Christmas in Kolkata

Happy Christmas!

We've combined our Christmas email and this blog entry. If 75 people read this, together we'll save around 400,000 pixels, which will help prevent depletion of the world's silicon resources.

With Christmas creeping up, but not much in the way of a Christmas feeling here (apart from the bamboo artists making a very large - maybe 6m high - santa limb by limb down the street and some carols at church), I have made some decorations for the Weaich's flat to complement the 30cm high Christmas tree Lyn has got out of the box now.

We have recently had a 6 day break up in Darjeeling (near the borders of Bhutan and Nepal) which was a very refreshing holiday. Very cold (2000m up) and a long way from everything. It was incredible that this fairly large (~500,000) city can sustain itself with only 2 very pot-holey, steep routes in and out of the city (about 3 hours' drive from the nearest airport or railway).

We slept alot, had some bucket showers (the power often went off in the evening), stayed in a hostel which was owned by a lovely Tibetan family, went to the zoo which had endangered Himalayan animals in it, visited the Tibetan refugee centre which trains those refugees in need in crafts and sells their products. They also had a little museum, which had a Tibetan passport their finance minister had used on a business trip around Europe and Asia in the 1930s or thenabouts. Somewhat inconvenient if you're the Chinese propaganda machine trying to claim Tibet has always been part of China. I think it even had a Chinese stamp on it. Oops.

Some of the girls took it upon themselves to beautify me recently. It started with nail polish (which they're actually meant to use to fix screens in printing), then progressed to henna decorations on my hands (very pretty), and finally they tried to get me to wear earrings.

In terms of work at freeset, I have unfortunately last night lost John back to NZ for 7 months to get married, so it is just me in the studio to contend with design-related things. Scary thought! However it means I will be able to use the computer which can better handle graphics, and I will be doing some work on the new tees website which will be interesting and challenging. There is a lot on my to-do list which is at the same time great, and daunting.

Tim's trying to step back a little bit from the day-to-day running of screen printing and focus more on the longer-term view. It's always difficult to decide when to step in and get things done and when that's actually unhelpful and disempowering and it's better to let others do things, even if it's slower for the women who are just learning. Now with some time to think about how things will work out in the long-term it should make some of those decisions a bit easier. There's a South African couple arriving in January - the woman will be taking over t-shirts and the man will be helping out in printing. Once they've arrived, probably one of us will focus on keeping things running while the other starts training.

One of the women at freeset recently celebrated 2 years of being dry. Both she and her boyfriend were alcoholics and violence played a part. But with the help of freeset, and some rehabilitation programs, and alot of will-power, they now don't drink and attend AA meetings regularly. Apparently she is a great role model for some of the others at AA. We had a celebratory morning tea, complete with cake fight.

Interestingly, we were chatting to some of the younger girls the other day, and they were surprised to figure out that most people in NZ don't have arranged marriages, and that we didn't have one. Two of them asked us to find them husbands, so if anyone's keen, sing out!

We have moved to freeset (a room between the sewing rooms on the 2nd floor) for about 5-6 weeks while the Weaich kids are home. They arrived a couple of days ago and are great kids - very entertaining (especially the youngest who walks around in her own little world singing Christmas carols over and over again or reciting little pieces of drama she learnt at school).

Tim has started playing the guitar at freeset while we sing together, and will start lessons after Christmas, while the girls are very keen to have me take English lessons once a week. I think I'll have to use drawing alot, as my Bangla isn't so great!

The weather is just beautiful currently, warm during the day, cold enough for a blanket at night. Mostly low 20s or high teens - all of the women are wandering around in thick blankets complaining about how cold it is. Unfortunately there's lots of pollution though as Winter is the dry season so there's no rain to scour pollution from the air.

Strangely, we still draw a crowd if we stop to talk in the lanes around here, and people stare as we walk past, even though we have lived here for months now (do we look like white people or what?). And the kids in the lanes never tire of their desire to shake our hands (we're trying to teach them to high-5 instead, with some success).

We hope you all have an amazing time this Christmas, and that you are all healthy and well.
We love hearing from you, and thank you again for your messages and support.

God bless,
Sarah and Tim

Signatures, Tea Parties and Wanderings

Today was an exciting day. For a start it was pay-day for the month which is always pretty exciting for everyone. But more importantly, this time, all the t-shirt women were able to sign for their paycheque. Sign their own names. Lyn (who we are living with) has been teaching those who couldn't write how to write their names over the past couple of weeks - it has been quite challenging apparently, with some of them struggling even to draw a vertical line. It is something we absolutely take for granted.

