1 LETTER
Sent from a keyboard without accents
Greetings from India!
We’re pushed for time so I’m taking the chance to dump the whole spiel on you today, and I’ll tell you more details later on. Seeing as this keyboard from the last century is useless, I’ve got an excuse for all my mistakes.
We arrived on Wednesday night, and as soon as we got there we bought a prepaid taxi at the airport. When we went out to look for them we saw a sign saying «prepaid taxis» and off we went, but it was nothing more than 30 Indians waiting for customers. So thirty blokes were arguing in Bengali about what to do with us and we hadn’t a clue what was going on, scared stiff. It was night but there was some light in the streets, and the initial excitement at being in an exotic country slowly turned into shock. The stench is tremendous, the city is full of rubbish and there aren’t any buildings more than 15 metres high. Since they’re all half falling down, nobody lives in their houses, everyone lives out in the street, sprawled about, spread along the pavements, on top of cars and always surrounded by flies. It looks (especially at night) as though they’re all dead.
The next day we woke up at 5 to go to 6 o’clock mass at «mother’s house», which is the «headquarters» of the sisters of charity, the place where mother teresa is buried. We walked there, and it was quite a fifteen-minute walk in silence. I’m not exaggerating if I tell you that the whole time it smells of shit, rubbish, rot and the greasy frying of whatever they’re cooking, and it makes you feel horribly sick. There are leaking water pipes where they wash in the mornings. And they all clean themselves as soon as they get up. It was embarrassing to walk past there: on one side, the rich folk strolling down their street, and them waking up like every day surrounded by rubbish. They never stop staring at us, especially if we’re with girls, and their stare is really intimidating, it’s as if they were screaming inside but no longer let it out, as if they’d already given up on everything, since they are born, live and die in the street. All the food stalls are 2×2 metres, a sort of cupboard that opens out onto the sides of the alleys where the Indians stand selling strange fried things.
Now that I’ve described the smells and more or less what you see, here’s the soundtrack: crows and motorbikes, nothing else; the motorbikes and the taxis, which in Spain would carry 2 or 3 people, here carry at least 10 and they hurtle along. As there are hardly any police and no traffic laws, it’s the law of «whoever has the biggest balls and pulls over last» and they cut it so fine it’s frightening, you can’t lean out of the window in case they hit you. The men walk around in little skirts and the women are watching the children the whole time, and the children are usually naked. They’re totally national geographic, dirty, with dazed faces, barefoot and begging for money. And then stray dogs everywhere rooting about looking sick.
It isn’t just a matter of poverty, there’s a cultural problem here, they’re dirty and careless and they don’t care about anyone, everyone goes their own way. You constantly see abandoned children around, and sometimes a corpse on the ground, and nobody cares, nobody. I promise you their stare is a tragedy. They only smile at you if they’re vendors, the rest of the time they look at you with a total zombie face. The scene is sad, very sad. I’ve been here 5 or 6 days, and you don’t get used to anything, not the smell, not the scene, because there’s always a stare first thing in the morning that knocks any nonsense out of you.
We’re sleeping in a jesuit house where they’ve taken us in. The rooms are two metal beds with pillows that feel like stones, and a fan, which believe me is like a 5-star hotel round here. Being inside a building the smell doesn’t reach so much and you can survive at night. That said, you sweat ALL day long, it’s roasting. It’s madness, you end up with your t-shirts soaking.
I’ll tell you more about the scene when I get back but you can get the idea.
We’re a group of 24, almost all women. Most of the group are my uncle’s students, really nice people from valencia and castellon. As I was saying, we went to Mother’s House, and we were stunned: in the middle of a city of chaos, poverty and disease, they have a big but humble house, very very well kept. This is a feature common to all the nuns’ houses, they’re very well kept and they’re constantly cleaning them. At 6 we had mass with them, and through the window you could hear all the racket of horns and crows, but even so, the songs they sang could be heard and they were tremendous, very beautiful. It’s surprising how their work is praised, and at the end of the day it’s a handful of 40 little nuns who share out the work and the running of the homes. Most of them are a metre and a half tall and elderly, but people greet them with an astonishing respect.
