Making it feel like home

My day at Prem Dan started with the laundry, a task performed by 18 or so of us yesterday. Today it was just 7. It was hard. So hard. I must have climbed a couple dozen flights of stairs after hauling all the wet fabric up to the roof top. But we did it.

With this extra difficult morning of manual labor came a consoling afternoon of more rewarding slow, quiet time with the women. Some of them even remembered me--something I didn't expect for only my second day of work.

Highlights of today: Laying on the floor, stretching with Sarich who has some sort of bone disease while she sang quietly under her breath in Bengali. Carrying a little, little woman to bed. Feeding a woman lunch by hand (she didn't have any teeth--it got interesting).

I think the manual labor at Prem Dan mixed with the mild time spent with the woman is a necessary combination for me. Without one, the other would seem very overwhelming in its own respects.

Something interesting: After serving breakfast I walked upstairs and found a young woman who I had met yesterday sleeping in the stairway. I asked one of the Sisters if I should move her to a bed. She told me a lot of the woman are so used to sleeping on the streets, something they've done their whole lives, they often find it hard to sleep on their beds at Prem Dan at night. So, they nap in the stairway because it reminds them of home.

Last night I decided to do stuff to remind me of home.

I was in need of some comfort and at a loss for how to find it. Lying in my fabulously dingy, amazingly bare room at the hotel, I decided to decorate. I know... I know... this is so silly. Yes, please laugh at me. Laugh away. But this is what I do. I've always done it. Ask my parents, ask Annie Murphy. I nest. I'm a nester. I rearranged the cots, I went and got an extra sheet from the front desk and laid it out on the floor like a rug, I taped to the wall (with my medical tape from my med kit) pictures from home and I even "borrowed" a plant from one of the decks to put in our room. For me, Hotel Maria room #17 feels so much more like home now. I like it.

The evening was capped of with beers on the roof top with Theresa, my new German friend and Traci while we laughed hysterically about words and tampons. Yes, that was the depth of our conversation. I laughed so hard I almost spilled Kingfisher beer all over my puffy pants. It was great.

Thought you should know, I rode an auto rickshaw home today from work without any other volunteers. It was me and 5 other Indians. That amounted to a sweaty mess of 7 people, including myself and the driver, in an ittybitty, metal box on three wheels zooming through insane Kolkata traffic. What a day.