The Himalayas: Rain, Leeches, and Diarrhea

I turned over again under the heavy blanket and moaned. Josh and I were on vacation in Darjeeling, a small town on the edge of the Himalayas, but I was sick in bed with a fever, upset stomach, and the dirty D. I had to use the toilet again but I couldn’t muster up the energy to get out of bed. Maybe I’ll just wait for five minutes…

Darjeeling as seen from my sick bed

“Despite the fact that I got really sick and delayed us for a day, this is surprisingly almost going according to plan!” I told Josh cheerily as we pitched our tent along a trail in the thick Himalayan jungle. It was starting to rain again and night was soon approaching so it was a relief to have finally found an adequate campsite. Josh stopped his work and crouched down, staring intently at his shoes. I waited. After a while I heard an “Augh!” then “What the!” “What is going on over there?” “Ah ahahah! Aaaaaaaaaaaaa!!” What?” “Leecheeeeees!!!!” I looked down at my hiking boots as Josh stomped wildly in circles waving his hands in the air. There were leeches everywhere. I tried to pick some off but they only latched onto my fingers. The more I flung my hands around the tighter they hung on, all the while more crawling up my boots and squirming down in between my socks and under my pant legs. Panicking, I spun in circles shouting, “Get off! Get off! Get off!”

Leech bite

It was two hours later and Josh and I lay shivering in our tent in our new location three inches from a road. As the rain beat down hard on the rain fly I tried to close my eyes and go to sleep but every time I started drifting off leeches would dance before my eyes in their grotesque writhing motions and I would startle back awake. I rolled over on my side and looked to see if Josh was awake. Nope, but I noticed that my sleeping bag felt a little damp. I didn’t realize it right then but there was a hole in the bottom of our tent and by morning we would be lying in a giant puddle, everything we owned soaked completely through. 

Looking for another camp spot

“I think we’re in Darjeeling.” I told Josh. He laughed as if I’d just told a joke he’d never heard before. “No, I’m serious.” Rain was dripping down my nose, pouring down my back, and soaking through my socks. I was walking like a cold penguin with my arms stuck out and my saturated pack pulled down on my back. Not willing to turn my head into the rain to address Josh, I had to shout everything twice. “No, I’m serious!” According to our estimation we should have been about 15 miles outside of Darjeeling and walking farther away but here we were, somehow turned around and standing a block from the town center.

Hiking back to Darjeeling. Unintentionally.

As the bus bounded over an especially large bump Josh and I shot to the ceiling where we simultaneously banged our heads and were thrust back down hitting our backs on the hard sleeper-class bed. “This is by far the worst bus ride I’ve ever been on” Josh said matter-of-factly, his voice wavering with the bouncing of the vehicle. Our week in Darjeeling was over and despite the fact that the clouds had never cleared enough to actually see the mountain peaks, we were on our way back to Kolkata. Unfortunately, the train was booked for days so we had to take a bus. Sixteen hours of the most jolting dirt road I had ever experienced. 

Josh and I's bumpy bunk

This vacation sounds like a total disaster to you I’m sure, but I actually only realized how miserable it sounded after I got back and was trying to describe to friends the details of why it had been such a great and relaxing trip. It was seriously one of the most fun and refreshing weeks I’ve had in a long time, but every time I’ve told a story, it’s sounded terrible. Sometimes I think all the discomfort we spend our whole lives trying to avoid might actually be the gateway to the fulfillment we spend all our lives trying to find. I guess in the end building character brings more contentment than controlling our emotions through our circumstances. Or maybe I just really enjoy being miserable.

40 Days

Today is my 40^th day in India.  It is odd to write that because it feels to me like it must feel to my readers that I have only been in India for a short time, since I have only shared a handful of stories.  For every story I’ve blogged about there are a hundred stories I haven’t.  As I sit here on the concrete floor of my hotel room,an odd song is being composed outside in the hallway consisting mostly of drums and a wavering, nasally voice.  It sounds like something you would hear in a movie when they show a quick shot of the heart of India with rickshaws and brown women with giant pots on their heads walking up a dusty jungle path.  I, however, know the singer and he is not Indian, he is in fact a white guy from New Jersey; but he dresses in an orange robe like a Tibetan Monk and sports a shaved head with a single lock of hair in the middle.  He lives in the mountains north of Kolkata but spends a good portion of his time here for reasons I still haven’t figured out.  Josh and I refer to him as ‘Papa Pipi’ because we can never remember his Hindi name.  All that to say 40 days worth of stories is overwhelming when it comes to blogging and I don’t even know anymore what is weird and what is normal, I wish I could paint an accurate picture of my life in India but it’s unfortunately impossible. 

Josh smiling even though he is sick

This morning I opened a note from my friend in Spain who had given it to me before I left and told me to open it some time after May 16^th.  In it she asked some great questions and I want to share them and maybe you can ask them to yourself too. 

1.       What has been the biggest surprise?

Possibly the size of the Missionaries of Charity.  The house of the dying has only 89 beds in it within a couple small rooms.  There are only ever about 30 volunteers in a given day.  Since Mother Teresa is a common household name and her ministries are in hundreds of countries around the world I guess I always assumed her headquarters would be giant with hundreds of volunteers.  Maybe that’s my American showing. 