We have been able to hang out with some of the freeset women socially lately which has been fun, and insightful. Firstly, Lyn had the women she works with (mainly the older ones) over for lunch at our flat last week. She made lovely curries and dal. The women decided they couldn't eat sitting on chairs, so we all sat on the floor, and ate with our hands as they are used to. Lyn had asked the week before if they were keen to have some Indian food and some bideshi (foreign) food, but the unanimous answer was that they didn't want to try bideshi food!

Then last Friday night, Kerry (the founder/manager of freeset) took the printing girls and us out for dinner in town to celebrate the completion of a very large order. The girls were all dressed up beautifully, we had chinese fried rice, and ended up the only people at the restaurant so had a dance-off.

And on Saturday, we had the printing girls over for dessert. However, they told us that 6pm was the best time (they have dinner at about 10pm), so we had dessert before dinner. The younger girls are more keen to try our food, so we made cakes, slice and fruit salad and then just had a plate of the Indian sweets.

The girl who mixes paint for screen printing took Tim and I to a shoe shop near Girish park last week as we needed sandals. We dropped by her place on our way back, after a slightly hair-raising ride in an auto(rickshaw) stacked to the hilt with 7 or 8 people (the standard 5 is sardiney enough). She lives right in the centre of Sonagacchi. So unintentionally we walked straight through some of the main sex lanes there. There were parts where most of the lane was taken up with girls standing in line, men strolling past, girls that look so so young - it was very sad. Many of the brothels had lines of seats outside where the women sit like merchandise on a shelf. The woman who was taking us aroung showed us her place (about 1.5metres by 4 metres) which just fit a bed, and her stuff was hung up above the bed, or stored below.

So this is life in Kolkata, or at least this little corner of it.

Tim also read a very interesting (but depressing) article about the experiences of women in prostitution in 9 different countries. There's quite a good summary of it here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/17/belle-de-jour-tanya-gold

or if anyone's really interested, you should be able to find it on google scholar: 'Prostitution and Trafficking in nine countries: An update on violence and post-traumatic stress disorder' by Farley et al, Journal of Trauma Practice, 2, 3-4, 2003

Tim's potted version, however: the authors found an overwhelming link between prostitution and violence - 71 % of the 854 women interviewed had been physically assaulted while in prostitution, 63% had been raped (and both of those figures, for various reasons, are likely to be subject to under-reporting), approximately half were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (a similar percentage to a previous study of Vietnam War veterans), and 89% of women wanted to leave prostitution. All of those factors and more seemed to be equally true in developed nations and in developing nations, and there were some interesting comments regarding the legal status of prostitution too (in Germany, I believe brothels are legal but street prostitution is not, yet a slight majority of the women there felt they'd be no safer in legal than illegal prostitution).

It made me do some serious thinking about the Prostitution Law Reform Act back in NZ, which I'm increasingly coming to think was just a pathetic washing-of-hands exercise by middle-class New Zealand so that, under the assumption that legalisation would make the lives of prostitutes easier, we could absolve ourselves of any responsibility to actually do anything to care about people we had no interest in caring about. If 80-99% of women working in the sex industry across a diverse range of countries want to leave prostitution, I find it difficult to believe that New Zealand would be significantly different. Maybe if New Zealand really gave a crap about the smallest members of its society then we as a country would have given significant funding to counselling, alcohol and drug treatment and job-training to help them do that. Instead, we gave them an 'it's legal now' pat on the back and left them to their misery. None of this changes the fact that the previous law was completely unjust and the current law is probably better in many ways, but I'm highly sceptical of the motivations behind its introduction. In more positive news, it's set us thinking about what we might be able to practically do for the sex workers of New Zealand once we get back from Freeset. If anyone wants to join in that discussion or can point me to some similar NZ-based research, leave a comment and we'd be most grateful.

Thus endeth the rant.

In other news, Sarah flooded the flat by leaving the water on in the sink and forgetting about it; the children in the lane still think we are novelties and point at us or come and grab hold of us; Tim now has a guitar and will be starting lessons at freeset for those who are keen when we get back from our break; three kiwis have been here for the past fortnight sorting out the water filter (so it is all ready, except for one problem that still remains - where we source the water); 20 new trainees have just started with us (so John and I have been hearing the roar of sewing machines below us - they give the machines a thrashing when learning!); there's an autorickshaw that travels along Bedon St near our place with 'Love is Bilend' (sic) printed on the back window - Tim has developed a somewhat unhealthy obsession with photographing said rickshaw, much to Sarah's bemusement and horror.

