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
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