Not so glamorous...

Hello friends! Each day I am here I feel like I am feeling more at home... I love Kolcutta and despite it's extreme poverty and despair, I have felt very connected here. It seems like such a long time ago that we arrived and i feel like since we just jumped in head first i have learned so much in such a short period of time...

Yesterday we served at Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying... While it will definetly be an experience I will never forget, it was not exactly what I was expecting. I think when you tell you people you are going to serve at Mother teresa, it gets put on this very glamorous level. I guess that is understandable considering almost everyone knows who mother T is, but let me just say that it is not so glamorous...

We woke up at 5 am to get to Mother House at 6 for mass. We walked in and they had just started...all the sisters (about 80?) where there and about 30 visitors where there on the side. We sat down and worshiped with them. I really enjoyed it, the message was great and just being there was very surreal. After mass we went down to have Chai and bread and then all the volunteers were divided up to go to the different house. There are about 6 house for different groups, like one for little babies, one fro women, one for the dying, etc... Sitting down eating there were people from all over the world there...we met some from argentina, japan, austrailia, UK and US. It was pretty cool to see everyone there, for whatever reason, ready to serve. Some were there for their first tiem like us, others had been there for weeks, months, or even years. We got assigned to the Home for the Dying, which has about 100 people, men and women, on their last legs of life. Inside, i was glad we got placed there just because it was the one I had heard about and it seemed like the one that would be the most impactful... not to sound selfish. So we took a bus to the home and then walked a little ways and finally made it.
We walked in and it was a very simple building, with rows of beds laid out with men and women lieing on them. We immediatly wend to the back where they were doing laundry. Everyone kinda seemed like they knew what they were doing already but finally someone told me what I could do. We were cleaning the clothes from the patients...but not in a washer...but instead we would put the clothes into this stone tub full of water, and then step on them with our feet and then we would put them into another tub full of water and do the same then finally they would go into a final tub and then wrung out...

I could write forever about all the tasks that we did that morning but that would probably bore you but the point of all this is that what we did, was nothing extrodanary or out of the ordinary...in fact we were doing things I could have done at home or any hospital of nursing home. I mean it was very cool to look around and think that I was working where Mother Teresa did, but at the same time it was nothing to brag about...

After we finished the laundry we had some time to interact with the patients....I'll admit that was very hard for me at first just because these men were literally dying before out eyes. I don't think I had ever been around that kind of sickness and despair before. Although again, looking past that, they were just men, some of them young, maybe even my age. Some were so sick they couldn't respond or even move, but many were alert and I even played catch with one of them for a while with a small ball.

The morning shift ended at 12 with a small lunch for the volunteers on the roof. It was so amazing to get to talk with the other people working. This small Japanese man who had worked there for the last 5 years on a off, took me under his wing and showed me the ropes...he said i "looked nice" and was very helpful which I really appreciated. We also met many young people, a couple of guys from Canada that had been traveling around the world for the past 8 months...and we met a guy my age from Chicago that had been working for a non profit and he travels all over the world. There were couples, old men, young women...it was such a melting pot of people, I loved it.

We were told that the afternoon shift started again at 3 and so we road the underground back home and went to a small cafe....it was so surreal that we traveled from extreme poverty to wealth in about 20 minutes...it was hard to stomach....

We weren't sure if we were going to go back at 3 because we tired, but Lindsey Marco and I decieded that we wanted to go back. It was cool to be out in the city by ourselves and actually feel like i knew where i was going..sorta... We got back to the home and it was very quiet and they said we could just sit with the patients...I gave many of the men massages since they were so sore and acheing... I sat next to a man that as he took each breath it sounded like it might be his last...each breath gave out an audible wince of pain... One of the other volunteers had brought a guitar and was playing songs, which brought a very soothing feel to the room. I massaged one man's leg for about 30 minutes and just held his hand...it was a very intense moment as we just locked eyes...I don't know if what I was doing was even helping, but I hope that just being there did something... Some of the men had TB, some had aids, some had limbs fully amputated...it was a room full of pain and suffering...as I was sitting there again I felt that this was nothing that I wanted to tell people about in remincent stories about "serving at Mother Teresa's". This is not to say that I am not so gratful for this experience, I just don't know if it is something I would want to brag about or do for a long period of time. We talked alot on this trip about the differnce between "crisis intervention" and "development". Mother Teresa worked with crisis intervention, and it was necessary. But i think it is also important to take a step back and try to figure out why we have these problems in the first place.

I had a lot more on my mind but am having trouble getting it into words... I have found it is better not to force it but let the processing come when it does on its own...

To sum it up, yesterday was a very challenging day, I am probably more sore than i have been in years... my whole body aches...but then i think about the man who i was sitting with who must ahve been in pain 100 times more... I am glad i got to experience this and it will be something i remember forever... but I also think I learned that at the end of the day, it was still just work, hard work... serving at the home for the dying isn't any "better" than serving any where else...God isn't going to look more highly on my day yesterday than any other day in my life prior...

So that pretty much sums up yesterday... Today we just got back from Emmanuel Ministries, which is a school for the poor. SO AMAZING! I will tell more later, but we spent the morning there playing with the kids and it brought me so much joy...

Love you all... Off to Nepal tomorrow for a few days! I'm excited! don't know what to expect!

I like traveling with Janet and this group...we laugh alot. Even when things go wrong...which they do a lot, but we just laugh. it is so great!

Still laughing,
matt-