2.       What has been hard?  Harder than you imagined?

Really my life here isn’t nearly as hard as I imagined it would be, though surprisingly the heat has been really annoying lately.  We have had record temperatures which when it’s already summer in Kolkata gets kind of ridiculous (today the heat index was 120 F and no A/C anywhere!).  It is so hot that I am covered day and night with heat rash which is quite itchy and sweat drips down my face even at night.  It is also really hard for me to visit people in the local hospital which I do occasionally as part of my job.  Walking through the rows of burn victims, recently paralyzed, and sometimes dead patients makes me feel so powerless and uncomfortable.  Life seems entirely unfair in those moments. 

3.       Is there anything you are dwelling on and not putting into words?

Not that I can think of…

4.       Where have you seen the power of the Lord?  How have you come to know him in new or deeper ways?

One way I’ve come to know God in a new way is through the Catholic community in general.  Once again I am reminded of the beauty of the diversity of the global Church.  The traditional prayers and rituals all point directly to Jesus and I have found intimacy with Him through them.  I am also learning to see Jesus in the people around me.  One of the oldest sisters the other day said she grew up getting to know God in church and in the Bible but she learned from Mother Teresa that she could get to know God in people as well.  As far as the power of the Lord goes, that is a daily occurrence for me.  Every day I see lives transformed.  People walk who couldn’t walk, reason who couldn’t reason, and hope who were hopeless. 

A Prayer

Every morning after mass all the MC volunteers gather at the Mother House for a breakfast of bread and bananas.  We hang out, meet the new people, and say goodbye to friends who are leaving.  Before we all head out to our respective ministries we spend a few minutes praying and singing.  Yesterday my team had to leave early so we missed the prayers and songs.  Later in the day I was feeling exhausted and void of motivation for the first time in a month.  As I sat on a crowded bus and stared blankly out the window, sweat dripping off my nose, I suddenly remembered that I had missed the morning prayer.  It struck me that I had come to rely on that prayer throughout my day and that without it I felt a little lost.  So today I want to share one of the beautiful prayers we recite every morning:

“Dear Lord, the Great Healer, I kneel before you since every perfect gift must come from you.  I pray give skills to my hands, clear vision to my mind, kindness and meekness to my heart.  Give me singleness of purpose, strength to lift up a part of the burden of my suffering fellow men, and a true realization of the privilege that is mine.  Take from my heart all guile and worldliness that with the simple faith of a child, I may
rely on you. Amen.”

Saying that to God in unison with my fellow workers sets the right mood for the whole day.  As Mother Teresa said, "There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in - that we do it to God, to Christ, and that's why we try to do it as beautifully as possible."

A good friend on his last day 

Dying on the Sidewalk

A few weeks ago I was walking home after a long day’s work in the height of the afternoon heat along kilometers of crowded sidewalks.  My fellow volunteer Mary stopped me and nodded toward a beggar lying down in the sun with his eyes closed.  I fought against the flow of pedestrians and knelt down beside him while Mary woke him up.  His eyes wouldn’t focus and he couldn’t talk.  His water bottle was as empty as his change jar and he reminded me of pictures I’ve seen of holocaust victims.  After a few minutes of trying to comfort him and giving him water to drink I looked up and noticed that a crowd had formed around us.  There were maybe twenty people all standing in a semi-circle staring intently at us, some yelling advice in Bangla or asking us if he needed to go to the hospital.  “Where were all these people ten minutes ago?” I wondered.  He was just as needy then as he is right now, but it wasn’t until somebody else stopped to help that anyone noticed.  Since that day I have experienced this phenomenon on a daily basis.

Hindus believe that if a person is a bad sinner they will be reincarnated as a very poor person (those below the caste system) and live a miserable life in order to pay penance for the bad that they did in their previous life.  If they suffer enough they might move up to a higher social class in the next life.  One could see from this belief how it could be considered immoral to assist the poor in any way.  If you relieve their suffering then you are not permitting that person to pay their dues for their past sins.  That could explain how an entire culture can eventually become nearly blind to the hurting, needy people they step over every day. 

When Mother Teresa’s work among the outcasts began it was a very new and odd thing and attracted a lot of attention in Kolkata.  She intentionally dressed and lived like the poor and spent her time helping and loving them.  After a while the Indian population began to donate money to the Missionaries and then they began to volunteer themselves.  Eventually hundreds of NGOs sprung up in Kolkata and spread all around the world.  Mother Teresa helped start a global movement focused on caring for individuals trapped in poverty.

Of course that wasn’t Mother Teresa’s intention at all. She was just following the voice of God and loving those who had no one to love them, but in doing so she not only affected an individual’s life but the entire culture surrounding them as well. Sometimes we see poverty as a giant that can only be beaten using massive political reform and we feel helpless in the face of such a large adversary, but actually if we focus just on loving the people around us we will eventually find we are having a larger impact on more than just those people. At least that is what I hope as I resist yelling at all the annoying rubberneckers causing chaos and getting in the way huddled on the sidewalk around me and someone they normally would have walked right past without a second thought.