I never thought this would be easy

But I never thought it would be this hard.

Here are two stories that happened today. And it's only 2:30...

There are two men in Khalighat that share beds next to one another. For the past three days I have sat in between them on the floor, rubbed their backs, held their hands, listened to them, sang to them, and cried when they cried. I don't know either of their names and I don't specifically know why either of them are there but the man on the left has difficulty breathing and when he talks it is only a whisper in Bengali. The man on the right has sores all over his arms and legs and face and hasn't said a word since I've sat with him. I don't know why I've been sitting there specifically but it's peaceful there, on the quieter side of the room where some men sit and play cards and others simply sleep. Today I was sitting with the man on the left and he was having more difficulty then normal breathing so I held his hand for about an hour and rubbed his chest and sang him a few songs while he layed on his back with his eyes closed. His breathing kept getting harder and harder and there was nothing I could do for him except stay there and hold him. After about 15 minutes of heavy weezing and both of us in tears his eyes shot open wider than anyone's I have ever seen and he stared at me for 10 seconds as his chest stopped moving. I ran and got the first person who looked like a nurse at all and told her that this man had stopped breathing and she told me to pray. To pray for a man who had probably had nothing his entire life and died with nothing but the clothes on his back. To pray for a man who in his last days couldn't chew his food or swallow water or take medicine or roll over on his side or open his eyes.

This is the first time I've seen someone die. It won't be the last but that's not making anything easier for me. I helped wrap his body then went to the roof of the building to be alone for a minute, atleast as alone as you can be in Kolkatta (I don't think anyone has ever truly been alone in this city for atleast 150 years). I couldn't stop thinking and I couldn't collect my thoughts. It was like my brain took pictures of thoughts and scattered the polaroids on the ground and I couldn't get a good look at any of them. That is, until Martha sat me down and talked to me. Martha is a beautiful girl from France with a heart of gold. I told her that I was really shooken up by what happened and she said some of the most wonderful things I'd ever heard. I'll paraphrase here.
There are two truly beautiful and meaningful things that happen in a persons life: birth and death. The only two gaurantees that we have as humans. Before and after life we are with God and both must be equally as painful and scary for each of us, because we can't know exactly what comes next. We can imagine but we can't know. This man returned to God today in a place where thousands upon thousands of others have died. And God put me in that position. I didn't choose who I sat beside, if I did it was completely random. And no matter how much I pray that I hadn't seen what I did, I had to. Otherwise he would have looked up and seen an empty ceiling instead of another person. He didn't know who I was, nor did he probably care, but he had a hand to hold instead of a bedframe and that's what matters.

And that makes this easier.

And maybe that's the only reason I came to India was to be with that man today. If that's the case then I am satisfied.

Namaste my beautiful.

Let's get one thing straight,

India is dirty.
India is hot.
India is uncomfortable.
India is Beautiful.

Last night I slept on the roof of my hotel and watched an orange sky pass over me until five o'clock in the morning. This morning I woke up to a purple sunrise and a terra cotta pot of warm chai.
The last week has been exhausting and full of wonderful people and new relationships. Let me give you a small rundown of what I'm doing on a "regular" (if there is such a thing) day to day basis:
At 7'oclock every morning the volunteers all meet at the mother house for breakfast and to hear any announcements that the sisters might need to give us. We pray and sing a couple of songs and eat bananas, white bread, and chai then everyone heads out in their different directions to go to work. I normally arrive at Khalighat, the home that I am working at in the mornings, at about 8 o'clock and work until about noon. Khalighat is the first home that Mother Theresa set up in Calcutta in the 1940's, it's called the home for the destitute and dying and about 50 men and 50 women are being treated here. They are brought off of the streets for many many reasons but for a good majority they come here to have a few meals and a bed to leave this earth in. First thing in the morning I help with laundry wringing out clothes and laying laundry on the roof to dry, a daunting task on somedays to try and wash clothes and bedding for a hundred people by hand. After laundry we'll go onto the male's side, a large room with about fifty-sixty beds about a foot apart, and help distribute medication and water and basically hang out with the men while some of the more trained volunteers with a background in nursing change bandages and clean wounds. Some of which are just awfully infected and many of the patients are missing appendages. We give massages and listen, even if we can't understand, to what the men have to say and sometimes just sit beside them and hold their hands. Not everyone who is here is here to die however, many people are seen for about a week or so, given a round of antibiotics, had their wounds cleaned and the bandages cleaned, and sent back on their way purely out of a lack of resources to keep them with us longer. Our time with the men lasts about two hours and then we bring them lunch, do dishes, and head home.
In the afternoon I work at a children's home called Dayadan. A place for orphaned children with mental and physical disabilities. I work on the first floor from 3-5:30 with about 4 other volunteers playing with about 12-15 boys with an array of different disabilities. Many can't speak or walk but they are all some of the most wonderfully happy children I've ever met. We play with them for about an hour then we help feed them and then break them up into smaller groups to help teach them songs for this years christmas pageant. I'd love to tell more about the boys but the truth is, I've only been here for about a week and I'm still getting used to this routine and I'm still getting to know the boys, so there will be plenty of stories in the next few weeks I promise.
Namaste

Well, here we are (with a few surprises)

KOLKATA!
You greeted us with cows, english taxis, dirt roads, car horns, piles of trash, millions of crows, kites, barbed wire, broken teeth and old friends. What do I have to offer you? Whatever it is, take it. Breathe it. Feel it. Hold it. Love it.