Sarah walking down our lane to work.

This is looking from outside our place down the lane, towards Ramesh Dutta.

Our fruit and vege market, just 5 mins walk from our place

The end of our lane - apparently in monsoon time all the dogs sit on the table to the left of the photo.

Life and death in Sonagacchi

As mentioned in our last email, Bono-da died 10 days ago. He was the security guy on the door of Freeset, and although he was often found snoozing, he knew alot of people and was therefore good at knowing who should be coming in and who shouldn't. He had been sick for more than a year, and spent a day in hospital where he died. Once his body was brought back to Sonagacchi, we followed the procession via his home for a moment, then down to the Ghat (meaning 'terrace', I think. It's an area by the river where the crematoria are as Hindus have to have their ashes scattered in a river, preferably the Ganges).

The whole procedure seemed very rushed compared to our Western experiences with death. The cremation was perhaps 8 hours after the death, and the procession was all very hurried and chaotic. I'm not sure to what extent this is a cultural thing and to what extent it just reflects the realities of living and dying in a tropical environment. In any case it was quite a surreal and confronting experience.

The crematorium was also quite an experience. As someone there commented, the inside looked like some mixture between a swimming pool and a railway station, with a large digital clock in the centre displaying the date and time (right down to seconds, which is very interesting). The bodies are lain on the floor in rows, and mourners gather around while waiting for it to be their loved one's turn for cremation. On the day we were there, in the one room there were about 6 bodies in the line - with mourners stroking the faces and feet of the dead, a very intimate process. On the one hand, this seemed somehow vulgar and disrespectful relative to the way death is handled in New Zealand. On the other hand, I thought it was far more real and therefore healthier than the way people in European cultures tend to dress up their dead as if they were alive and largely avoid contact with the body.

There was added tension because of the fact that, apparently, Bono's family had treated he and Meena terribly, but wanted to be involved in the funeral, understandably upsetting Meena. There was a fair bit of yelling, but given we were worried about actual fights breaking out, things went fairly smoothly. Both Bono and Meena came from Hindu backgrounds and later became Christians (although they didn't entirely leave Hinduism behind), but having both Hindu and Christian elements to the last rites seemed to keep the peace.

Alastair (our former host) ended up giving his Bible to Bono's family, who were interested in the passage he read, and a goat materialised out of nowhere (this is all indoors, remember) and started munching on Bono's flowers once they were removed for the last rites. I'm convinced this is a metaphor for something. Any suggestions?

Today is Meena's last day of the official mourning period (about 10 days. They must wear a white sari for this time, not cook at all, appear mournful etc - must be really hard on top of the emotional stuff you go through simply in having a loved one die). Perhaps understandably, Meena is fairly angry with Jesus (and pretty much every deity she's had any involvement with), having strongly believed that Bono would be healed. I think she also feels a bit cheated by life in general - her's has been far far tougher than most. That said, we can be grateful that Bono-da had a good, long life (he would have been in his late 60s perhaps - about 20 years older than Meena) and is now free from the suffering of the past year or so.

Anyway it was the feast for Bono-da today - she invited all her friends and all of freeset to come. She held it in one of the buildings close to freeset and we all went there after work and sat in various rooms to start with. Then, room by room we were called to the upstairs room where we sat around the edges. We were served a very elaborate Bengali meal on plates made of large leaves - including rice, dal, spiced fish, vegetable curry, fried potato string... then mishti doi (a kind of very sweet yoghurt) and other typical sweets which you had to squeeze the liquid out of and they had the texture of a sea sponge.

We've been learning a little bit about the HIV/AIDS in India. A quick google search tells me that the prevalence rate is something like 0.3% (about 2.5 million people). Those are UN supported figures, but some of the freeset crowd who have looked into it suspect that there's a fair bit of under-reporting. The local equivalent of the prostitute's collective provides annual HIV tests, but we know of women who were repeatedly told by this testing that they were HIV-negative, only to discover they had full-blown AIDS. Not sure how much this is a cultural stigma and how much is corruption (the sex workers' union receives international funding for HIV prevention programmes, so you can see why under-reporting might be in their interests). We suspect plenty of both, from what we've heard.

Apparently it's quite common to treat someone for HIV-related opportunistic infections (TB etc) but not tell them about the HIV (this happened to one of the freeset women who died last year of an AIDS-related illness, and we suspect one of the current women is being treated the same way). This is particularly sad given that the antiretrovirals are available - though I'm not sure how easily.

