WE ARE HERE!!!

Hello friends!

I am writing to let you know that we are in Kolkata, safe and sound! It is 11:16 am here, which I think is nine and a half hours ahead of the east coast.

We had quite the journey getting to Kolkata. Luckilly all of our flights went off very smoothly and our layovers were as painless as possible. Our flight from JFK to Dubai was UNREAL. It was the most outrageous and high-tech flight that I have ever been on. Each seat had its own TV with a remote control and hundreds of movies, tv shows, albums and games to play and listen to. We flew economy, but we still got hot towels, dinner/breakfast, little travel kids with socks and tooth brushes, pillows, blankets and unlimited snacks and drinks! We chatted with a friendly flight attendent who assured us that everything is "bigger and better" in Dubai.

We had a seven hour layover in the city and decided that it would be a good time to ventuer out. We took two mini-van taxis to the BIGGEST MALL IN THE WORLD. On the way, we saw the biggest building and limitless car showcases. We made friends with a woman from San Fransisco who was on her way to a different part of India and she shared in our mall adventure. The mall itself was almost nauseatingly large and I suspect that we probably only saw a small fraction of it. Part of this fraction included an INDOOR SKI SLOPE which I had the pleasure of seeing once on the travel channel. We stopped for some Starbucks and headed back to the airport via some high-tech taxis with GPS meters. Every car we saw was incredibly brand new.

The flight from Dubai to Kolkata was a little less high-tech than than the first, but still incredibly accomodating and equipped with tv screens for every seat. I watched a lot of episodes of Friends on this flight and tried to sleep with no avail. We arrived in Kolkata at about 8:30 in the morning, which was 11pm EST and luckilly ALL OF OUR BAGGAGE ARRIVED TOO!!! Huzzah!!!

We took three taxi cabs to the hotel, a journey of about 25 minutes. These cabs were much different from the ones we saw in Dubai. They were traditional yellow taxi cabs, proabbly from the 1980s and the dashboards were filled with Hindu gods. The traffic in Kolkata is UNREAL, we experienced lots of traffic jams alongside old cabs, some new cars, packed busses, skinny cows and various rickshaws (auto, bicycle and man-pulled). The rural poverty here is incredible and unlike anything I have ever seen. It was sort of like being in one of the poor latin American cities that I have visited, only with about 15x the ammount of people. 15 million people live in Kolkata, in a city that was built for more like 15 thousand.

I expected the city to be a little bit hotter than it actually is, but nevertheless we have still sweat quite a bit. Our rooms are cool with fans and air conditioning, as well as the Blue Sky Diner and this internet cafe. We took quite the walk to one of Mother Theresa's buildings for our orientation yesterday. We experienced many new smells, some good, some not so good, all assaulting our noses at once. There is one corner here that smells overwhelmingly of sewage, but luckilly you can pass by relatively quickly.

Our orientation was helpful. A Spanish woman named Maria, who is a long-term volunteer, told us about all of the different houses that we could work at. Hannah and I are going to be working at Daya Dan which is a home for handicapped children. Other houses include Caligat, home for the dying; Prem Dan, home for the sick and dying; Shanti Dan, home for women and their children, many of which who have been imprisioned; another home like Shanti Dan for men and Shishu Bhavan, a school for orphans who will be adopted. Thursday is the day of rest for volunteers and so we will all be heading to our placements tomorrow morning, after breakfast of bananas, bread and chai tea at the mother house.

Something that was interesting at our orientation was a sheet of paper that we were handed that explains the code of conduct within the missionaries of charity. Part of this explained that the sisters discourage any and all volunteers from giving money to beggars. They said that we should give money to organizations and not directly to people, as it only encourages the begging culture, which is set up almost in a mafia-style fashion. Some of the chidlren that we see begging on the streets have actually been taken to be used as beggars. Many of the children are being sexually exploited as well and so the sisters say that we should not give them anything, as it encourages this exploitation and rewards them for going up to and touching strangers. I agree with this idea, but it is still hard to see all of the begging children and it's hard to find a balance between acknowledging them and trying not to encourage them follownig us.

We went to bed extremely early last night. I was asleep by 730 and despite waking up a few times in the middle of the night I was able to sleep until 8am this morning. The city is EXTREMELY quiet at night time, so different from the busyness of the day. We are in the midst of our second day here and so I will leave you to go explore the city some more! We all have access to our email, so feel free to email us individually if you would like!

Namaste,
Nicole