They have 5 houses spread around the city where they take in people with all sorts of illnesses. On the first day they already assigned us a house. I got a house on the outskirts of the city, with 9 others. We have to take the train and a taxi every day, and in 2 hours we get there. Our house is Kirk Angola, and it’s for tuberculosis patients. It’s a lovely house, with a very pretty garden. Today, for example, has been a day of hard work. I had to wash some of the patients, most of them skeletal and paralysed. It isn’t easy, at first it’s pretty disgusting, quite frankly, because the shower room stinks of shit something awful. Many of them wee and poo on the floor because they can’t stand up, and it has to be cleaned. And then you have to wet them, rub them with soap, dry them, dress them, wheelchair and out to the garden.
When they put me to washing them I was left breathless, but a Nepali man has been working with us showing us how it’s done, and we were amazed. He treated them in an incredible way. You could see that he loved them. He even cleaned their sores. Afterwards we talked to him and we were blown away. Mother teresa took him in. He was paralysed, and little by little he has been getting better and recovering movement. We said to him, «Why are you able to do this? Why do you do it?» and the man says to us, «because they did it for me». It’s a tremendous newness, what the nuns’ welcome means; they only begin to see themselves differently if they enter one of those houses, and are loved. I’m not exaggerating if I say that the nuns are a world apart in this city. The beauty we need to see so as not to despair in daily life is in the nuns’ houses. There the gaze is different, it’s one of tenderness, concern and joy. Everyone inside greets you with a «jiesu pronom» or something like that, which means more or less «hello in christ». Those who have been in the house for a long time are different, they talk to you about mother teresa with tremendous joy, and they take care of the others thoroughly. I’ve been cooking with them and they’re brilliant. They said something to me about the pigs (they have a few at the house), and I’m afraid it’s something about killing one, I hope they don’t rope me in. As I’m with the men I don’t see the nuns much, but it’s the «patients» themselves who look after each other. I know I’m repeating myself, but seeing how useless and slow we are, it’s more worthwhile to watch how they work and care for others. The contrast with the way they look at you outside the houses makes the gaze of the people inside even more powerful. What makes them love you.
Spending so much time together, the group of 10 of us are becoming great friends: there’s my uncle, miras, alex, marta, javi garcia, carlos, and three from valencia. Yesterday we rested and it was a spectacle. Yago kept insisting that alex and miras should tell the others their story, and we ended up talking for nearly 4 hours, in the only bar in calcutta with beer and air conditioning, telling each other how each of us lives his faith. Carlos and these 3 girls are sticking with us a lot, and we’re having a great time, and arguing a lot.
You’ll be amazed at everything that’s happening to alex over here, it’s one long laugh, what a character.
In the afternoons we pray with them and rest a little. Prayer becomes essential here. Even so, I’m finding prayer hard. I’m left without words when I go into the chapel at «mother’s house». I’ve got a tremendous muddle inside me. I take the chance to talk every night with my uncle about how we are, and to bring some clarity to the day. Because I’m telling you truly, not even seeing miracles is being «enough» for me, I feel the lack of being more aware that God loves me, just like that, I hope that makes sense. I notice it in how I am in the afternoons, sort of impatient, moany and serious; I find myself as much in need of the love that happens with the little nuns as the people in the houses or on the street. Perhaps thanks to this, the conversations with my uncle become more powerful. It’s been interesting to see how the only way of resting from my «overthinking» and my worries is when I measure myself against my uncle. It becomes necessary to me that he should welcome how I am each day, and he does.
I could tell you a thousand and one more things, but this is the first thing that comes into my head in a 10 square metre internet cafe, with an extremely ugly Indian man who smells bad stuck to my left. Pray hard for me, so that this helps me grow at least a little in faith, because otherwise the trip won’t have been worth it. A hug to you all!
We’ve met and talked with quite a few: John, winsten, niami, milan, mjumbanem…
2 LETTER
> Greetings from India!
> Thanks a lot to those of you who have written back, I haven’t got much time so here’s another long ramble.
> After what I was telling you, we spent a couple more days at the house for tuberculosis patients, and we’ve met one of «Mother Teresa’s children». They’re all orphans taken in by Mother Teresa; he’s 38 now and works in the TB house. He never stops, he won’t stop talking about the Bible, he knows more than all of us put together. He talks about «his mother» and tells us every single thing she said to him, how she brought him up, how she looked for a school for him. I’ll tell you in more detail because it’s priceless. But the real thing is something else.