One of the foreigners at freeset also does some work with a similar organisation in a red-light area in Andhra Pradesh. Apparently that particular area has something like a 70% rate (not sure of the source), which is just so sad, and apparently the use of condoms is just not the norm.

We should stress we haven't done any research into this ourselves, but that said we have no reason to doubt the credibility of those we've heard it from.

We also found out that one of the women at Freeset was married when she was 7. Her parents didn't want her to be trafficked and thought the best option was to marry her off.

Anyway, somehow this post has ended up all very bleak, which isn't a reflection of how we're feeling. Some lighter news to round it up. You should always have a happy ending. I learned that from Walt Disney.

I'm (Tim'm) getting to know my printing girls much better now I'm picking up enough language to start communicating beyond the purely functional (Sarah's note: he is doing amazingly really - everyone comments how fast he is picking it up). We've also started hanging out with them at ca (tea) time, which is cool. The last few weeks I was finding the printing work so tiring I needed to escape the environment for a break, but it's been really cool sitting around and talking smack (which is about all I'm able to talk in Bangla, really).

The girls are also trying to teach Tim a song - we were slightly concerned it was going to be dirty, but one of the foreigners helped us translate it and it seems pretty tame.

We have also learnt that there are a few English words that we would want to be careful saying as they are not so innocuous when translated into Bangla. Also, bhalo (meaning good, used alot in Bangla) without aspiration is an anatomical term. Wish they'd told us earlier!

We are taking the overnight train up to Darjeeling in less than three weeks for a break which will be good. We both need it, and hopefully will come back refreshed. Apparently it's cold up there which is a plus for me (Sarah)!

Adeeti (the baby with eye cancer) is soon to have her final chemo treatment before getting some laser treatment. From what we've heard things are looking very positive. Wonderful news.

Firstly, thankyou for the comments on our last post. Great to hear some different perspectives.

(Tim) Work has been plodding along nicely. Lately I’ve been able to spend a bit less time helping out hands-on up in screen-printing, which has given me some freedom to work on other things (mainly the training programme and some resources for our distributors).

I’ve been starting a little bit of informal training, which is starting to help make things a bit more settled in screen printing. There have also been a few coughs and colds amongst the women lately with it heading into winter – obviously undesirable but a slight silver lining in that it’s made things a bit quieter.

Of course, the Bengali winter is not quite of Dunedin scale – I don’t think we’ve had a day where it hasn’t hit 30 yet. Nonetheless it’s been getting cooler and dropping into the teens most nights, which is nice. I even had two layers on the other day (albeit for about 10 minutes before I realised I was crazy [Sarah: yes that is absolutely crazy, I wish I could live in a bikini]).

We’re starting to gain some insights into the lives of the women too. In the past couple of weeks we’ve heard of a few of the women who have been abused by current and former partners. In one case a woman is living with an abusive husband who’s been confronted several times by some of the guys at Freeset. Nonetheless, she was beaten up again last week. In a culture where divorce would likely see the woman shunned by her own family as well as her husband’s, it’s difficult to see what more can be done. Another woman’s estranged husband recently showed up out of nowhere after I think about 6 years and attacked her – I think on her way home. She was given some extra money to take a longer bus route which avoids the area he lives in. Not an ideal solution, but hopefully it’ll keep her safe in any case.

We recently visited Meena (one of the freeset woman who is wonderful at getting amongst the community to offer the freedom freeset provides to other women standing in line) and her husband Bono. I think they have a fairly typical living arrangement – they live in one room, half taken up by a bed, one cupboard, a sink, with one fan and a light or two. While we were there, a rat was trying to steal Bono’s dinner. Bono had a stroke recently, so is sadly paralysed on one side and unable to get out of bed much. However, Meena takes such good care of him outside work hours, and they have a helper look after him while she is at work. Bono used to be the ‘gate-keeper’ at Freeset. Funny how it came about too – he started hanging around the doorway and was good at keeping anyone out that freeset didn’t want in (used to have connections with the Indian mafia); so after a while, freeset decided he should probably go on the payroll.

Despite these difficult situations, there is a lot of hope that we see each day. The smiles, the jokes passed around, the singing at work.

The festivals just keep coming! You finally think that the drumming will stop, and a new festival has started. Common themes are parading down the roads, making as much noise as possible, carrying idols to the river, putting flowers in your workplace/ home. Last weekend was Sun Puja, so lots of people were prostrating themselves (and often their babies) on the busy main road.

