Daily Routine (from Kolkata)

After looking back at the entries I've made so far, I realize that while I've done a lot of pontificating and soap box preaching about Kolkata, I never really mentioned what my daily routine was while I was working there. I recently thought about some of the daily things and figured I would write them down.
As I mentioned before, when I started working at Mother Teresa's I also moved into a new guest house. As with most guest houses in India that I've seen so far, the staff that works there sleeps on mats in the lobby or hallways of the guest house. I'm assuming they either don't have homes in Kolkata or their homes are so far away it's easier just to sleep where they work. This usually hasn't been a problem except for this guest house because I was on the ground floor and the guys slept right outside my door. I didn't mind that except that they would talk to each other until well past midnite. And I think I've mentioned how loud and angry Bengali can sound. Even with ear plugs in it was hard to sleep. At times something would wake these guys up in the night and then they would start talking. Now remember, these guys spend the entire day together, working together in the day and sitting on the front steps in the evening. All the while talking and talking to each other. What could they possibly be talking about at 4:00am that they didn't get a chance to talk to each other about in the other 18 hours of the day? More than once I had to ask them to be quiet.
In the morning they would still be asleep and I would get up and have to step over them to get out the door. One guy in particular slept right across the front of my door and I couldn't exit, close and lock the door without waking him.
Once out of the guest house I would go to a cafe on the corner and meet an older British man named Walter for breakfast. Walter was probably in his 70s and was just out traveling the world. I met Walter at Mother Teresa's and we'd walk to work together and chat. Walter and I would commute together for about a week and then he would leave Kolkata to continue his travels.
From the cafe we'd walk about a half a mile down the street, past the street people's camps, past the herds of goats and past the people having their morning constitutionals in the street, to the Metro station to ride the subway. The Metro ride to work in the morning was the only place in Kolkata that wasn't a chaotic mass of noise and people. It was actually quite relaxing. The Metro was cleaner than the subways in New York City and at rush hours just as packed. But at this time in the morning there were only a handful of people. There were TV sets that hung from the ceiling of the subway's waiting platforms and the audio was piped over the PA system. There were only 3 things that were shown on the TVs and they were shown at the exact same time every day in every station. I was able to tell how late I was running by what was on the TV. If I was on time I would get to the platform and there would be this strange, old, circa 1950s American movie playing. It was about a bunch of circus performers and their lives. At one point, the hero, Sebastian tries to do some Triple Lindy move on the trapeze and falls. Shortly after this the movie switched, right in the middle of the action, to an elephant movie. The elephant movie was actual documentary elephant footage with human voice-overs to make it seem like the elephants were living out human like lives. The train would come about 2 minutes into the elephant movie so if it was on when I entered the subway, I knew I was running late and had to run to catch the train. The third show would be on when I was commuting back from work. It was an endless showing of the "World's Greatest Goals", basically non stop old soccer scoring kicks. It claimed to be the "World's Greatest" but it only showed teams from England.
Once off the Metro, I would walk through this loud, frenzied market area that was set up along the road to Orphanage. The people at this "market" were all selling clothes but it wasn't really a market, it was just a few thousand people taking up the far left lane of the main road and all trying to sell piles of clothes that were just laying in the street. By midday they'd all be gone. I would turn off this main road onto a smaller one that would cut through an area that had artist that would make large papier mache sculptors for floats. They would make them out of intricately bent bamboo pieces and cover them with heavy plaster. Then sculpt them to really detailed figures and paint them. Many looked like they were sculpted out of stone.
When I got to the orphanage, I would either head to the roof to do laundry or head into the clinic to do wound care depending on what day it was.
After working at the orphanage, I would head back to the Metro, which was really packed by now and then back to the area near my guest house for lunch. I would quickly eat lunch and then meet the Spanish and Chilean nurses and doctors down at the end of the block. We would all walk together for about a mile to a main thoroughfare and catch a bus. The buses are these rickety old, smoke billowing things that are painted all sorts of colors and jam packed with people, mostly men. (There were far more men out in public than women, easily 80% men in public). As the endless flow of buses came down the road, there were men who hung out the side door and shouted at people where the bus was going. It was really hard to hear what they were saying and if there were signs on the front of the bus saying where it was destined, it was in i and impossible to read. So you had to shout at each bus that went by until one of the guys nodded his head 'yes'. On the bus, there were special benches for ladies that men had to give up their seats for. So all the nurses and doctors got to sit (I was the only guy in our group). The bus would lurch and brake and speed up and weave madly side to side and you couldn't see out the little windows, only hold on for dear life. The bus would drop us off near the Sealdah train station where the other medical clinic was.
