways.
At my placement, too, it was hard to balance time spent with different groups. The organization is run by amazingly intelligent, dedicated, godly people who are trying to figure out what it means to live responsibly as Westerners (read: really good to spend time with!), and it employs funny, generous, talented Indian women who have escaped a tragic profession and now are ambassadors of freedom in their communities (read: also really good to spend time with!).
Then there’s the option to spend time with the Sisters of Charity, and morning and afternoon services with the Sisters, and meetings with friends we’ve made, and shopping and cooking and exploring the city – there are a lot of demands on our time!
I am really sad to leave Kolkata, and I don’t fully believe that at this time tomorrow we will be hundreds of miles away, in a clean, quiet, modern city. No chai stalls. No communist marches through our neighborhood. No busy commuter trains, no chicken and egg rolls or old British architecture. Less trash, fewer beggars and fewer reasons for the girls to be insecure.
I adore: buses, pushing on the train, rice and beans and the beautifully colored saris that the women wear. We do not adore: the honking horns, diarrhea (“the Big D,” cousin to “the Big C”), the noisy train beneath our apartment window, or the barrage of poverty and injustice. However, whatever our state of mind at the moment, I think we all appreciate what Kolkata has taught us and the people we have had the privilege to get to know.
Thank you for helping make this journey possible.
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