One of the gross things about living here is that as you walk along the pavement, often you will have a few drips of liquid drop on you. This would be fine if you knew it was just water, but judging by the smell of some of the drains here, you realise it probably isn’t. Another annoying thing at the moment is the crazy numbers of little flies that surround you (and sometimes bite) throughout the evening. Tonight, we had at least 2 landing in every dish and glass on the dinner table.

Tim is about to find a guitar, and restring some of the freeset ones, with a view to adding to the singing in the morning, and also hopefully to start up some group guitar lessons, which have not been held for a while now given everyone’s workload. He is very excited.

Pictures:

- the 'opening' celebration of the new freeset t-shirt building

- Sarah's office (shares with John and Kelsea and at the moment a photographer)

- Tim on top of the new building - which will soon be an office for the director of t-shirts, and another sewing room

- Sarah climbed up a ladder on the roof to get this picture

The following message was brought to you by our sponsors: freeset tees, whose website is now up at http://freesetglobal.com/tees.html and Vivel Anti-Dandruff 3-in-1 shampoo, who apparently have a total monopoly on the advertising on the metro stations in between the occasionally hilarious music videos (we saw the Indian equivalent of Sound of Music yesterday - a Hindi music video set in alpine Switzerland. The game is to guess the English language equivalent, and so far we've also had the Dixie Chicks, Shakira, and Paul Holmes).

So we've now been in Kolkata for a month, which is a little crazy. That strange whirlpool where simultaneously so much has happened that it seems like six months must have gone by, but yet everything's raced by so quickly that it seems implausible that we've been here for more than a week.

Anyway, we're loving the place so far. Certainly it's a little messy, but bursting at the seams with life in every direction. Chaotic, but so much more interesting than anywhere else I've been before. Despite the fact that there's plenty of misery to go around as well, I'm rapidly growing to understand why they call it the City of Joy.

In terms of what we've been up to workwise, Sarah's had a fairly tough week as John, the other designer, has been sick all week. She also had a day off work with a sore throat on Thursday, but thankfully recovered pretty quickly.

My week has been similarly busy. There are quite a few people who have been on holiday or sick in the last week or so, and I've had to cover for a few of the ones who do screen-printing related stuff. For instance on Friday, the printing manager was away for a long weekend with his wife and daughter who are staying with her family about 10 hours away in Uttar Pradesh; the woman who mixes paint was sick; John, who often helps with printing aside from his design work, was still sick; and Karl, the GM is on holiday and I've picked up a small amount of his job. Hence I ended up either doing those people's jobs or closely supervising people who were doing them but lacked experience and/or confidence. As you can imagine, not much of my job got done!

However, it was a great way to rapidly learn a lot of the stuff I'll be having to teach the women very soon, and things should settle down next week as people return. If nothing else, it was a vivid demonstration of the necessity of the task I've been asked to do. Printing at Freeset is currently far too reliant on one or two people who are very good at their job, but have no cover if they ever decide to take a holiday or get sick.

In non-work related matters, we needed a break from India last Saturday, so we went to Germany for the afternoon. At the South city mall, about 20 minutes cab ride from where we're currently living, there's a supermarket with quite a good international section, where we bought some stodgy North European style bread and paid exorbitant amounts for dutch cheese (roughly $6NZ for ~100g I think). After that, we felt suitably sated with Europeanness and were ready to return to the real world. It's funny how neither of us would be caught dead in a mall back in NZ if we could possibly avoid it, but here it's the only place generic enough to feel like home (although increasingly, Kolkata in general is starting to feel very homely). We can still only stand the mall in small doses, but it will be a nice place to escape to once or twice a month when India becomes too much.

We're also moving back North to Girish Park probably on Tuesday, which is a great relief. For the past couple of weeks we've been staying in the South - about 45 minutes commute each way to Freeset. That, along with an unusually busy week has made for extremely long days, so we'll be very pleased to be back within walking distance from work. It also means the work days should be a bit shorter, as we've been going in an hour early to beat the rush hour, but it hasn't always been possible to leave early for various reasons.