> A sister from Mother House came up to us the next day to suggest something to seven of us; the idea was to go to a leper colony on the outskirts of Calcutta, five hours away by bus, to work as volunteers, sleeping and eating there of course. What a day when she told us, everyone absolutely terrified about deciding who’d go. They were dropping like flies. In the end it was Alex, Silvia, three from Valencia, Greta and me. I didn’t sleep that night, I was imagining the scene like a horror film, with «skin hanging off and all that». And everything they told us made it worse: that it’s more or less up in the hills, where there are loads of spiders and snakes… that the power goes off every five minutes and you have to go around with candles… Anyway, Alex and I were already picturing the nights out there, with zombies wandering around the grounds. They also told us it was a cracking estate, beautiful, and that there was a Spanish sister there! So that cheered us up.
> Up at 4 in the morning to catch the bus and off we went. Absolute killer of a journey, but anyway, as we got closer it got less hot and humid, and less noisy at last. We arrived at about 10 in the morning and a very nice Filipino novice was waiting for us in an ambulance to take us there. The town is Assansol, but the house is an hour away by car. She was already reassuring us: «lepers aren’t like the ones in the films». And so, we stopped at a school nearby to pick up the Spanish sister, who was there with two children from the house, «ex-lepers», trying to get an interview at the school to get them in. She and the two boys got into the ambulance and that was it, an hour talking with her. A saint, just like that.
> Her name is Sister Maria, and later we found out she’s called «Lola». From the moment we got into the ambulance until we left the house, we saw her with a smile from ear to ear. Her welcome at the house was tremendous, always looking after us. As soon as I got in she started telling us about the centre, let me explain. It’s an enormous estate, maybe an area of 1 km, it has 8 blocks for leprosy patients, 4 for men and 4 for women, then a house for the children and one for giving classes to people from the village; they’re pretty self-sufficient, with hens, rice fields, cows… Then there’s the sisters’ house with the kitchen, the chapel and so on. Straight away she started telling us the story of the lads who had got into the ambulance, tremendous things. The first one is called Bisu, abandoned by his father, an alcoholic, who accused him of having killed his little sister (his father did) and used to beat him; then Santu, she only said he was an abandoned leper. These two lads had been maybe 12 years in the house and 3 with Lola. Then she told us about Gudu, and this story really is too much: alcoholic father again, abandoned in the jungle and made a slave (!!!), later leprosy, and now he’s cured and works in the leper colony for the sister. She was telling us she was trying to get the two lads into school and get electricity for Gudu’s house, who’s married now and has 4 little girls.
> Well, we were much calmer by then, we started telling her what we were studying and so on, and then we arrived. We went off to the main block; the men and the women were halfway through the rosary, they do it every Wednesday afternoon, and she was translating the intentions the lepers were saying. The first intention just as we arrived: for the volunteers and their families, that they may be happy. Alex and I were already looking at each other in amazement. From then on it was unreal, everything was smiles, everything. The food was great, we slept great, they’ve looked after us more than we could ever have looked after them, it was embarrassing.
> Day to day it was getting up at 6 for Mass and prayer, breakfast, and at 8 off to work. We had two options, dressings (cleaning the lepers’ wounds…) and cleaning. I haven’t got the stomach for it so cleaning. Alex and one of the girls from Valencia signed up, and we started working with Bisu, Gudu and Santu. The work was tiring and hard, but it has been a grace. It never stops amazing me what a great gesture of love it is to clean for the sick. I noticed it because these three I’m telling you about corrected me every 2 minutes, about how to do things, to spend more time on them, to put the sheet on properly… anyway, it was brilliant working with them. They’re people very different from the scene here, very different, they look at Lola all the time as a mother, and that’s just what she is, she loves them loads. Anyway, I spent 5 days getting rid of cobwebs and changing sheets, and above all seeing these guys has been a gift. The more time I spend working, even though it isn’t what I was expecting (I imagined picking people up off the street), the more I’m enjoying it, more and more aware of how «silly» but at the same time how great it is to leave things looking nice, something lasting in the sisters’ houses.
