Calcutta Day 6 - August 2, 2010

Grace and I began our morning with our morning ritual. Narration by Grace: Grace’s alarm goes off. Grace awakens and holds the alarm closer to Tammy’s ear. Tammy remains motionless. Grace gives up and hits snooze. 10 minutes later the alarm goes off again. Repeat cycle. But today, Tammy actually stirs, looks at Grace, says I heard it, and then goes back to sleep. A few minutes later, she finally gets up. Then we eat our breakfast consisting of PB or cheese crackers (thanks Walmart in PA) and granola bars, and pop our malaria pills and vitamins.

After getting ready, we began our hike to EMC where we were beginning our first set of “official” observations. Grace’s backpack in tow (my bookbag goes everywhere with me but I didn’t bring it this time because I already had a large pack – totally regret that now as my shoulder bag is totally falling apart… but luckily Grace has hers too!) packed with a laptop, post-it notes (I live off of them), markers, camera and video, notebook and paper, and materials gathered from Ilora. Least to say, it was heavy but we were ready for the trek to the office. Figured we start sweating when we walk without a heavy bag so we’d be drenched by the time we got to the office. Thankfully, on our walk there, a vehicle started honking at us. That’s nothing abnormal here in Calcutta, so we moved out of its way, but then some familiar face began talking to us out the window. It was a bus headed to EMC with children and teachers aboard! We jumped aboard and were happy to get a ride there! So this bus goes into the slum and street areas to pick up the children for the NFE.

We spent the morning observing the younger children, ages 4-7, at the NFE program at their home office location. It was so fun to see these young precious children smile and laugh and learn their animals, their colors, their numbers, their letters. It was so encouraging and inspiring to see these teachers put their full energy into loving these children. They were so full of energy, pouring out their every bit of energy and love onto these children. I would have loved to have them as teachers.

The NFE takes a very holistic approach to helping these children. In addition to traditional education, they also take care of their basic health and hygiene care. A doctor is there to look at children who are ill, and the teachers and staff take each child, comb their hair, wash their faces, brush their teeth, and teach them the importance of hygiene at the same time. And the way the teachers taught, with such enthusiasm – so fun!

I love post-its.

Afterwards we headed into the office to debrief our many pages of notes that we had captured, post-it noted them and all that fun (yeah… I love post-its). After another delicious lunch provided by the EMC cook, we met the teachers we had observed in the AM. They told us afterwards that they were kind of intimidated and scared of what we were going to ask but I think they were quickly put at ease. We had a great conversation and discussion and got some good takeaways for our team to build on. We have quite a bit of homework to do, but that was expected. Anyhow, we had a great time with these lovely ladies. They are indeed amazing women who love.

After debriefing with our small team, we headed to dinner at a pizza place. On our walk to the pizza place, the three of us walked right next to a dead cat with its guts hanging out. Grace wanted me to blog about it since its very much on my mind as she says she has to process the scene. I’m trying to forget about it – rather I have forgotten about but she wants to talk about it, so I’m going to talk about it on my blog hoping that will be sufficient for her. Anyhow, the pizza was so good, although whenever I travel internationally, I’m never really sure if it’s truly that good or if it’s just that I’ve been deprived of it for a bit.

We are headed to EMC’s NFE at New Market tomorrow. We’ll update you on that later. Goodnight!