A Day In My (Indian) Life

I've been in Kolkata just over a week now so life is beginning to settle into a comfortable routine. Here is an example of my typical day:

5:00 - Wake up
5:30 - Walk 25 minutes to the Mother House with a couple other volunteers staying at my hotel
6:00 - Attend Mass at Mother House
7:00 - Breakfast of bread, banana, and chai with all volunteers at Mother House
7:35 - Say Prayer Before Leaving the Apostalate and take 15 minute bus from the Mother House to Prem Dan where I volunteer
8:00 - Arrive at Prem Dan and "talk" with patients while we wait for a sister to open the dressing room. (It has become one of my favorite things to just sit with individual patients and try to communicate. A few patients have a little English but most have none. Never-the-less I have grown in the last week to look forward to the unplanned times at Prem Dan when I can just sit on a patients bed for 5 minutes and remind them that people care about them. The long term volunteers and Sisters are wonderful examples in this).
8:15 - Change bandages on patients. (There are 40 or so patients with wounds that require dressing changes daily. These are mostly from blisters or burns or diabetes. As I've written about before. Its hard to walk the line between trying to improve obviously substandard medical care and recognizing that the sisters are hear forever and that the current practices fulfill the need for sustainable use of resources.)
10:30 - "Tea" of chai and cookies on the porch.
10:45 - More time to just be with patients. (In language I would try to use at home, I try to develop friendships with the patients. This is harder than back home because of the language barrier and because of the difficulty of reciprocity in the relationship. At first thought there is not much that the patients can offer me. I am beginning to realize that the patients do teach me patience so to speak and I hope that I will learn other things from them as well).
11:15 - Serve the patients a lunch of rice and curie. (We bring the food to each person and then help feed the one's that arn't able to feed themselves because of mental or physical disability).
11:45 - Do dishes
12:30 - Take an auto-rickshaw back to the hotel. (An auto-rickshaw is hard to describe if you haven't experienced it. It is a 3-wheeled vehicle with 2 stroke motor. 4 people plus the driver pile in and race through the streets which is an adventure that feels like riding a roller coaster).
1:00 - Lunch at the Blue Sky Cafe.
2:00 - Reading, laundry, cricket on TV, internet, etc.
6:00 - Dinner at the Blue Sky Cafe.
7:00 - Bed

Later....