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