Kolkata: Day of Rest

For those of you who have been following our blog, you will have noticed that we have been travelling up to 6 or 7 hours each day to and from our distribution sites.  Today the short duration of our trip hit us all and we decided to make the most of our time here by packing in as much as we could.  After greeting our lovely bus driver Amit and presenting him with an honourary Canadian toque, we headed off for the Birla Temple in the downtown core of Kolkata.  The drive from our hotel to the centre took almost two hours today!  After a tour of this beautiful temple we decided to make a return visit to Mother Theresa's Mission of Charity orphanage to see if this time the children were awake.  To our great fortune we arrived just on time and had an escorted tour with one of the sisters.  We arrived in time to join in with the children singing their morning songs, our favourite was the wheels on the bus!  We also had time to visit the physically and developmentally challenged children as they were having their breakfast.  As we were entering the orphanage some of us had the pleasure of chatting with a German nun who first joined the mission 50 years ago.  She is still just as passionate about serving the poor of Kolkata as we are sure she was all those years ago.

We then packed in lunch and a trip to three factory suppliers for the bedkits, where we were warmly greeted.  Of special interest to our team was the cottage industry of 5-10 women who used foot or hand pedal sewing machines to stitch together the bedsheets and pillowcases in the bed kits.  When we visited the factory which supplies the t-shirts and the sandal factory the owners expressed such joy at being chosen to provide items for the bedkit.  

 

We finished off the day driving through All-Market!  This area of Kolkata is filled with wholesale fruit, vegetables and nearly any other item that you can imagine!  While we have seen streets crowded with cars, buses, trucks and rickshaws, the human crush of these market streets was so different and an incredible experience for all of us.  Luckily we were contained in the fishbowl like atmosphere of our van, ably navigating the streets with our driver Amit.

 

Our well deserved rest will happen this evening when our heads hit the pillow, as tomorrow we begin on the road once again headed off on the distribution trail.

Team Kolkata 2014
Post your comments here: