Sarah and Tim Muller

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.