In other news, we walked through the fringes of Sonagacchi for the first time on Wednesday (Freeset is just on the southern fringe of the red-light area, and we've planned several times to go for a walk around the area during the past month but haven't managed to for various reasons). Despite the fact that we left New Zealand specifically to come help out in a red light area and knew we'd be living almost in the midst of it, it was still a shock to actually see it first hand. Especially since I was so focussed on looking for the shop we were hunting for that I didn't notice until we'd gone past and Sarah pointed it out to me. Everywhere along the main street there were women standing around trying to attract customers. I nearly accidentally kicked over the mirror of one of the women who was sitting on the pavement putting on her thick layer of makeup. And spread out amongst all this were countless families living on the street. Even aside from the tragedy of homelessness itself, I couldn't help but think of the sheer impossibility of a child in that environment growing up (if they were lucky enough to do so at all) with a healthy understanding of how to view themselves, how to treat the opposite sex, or sexuality in general. It was a very humbling experience to see the environment that the Freeset women have escaped from and gain an appreciation for what we're helping to achieve. At the same time, it was overwhelming to realise how small our contribution is in the grand scheme of things.

BBC World news told us last night that 46% of Indians are malnourished, despite the fact that India is a net-exporter of food. Also, in The End of Poverty by Jeffery Sachs, I read that in South Asia, there are "an overwhelming number of case studies and media reports of young women facing extreme undernutrition within the household even when there is enough to go around." It is a very insightful book if you have the time for it. However I think I may have to read a chick-flick book when I'm finished.

For Diwali (festival of lights in theory - festival of noise in practice, on this weekend), there have been so many homemade bombs going off everywhere - very loud so the first few make you jump. Feel like you're in a war-zone sometimes.

Yay - bigger photos within the text! For the others, click on them and you will be taken to the larger versions in Picasa...

Pictures below:

- girls at the Freeset birthday celebration

- the move into new t-shirt building

- contemplating the move of something heavy

Pomegranates are awesome and other stories

One of the many stray dogs that live around Freeset is a gorgeous little black labradorish mongrel puppy named Charlie. Sometimes he'll wander in the gates of the Freeset factory and sleep under the pallets (sp?) that all the jute sits on. But Sarah won't let me keep him.

On Thursday, the tee-shirt part of Freeset started the move into the new building and production started today. This I think is a great move, as the factory was getting too big, and the communities which were so strong when freeset was smaller have struggled with the growing numbers. The move was quite funny - the women all stuck in to scrape off hundreds of years of paint and dirt (Sarah is exaggerating with 'hundreds' but probably 50 wouldn't be far off), scrub the floors and windows, and set up their work spaces. They enjoyed it and all sorts of hilarious things were happening - water got everywhere, they all joked around, John had a large bucket of water emptied on him while he was filming the process. Fortunately the camera was spared - I only hope that it happened before, not after, mopping.

In terms of our work, Sarah's been settling in to her design work well - bag mockups, brochures and communications, screen layouts for printing keeping her busy. John (the other designer here, who used to work for TV3 and Campbell Live) will be away for 6 months of the year so Sarah will be taking on more then. He is also meant to be making promotional videos at the moment (he did the documentary some of you have watched).

And I've started working on the screen printing training programme. It will be an interesting beast to co-ordinate given the language barrier, but I expect my Bangla learning will accelerate, if only because it'll have no choice. Other challenges will be that many of the women have had few educational opportunities, and hence some of them (especially the older ones, who are less likely to have had a decent education) have few literacy, numeracy and problem solving skills. It's just occurred to me that what I'm working on, for some of the women, will represent a significant chunk of their life's education - quite a humbling/scary thought. Wish me luck!

The plan is to teach all of the women in the screen printing department all of the major skills required. At the moment what's happening is we have a few specialists in each of these elements of the process. There are also a few women who were recruited recently, and they're currently handling the more menial tasks until I get a training programme sorted for them. Their current work can't be the most stimulating job in the world, but still better than the alternative, obviously.

The immediate outcome will hopefully be increased productivity, which in turn means that Freeset can do more for the women in terms of wages and other support. And it's also an empowerment thing. Being better at their work will hopefully improve the women's self-confidence, and of course it also increases our ability to give the women positions of leadership. This is obviously something Freeset wants to do as much as possible, but conversely, handing someone a responsibility they're unprepared for is doing no one a favour. If all of the women who work in printing are given the chance to learn all of the skills, then the more able women will develop a fairly comprehensive understanding of the overall process. Hopefully one day when Rakesh decides to move on, one of the women will be able to take over his job.

We have just moved back to Kalighat (Karl and Lyn's soon-to-be-old place) for a few weeks. Nice to have a place to ourselves (not having to feel like guests all the time), but the trip home is quite tough (long and crowded) after a long day, so we don't have much time or energy for anything else in our days!

