My Calcutta Adventure

In January of my junior year of college I was part of a group service learning trip to Calcutta, India. I went to a small liberal arts school in Birmingham, Alabama, a school with a good academic reputation but full of students from mostly privileged upper middle class families. Many of the students had never been outside of the Southeastern United States, much less the country. Some of the members of our group had never flown on an airplane.

The leader of our group, the college's chaplain, had organized the trip to Calcutta in order for us to do a service mission in Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. The boarding house where we stayed in Calcutta was just a short walk down the street from Mother Teresa's home. Getting to Calcutta from Birmingham, Alabama was a three day Odyssey. Apparently, the trip organizers had found cheaper tickets going the western route to get to India. We traveled first to Los Angeles, spent a night there, and then traveled from L.A. to Seoul, Korea. From Seoul we flew to Bangkok, Thailand. We spent another night there. Finally, we had another 4 hour flight to Calcutta.

Immediately upon exiting the airport in Calcutta we were inundated. In the baggage claim area we gathered up our bags and placed them on rolling luggage carts. It was a good thing too. When we exited the airport the begging children saw this group of mostly white, western looking people coming toward them. They were literally all over us. They were asking for money and hanging on to us, clinging to our luggage cart; they were relentless. We were practically running to get to our bus. I had to protect one of the girls who was being assaulted by the beggars.

Fortunately, we made it to the bus. We then began to drive through the city. It was one of the dirtiest places I had ever seen. There was so much smog and many of the high rise apartment buildings looked like they were falling apart. The air was gray even though the sun was shining. People were hanging their clothes out to dry on their balconies. It seemed like they would be putting them back on just as dirty as they were when they had taken them off to wash them.

After we got a couple days' rest at the guest house, it was time to go to work. There was no need for an alarm clock because we were awakened at about 6:30 every morning by the screams of the crows at sunrise and the prayer call at the nearby mosque. We were in the heart of downtown Calcutta, but we had walls surrounding the guest house and there was a yard and many trees. It was like an oasis in this big city.

When we walked out the front door, we immediately saw people emerging from their apartments with their towels wrapped around their waists going to bathe in the fire hydrants. They would wash their faces and even brush their teeth right there at the hydrant. I remember thinking how unfortunate they were to have to live like that. We continued our half hour walk through the city to get to Prim Dan, which was a home for the sick and dying run by Mother Teresa's mission. As we walked along we went through the market place. There were dead animals being hung up, people selling spices, statues and other small items. We then passed a Catholic School and saw children in their very western school uniforms. Those uniforms somehow seemed out of place. Before we arrived at the home where we were to be working, we would come to a bridge that went across the railroad track. The bridge was high above the track and had large banks on either side. There were huts along the banks, in the middle of a city of 15 million people, built out of sticks and the same material that is used to make trash bags. There were whole families sitting in these huts. Mothers would be holding their crying children and begging for us to give them money. They had looks of desperation and hopelessness on their faces. The people bathing back at the fire hydrant seemed well off in comparison to those we encountered here.

We approached the home where we were to work. It was an old converted paint factory. The work consisted of gathering the cots where the people were sleeping, stacking them up and cleaning the floors. There were probably 30 people to a room and the cots were just metal slabs with legs, covered by a thin mattress. Before we set out cleaning the floor, we had to move those people out of the sleeping area who were disabled and incapable of moving on their own power. Many times over the course of the 2 and half weeks we were there, I carried a frail, elderly man in my arms out to the court yard before the cleaning.

The cleaning was another story. A lot of the residents were incontinent and made use of the floor as a toilet. We would throw buckets of water mixed with soap on the concrete slab floor and squat down and walk across the floor with little straw brooms that we held in each hand, scrubbing the floor as we went. The cots would then be cleaned and repositioned. This whole process took about an hour and a half. One particularly vivid memory I have is of a man who was unable to walk because he had injured his foot. Every day he would receive medical attention. The outside of his foot was split open in three places which all conjoined in the center, creating one large, open wound. You could literally see the bone. He would always scream as he was being treated. It was obvious that he was in tremendous pain.

People didn't have their own wheelchairs. They were just a means to get from point A to point B. When we were finished moving someone, he would be removed from the wheelchair and set down. We would take the wheelchair back and move another person. There was a rhythm in this whole process. The volunteers, who came from all over the world, moved back and forth quickly, wheeling a person out to the courtyard then running back in to bring out another. One man didn't have legs and he would slide himself along the floor with his arms.

My most vivid memory though was of a little girl. She was probably two or three years old. We had finished our work one day and were walking out of the walls of the converted paint factory. Everyday people would spot us as we were exiting and would position themselves on the sides of the stairway that led up the hill to the main street. A few days earlier, one of the advisers from our group told us about all these little children who had surrounded them as they were walking home. He had picked up a little girl in his arms and threw her up in the air and caught her. I thought that this was a very sweet gesture. This day we were walking out and the children rushed us, again, begging for money. This little girl, in a pink dress, came right up in front of me. I thought of our adviser's experience. I picked her up and tossed her up in the air. Immediately after, however, all the other little children started jumping on me, wanting me to do the same for them. I was literally covered in children. They were dragging me to the ground and I even began to get a little scared. The other members of our group actually had to pull them off of me.

This was my first experience dealing with people who lived in abject poverty. It led me to question my life and the materialism and frequent superficiality of the world I had known. It would lead me to travel to Africa a year later and eventually take a position working in the inner city after college. This experience with the extremely poor, sick and dying gave me a new perspective on my world and a greater sense of gratitude for the gifts I had been given.