> The relationship with these lads was brilliant, laughing our heads off all day, and sometimes serious conversations (as far as we could understand each other). Alex has come back really struck by these days and at the last «meeting» he described very well what has happened with these three Indians: «it’s curious, born in very different countries, very different stories, characters, languages and everything different, but the only thing that makes possible the relationship we have between us and the only thing that has been enough for them and for us in life, has been the encounter with someone who loves us», in their case the encounter with this sister. I’ll tell you more about them when I get back, but anyway, they’re amazing.
> The lepers aren’t like we thought, although it’s true that in the house fingers and hands were in short supply; leprosy attacks the peripheral nerves and deadens them (eeeeh), causing deep wounds that end up destroying hands and feet, so nearly all of them are missing limbs; the worst cases had faces that were a right mess, but there were only a few of those. In the afternoons we sang with them, swapping songs in Spanish and Hindi or Bengali, and they all play percussion instruments, tambourines, drums and so on, it was almost comical, but brilliant. The sister tells us that not that many are baptised, but on their deathbed nearly all of them are. This is the first thing that surprised me about the sister, she loved them all the same; Santu was baptised but Bisu wasn’t, and as her own children, she had no preference for any of them. Another thing she told us was that the blocks for the «less serious» cases had to be renewed every week, which means turning people out, and apparently it’s heartbreaking. It surprised me that she knew all the patients, when apparently it’s easier not to get involved with them, so as not to suffer on the day you have to turn them out, but this sister isn’t afraid of anything.
> Let me tell you more about her because it’s priceless: she’s from Madrid, she studied in Salamanca, and she was a massive party animal: «what a change, now I wake up at the time I used to go to bed», she told us. She was converted on the Camino de Santiago, she’d had loads of boyfriends, and she’s a doctor. They sent her out there completely out of the blue. She never stops laughing, and she asks you a thousand and one things about your life. The best sister of them all, and she’s Spanish, of course she is. The best thing of all about her is that she was an absolutely Human sister, in fact more so than us. The other sisters seem to have been «dull» all their lives, destined for this life, but she breaks the mould. Two silly things that make me say she’s human: one, because she remembered with a bit of nostalgia «the afternoon beers» in Madrid, and the other is because she told us that there was a French volunteer doctor and she found him very attractive, and she told us how she kept saying to God: «Lord, I don’t know why you’ve put this one here, I’ll find out one day, but I’ve fallen in love with You».
> And here’s the best thing about her: she talked all the time about «my husband» and at first we didn’t understand, and little by little we found out she was talking about Jesus. It was incredible, as if there were a bloke sitting next to her the whole time; every time she told us a story about the leper colony or about her life, she kept interrupting the account with the dialogue she was having with her husband. And she said to us: I’m a woman who needs to touch things, and I always demand it of my husband, Lord either you’re concrete and tangible, or I can’t see you». It was incredible; when she visited us at night in our little shack, she filled the room, we bombarded her with questions (your story? why this close relationship with God? Seeing Christ in the sick? How does that work?). What a close relationship with God, a permanent dialogue. It made you so envious, I’ve spent 5 days asking for that dialogue. God wasn’t something invented in her life, He was Everything, above all her patients. She’s one of those people who leave you speechless. A saint. I thought a lot about the dinner at Luis’s house with Tim Guenard, the same thought came over me at that dinner as when we were with the sister: WHAT A SAINT! How attractive a person so close to Jesus Christ is!
> For me these days have been great; at night I’d talk over the day with Alex, and we’d read the Gospel, and thinking through with him what had happened during the day has given a real boost to our friendship these days, and filled it with petition. Then seeing this sister, and above all «her children», who were walking miracles, has made me see how powerful God is, He has no barriers, He can do EVERYTHING. He only needs people to come into this world, and with this sister that’s obvious.
> As an anecdote, I’ve harvested rice, and the best thing: I found out that in the next village they play football matches, and I’ve always wanted to play surrounded by little black lads like «Thierry Henry» in a Pepsi advert, well, that’s exactly how it was, the hero of the village scoring goals; my feet are wrecked because they play on stone and barefoot but it was worth it hahahaha.
> I have plenty of time to pray, I’m praying for Luis’s school, Suca’s job and a thousand other things, so send me your intentions and I’ll pray for you. A big hug to you all.
Machine translation. If you spot a mistake, do write to us.