Food is ridiculously cheap here. Sarah and I went out for dinner last week and had amazing curries and ice-cream, costing a total of NZ$7. Egg rolls (pancakey eggy things with sauce and veges in it) for dinner cost 12 rupees from the place around the corner from freeset. That is about 15cents NZ. They're super yummy. However we're not so keen on the places on the footpath - we will often see dozens of flies on the food; children are plonked up on the surface where the food is prepared at times, and children and adults use it for sleeping on during the heat of the day.

It has cooled down a bit (we sometimes get down to 29 degrees overnight!) which is great. We still manage to be drenched in sweat from about 10 in the morning.

We are struggling with how to deal with beggars. They are not everywhere as we were lead to believe, but you wouldn't usually walk more than about five minutes without seeing one. And in centre city (such as it is) they are everywhere, often kids pulling on your umbrella, waling beside you pleading in mainly English that they have learnt. There are so many issues with giving in this way that it is hard to process.

It seems easy to give something, but we're always concerned that we'll be supporting one of the begging rackets (where a criminal enslaves children to beg for them) - not sure how common these are but it's definitely a reality. Also, are we disempowering these people? (but then extreme poverty is pretty disempowering too - how do you weigh that up?). Suggestions anyone?

All the best,

Sarah and Tim

NB: sorry forgot about the pomegranate story - will update you next time

Nomoshkar abar,

So Tim's quite popular with the girls at Freeset - they give him biscuits and flowers. We enjoy the chai (tea) breaks twice a day - the tea they make for us is very sweet, looks like coffee, but tastes like strong milky sweet tea. 'V' for indians Dan (another volunteer) says. Factory hours are 10am til 7pm with a lunch break between 2 and 3.

The other day, I went up to help with the screen-printing which Tim has been working on, and Tim introduced me as his strii (wife) to one of the women. She promptly told every woman in sight and they all 'oooed', pointing to us and telling us that we were a bhalo (good) couple. One woman asked why I didn't have a red paint mark in my parting - this is what symbolises a marriage - not a ring.

We are having quite big problems here at freeset with power (in the past couple of weeks). The power often goes off, and we are having meter/ circuit issues. It doesn't help when the electrician blows fuses then overcharges for his work - because it is the religious holiday Durga Puja, they are struggling to get an electrician, let alone a good one (like Christmas here, electricians can get plenty of well-paid work wiring up temporary lighting displays, hence we're not of that much interest to them at the moment). Apparently the wires may have fused together with the intense heat.

It is neat to start to understand Bangla a bit more - most of the women here don't speak any English, so we are very keen to get to the level where we can have a decent conversation with them.

Oh, and we should also be promo-ing our stuff to you - you can help these women too.

There is a minimum order of 100, so if you know anyone who has retail shops, or organises conferences, please tell them about freeset bags (and soon, tees will be available too). See freesetglobal.com for details.

We have been finding our way around the markets near freeset - there are no supermarkets close-by. We get our yoghurt in a terracotta pot strangely. We thought they must have been lending it to us because we hadn't brought our own, but no, when we took it back to the place they were quite confused. We found out subsequently that tea also comes in little terracotta pots, and people just chuck these out on the street when they've finished their tea. Luckily they seem to be biodegradable as they are not made strongly (much more sensible than using plastic cups, now we think about it).

And a lizard lives in our kitchen. I'm simultaneously frightened and intrigued by it. Actually there are about 3 that live in our current place, so I'll have to get used to them.

We have explored town a little- Tim was coaxed into playing cricket for a while at the park and the group really wanted us to come back for a game of soccer at 7am the next morning. The streets are very dirty - there is definitely a problem with rubbish, and right next to our local vege market there is one of many mini-tips - but a lot doesn't even get there.

Also, there are a fair number of people who live on the foot paths, under a tarpaulin (or not). It is hard walking past mothers with very young babies who only have a small amount of fabric to lie on the concrete with. It is a very different life here where many hang their washing up on the road barriers, wash themselves and clothes under outdoor taps, and sleep day or night on the pavement. Sadly, you wouldn't know for a few days if they had died there.

We have found a church in town held at the YMCA which several people from Freeset are involved in. They are part of Emmanuel ministries and sound like they are doing amazing things - have a children's home, a home for HIV/Aids patients, and other community initiatives. Have met neat people so far.

Hope you're all well,
Tim and Sarah

Nomoshkar!

Nomoshkar from Kolkata,

Having spent four days in Kolkata, we wanted to share our first impressions. A bizarre mix of first and third person with either or both of us writing, sometimes changing within the sentence - sorry!

