Midway Home

poster at the home

Today we celebrated Rabindranath Tagore's 150th birth anniversary with a day off from work.  He was a famous Bengali poet from Kolkata.  The office was closed so we took a day trip to the Midway Home in the outskirts of Kolkata.  The Midway home is EMC’s rehab home for alcoholics and addicts.  It’s an oasis of a place, a good hour plus away from the city, with coconut trees and grassy fields and peace and quiet.  It was awesome to see our brother S, the microcredit loan officer that we’ve been working closely with the past few weeks, in his role as head of the project at the Midway home.  It was neat to see him interact with the men receiving treatment at the home, men of as young as 16 and up through 60.  Men who trust him and look up to him because of S’s own life story that brought him to the Midway home for treatment over a decade ago.  Anyhow we got to interact with the men, hear about their lives, and just get to know them. 

After lunch at the home, we stopped at the drug and alcohol treatment center that all clients go to before coming to the home.  Some of the boys at the boys home we are staying at also came through this treatment center… it’s crazy to imagine those happy little boys we live with once being addicts to various substances… young children as young as 4 or 5 years old.  To think about the futures these kids now have.