During this commute and at work in both clinics, I would work most of my time with these doctors and nurses from Spain and Chile. Only the Chilean nurse spoke English so I would speak in really bad Spanish to the rest of them. And they would speak really, really slowly to me. Except for one Spanish doctor who I think thought I was fluent and would speak a mile a minute to me. I never knew what she was saying and would just nod my head like I did. She would also speak Spanish to the patients who most of the time didn't speak English. It was strange but funny to have to be a translator between a Spanish doctor and a Bengali patient.
After finishing work, we would all fight our way back on the bus and then the mile walk to the guest house area, the route which took us through this touristy market area where the vendors hassled you no matter how many times they saw you walk by.
Once back in my neighborhood I would have dinner and then usually just go back to my room, read and try to sleep. A couple of times I went out for a beer with this other volunteer named Mickey. Mickey was Irish and had been coming to work at Mother Teresa's for years. He was about 30, maybe 5'6" and a boxer by trade. He would fight around Ireland to make his money and then come to Kolkata for about 6 months a year to volunteer. He worked mainly trying to get some of the street people into hospitals or some of Mother's hospices. He would also give boxing lessons to a group of the poor kids. Mickey had been volunteering at Mother Teresa's for 10 years. He was from a tribe of travelers in Ireland and he spoke Cant and Gaelic as first languages. Mickey was also hilarious and would tell some of the worst jokes, most of which would have the word 'Willie" in them. He also had a list of really bad pick up lines, like, "How much does a polar bear weigh?", followed by "Enough to break the ice, Hi my name is Mickey." He claimed that Brad Pitts' role in the movie "Snatch" was loosely based on him. Loosely. I had a good time hanging out with Mickey and another Irish volunteer named Colm. Colm was about 40 and his first language was Gaelic. It was really neat to listen to them talk to each other in a language that sounds so familiar yet you can't understand it, but you feel like you should. Mickey said he had a period of being a ruffian when he was younger but had since come back into the fold of the church. Oh, and Mickey liked to drink.
While working at the clinic at the orphanage, there was this guy from Tacoma, Washington who worked there for the last week or so that I was there. He was a 54 year old, thin white guy who went by the name of "Mad Dog". He was doing an around the world trip for a year and was about half way done. He said he was getting married when he got back home. He was an interesting guy with no medical experience but caught on on how to clean wounds very well. He had a strange sense of humor too. On the day I was working on that guy's finger, the really bad one where the guy was screaming in pain, Mad Dog was watching me work and at one point when the guy screamed really loud, Mad Dog looked at me and said, "Welcome to Mama T's House of Pain!" On another occasion I overheard him singing the song from that kids' game "Operation" while he cut into a wound. He worked for a while there and then one day disappeared.
One of the roads that went through the neighborhood was totally ripped up from construction. There was a 10 foot deep trench running down the middle of it and two giant, long piles of dirt paralleling it on either side. The men who worked on the project did all the labor by hand, no machinery at all. Needless to say this project was going to take a long time. On one side of the trench, all of the new gravel and bricks for the fixed road had been delivered and stacked waiting to be used somewhere in the far future. The street people in that area had taken a bunch of the bricks and stacked them so that they all had little brick houses, it was genius. They put tarps over the top and had what was probably the best living space they had ever had. Too bad it will only last until the road is done, which could be a while.
And for those of you who have been wondering, I did finally get up really early one of my last mornings and make it to Mass at Mother House. It was plain and nice and I'm glad I did it. It also gave me an opportunity to see how many Sisters there were, probably 70 or more, all from different parts of the world. And it made my heart sing to look up at the front of the chapel to see that the altar boy, dressed in a white robe, was none other than Mickey.