For the first few days we stayed with Karl (general manager of freeset) and his wife Lyn who also works there. They are two fantastic people (and we will be living with them off and on throughout the year) who have three kids at a boarding school in South India and they have both been wonderful in letting us settle in and showing us around. They currently live near Kalighat (45 mins from freeset by foot, bus and metro) but are moving closer soon.

We went in to Freeset on our first day as it was Freeset's birthday. It was a holiday in West Bengal where Hindus worship machines (if our limited understanding of Hinduism/Bengali culture has not betrayed us), so Freeset decided to celebrate that day and be thankful for the women, the opportunities, and freeset (and the sewing machines, of course).

Freeset seemed to be an amazing place - Anne and Kerry (the founders) have something very special going on there: the women all seemed very happy, and had brought various family members with them for the celebration. The children would just smile with these beautiful smiles that made you melt, and the women all greeted us with nomoshkar. Occasionally one of the women would say something in English - either teasing Kerry, or telling me that I should be wearing a sari (haven't had a chance to get one yet). They celebrated by dressing up, having some speeches (of course we couldn't understand a word as they speak so fast and we have about 200 words of Bangla between us), lots of dancing, and the westerners showed them how to do the makarena.

Because you can't safely drink the tap water here, we are fortunate in having access to filtered drinking water both where we are staying and at freeset. Freeset have recently put eight water filters into the new factory with the aim of making 30,000 litres of clean water available to the Sonagacchi community. They are currently struggling with this as they are sourcing the water from the Ganges, which means that although the water has no germs, it is a murky colour - which doesn't really convince people of its cleanliness when the town supply, although quite bad, is clear. They're currently working through how to sort that out.

Today (Monday) is our first day at work. Up till now we're been trying to learn some Bangla, and get used to the culture and the climate. The women at freeset don't speak English (apart from a few words) so learning some more language is definitely a priority. Karl has given us more of an idea of what we will be launching into this week and beyond. Tim will be first learning about the printing process, and then setting up a training programme for the women who join freeset. I will be helping out with designing the bags, and with promotional and communication materials for the launch of the t-shirts. Today is pretty laid back. Because it's another public holiday (the end of Ramadan), only 4 of us are here (normally around 150) - we've just come in to get our bearings before the chaos starts tomorrow. Annoyingly the power was out on 4 of the 6 meters at work, so we had to work in the dark some of the time, but hopefully will be back on tomorrow when everyone comes back to work.

Other than that, we've just been acclimatising really. The place we were staying had a lovely park 5 minutes away so we went walking around the lakes there and got invited to join a laughing exercise club by a nice man named Arjun. I think the no 1 surreal Kolkata experience so far. It's also coming up to Durga Puja, the festival of the Durga, who if I understand correctly is an incarnation of the goddess Kali and the regional deity of Kolkata. All around the city there are temporary temples/shrines (pandal) built in the middle of streets, or sometimes in parks. This seems to be as much a competition as an act of worship (or perhaps the competition is part of the worship?), with different areas competing for the best pandal. The creativity and dedication of the people is just astonishing. Beautiful structures with intricately carved plaster arches and walls seem to have sprung up around every corner, and traffic just has to find a way around them. It's perhaps something like Christmas light competitions in the US raised to the power of 10.

This afternoon John (the designer Sarah will be working with) took us around the little lanes near freeset. We waded through water which we didn't really want to know what was in it given the colour - was flooding as we had just had a couple of hours of heavy rain. And the water was not restricted to the lanes. The lanes are packed with people, piles of rubbish, dogs, cats, crows, and various creatures whose species was less discernible (Tim saw rats and a massive red insect which he has only just now told me about (lest I might have screamed perhaps)). Most people seemed to have somewhere undercover to live, but very very basic.

We visited a woman who works at Freeset, who was in this little room with her husband and one year old baby. The baby had just had an operation to remove one eye, as she had a cancer there that they detected too late to save the eye. Now the poor kid's in the middle of 6 rounds of chemotherapy (the Freeset Trust managed to raise money to have her treated at a private cancer hospital in Kolkata). She was remarkably resilient though and tried to steal Sarah's bracelet with incredible energy. Her smile was just amazing too! She was very beautiful.

That's all for now. Hope you are all well,
Sarah and Tim

You can see where we're living on this map:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=ramesh+dutta+st+kolkata&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=Ramesh+Dutta+St,+Kolkata,+West+Bengal,+India&ei=dHK4SvOhKo7gswPl89gT&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=title&resnum=1

Freeset is right near the middle, and we're currently living slightly to the North, just past Dari Gosh Sarani. Sonnagachi (the big red light district) starts just to the North of that.

Edit: fixed link, hopefully