Shishur Sevay

Our children are wonderful.  We are in the midst of  monsoon flooding.  Kolkata is almost at a standstill.  We are waterlogged, not in the house, but just outside our steps.  The children have not gone out to their school, but our teachers here have all shown up, so it’s been a good week of learning.

Two teachers were talking about the flooding with each other.  The children overheard them.  They asked the teachers, “why can’t we bring them here?”  The teachers explained we didn’t have enough money to feed everyone.  So the girls came downstairs, en masse, and asked me if we could bring all the poor people here.  I said we couldn’t, but we would find a way to help poor people.  One of our founding principles was that the children would serve others less fortunate. 

Our girls don’t need to learn to serve, they just need the opportunity.  They had hard lives, and are happy about what they have now.  They have compassion and want to share.

Blogs go backwards, so what i write first is read last — reminding me of novels where i read the end so i can relax through the story.  I write forward and I am read backwards.

Soon there wil be a website to explain more.

But in the moment of Now, I live in Kolkata, which used to be Calcutta.  I live in a small orphanage that started with a vision i had.  I live with 13 orphan girls, aged about 2-12.  The four youngest are severely handicapped, mostly with cerebral palsy.  The others are "normal" with their handicaps being social and educational.  These are all urgent problems so we try to do everything at once.

I sleep on the floor with the kids.  In the summer that is the coolest place.  In the winter we have cots, and lots of blankets.  Recently we had terrible monsoon flooding and so were were locked in for a week — me and 13 kids and i really enjoyed the time.  I’m not alone in terms of help — and in the flooding all my teachers came — anyone close enough to get here, got here.  And we were able to get food in.

The rain is gone for now… the kids are back to school… me and my ducklings walking to school