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.