We landed yesterday at about 4 o'clock and hopped in an old yellow taxi, constant reminders of Englands colonization of India, and headed towards Sudder Street, our new home for the next three months (That is still quite strange to say). The first thing we saw in the taxi was a group of about 12-15 cows standing off to the side of the road, next were about 30 women and children pulling plastic bottles out of a massive pile of trash, next was an array of things so grand and so heartbreaking that words could never do them justice. Huge billboards advertising everything from giant t.v.'s to beauty supplies to luxurious homes with plastic tarps and bamboo poles coming attached to the sides making makeshift homes. We kept driving for about 45 minutes or so weaving to every side of the road with our drivers thumb constantly hovering over the horn and frequently pressing it, letting everyone know that he was coming and not planning on slowing down. Needless to say, Kolkata is much different than Bangkok.
We got to the Hotel Maria and got "settled in" without talking much at all, trying to take in this city in a single large gulp doesn't allow much space for words to come out. We went to the roof and the view was mostly just higher buildings in every pale shade of green, yellow, and pink with the most gorgeous orange sunset i have ever seen casting the buildings' shadows down on us and sillhouetting the apartments. After a quick stint on the roof we made our way down to the lobby and who should happen to walk up to us? None other than our dear friend Lizzy, a member of calcutta club who just graduated but helped us prepare for this trip like no one else could. A shouting match of disbelief followed and I don't think any of us said anything except,
"WHAT?!?"
"HOW?"
"ARE YOU SERIOUS?!?!"
"WHAT?!?!"
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"
Streams of tears just poured out of our tired eyes and we stood in the lobby of Hotel Maria crying and laughing and yelling for about 30 minutes until we were kindly asked to leave. I'm still a little bit in shock that she's here. During the school year when we were having regular meetings the girls and I would constantly bug her that she had nothing better to do than to come back to Kolkata with us and apparently enough persuasion turned into Christmas in September for all of us. She's only here for another week and a half or so (she's already been here about two weeks) and then she'll be travelling to some smaller villages doing some work with people she met last time she was in Kolkata. It's truly amazing that in a city of over 100 million people she was able to find us within two hours of getting off the plane. Can anyone else see God at work here?
Lizzy took us around Sutter St. and introduced us to some of her amazing friends that I'm proud to say have already become some of my amazing friends. We parted ways and tried going to bed early last night, about 9 or so, but to no avail. The air is so hot and so thick that as you lay in bed you can literally feel the sweat drip (or run for dear life) out of your body. Not to mention the noise level that never seems to get lower. So we all laid in bed listening to music out of my tiny ipod speakers for about 3 or 4 hours praying for sleep to come, and eventually it did, as it always does. This is gonna take some getting used to. We woke up at about 5:15 to meet Lizzy and walk to the Mother House for Mass at 6:00. Mass was beautiful and we got to talk to some of the sisters and some of the other volunteers over a communion breakfast of hot chai and white bread, such a wonderful (and EARLY) morning. We're going to Shishu Bavaan, one of the childrens homes run by the missionaries of charity and where Emily is going to spend her days volunteering, at 3 o'clock to get registered and attend a new volunteer orientation. That's in about an hour.
I haven't taken many pictures yet as I want to get to know the people around me and to get my bearings a little more (we haven't even been here a whole day yet!). Also the internet speeds are quite slow so i don't know if i'll even be able to upload many photos but we will see. I think that's all i can manage to type at this point so until I have more meaningful things to say, NAMASTE NAMASTE NAMASTE.

2 days in bangkok

Spent curled up on a plastic mattress watching Arnold Schwartzenegger movies and reading books is how I like to picture heaven. Air-conditioning blasting my face until I've come down with a slight cold and I pull the blankets up over my face.
That's how the past two days have been and I still couldn't be happier, to be honest I feel slightly guilty that I haven't been exploring more but I think we're doing fine.
Yesterday, we realized that michelle had misplaced her debit card, a scary thing to do in Bangkok, so we ran around wildly trying to find banks and calling people but to no avail, she got it cancelled and we're still trying to figure out how to get a replacement sent to us while in India, so please pray that that will get figured out. Luckily she had some back-up cash on her for emergencies so everything is fine there. We leave Bangkok tomorrow at noon and I don't think any of us could be more excited. Not that Bangkok isn't beautiful and amazing in it's own right, but I think we're all ready to be done being tourists and to get to the point of this trip, trust me, it hasn't been lost, that is if any of us really know what it was to begin with.

How to get your watch stolen in bangkok:

Ride a tuk-tuk to the zoo.

Well you probably don't even have to do that but thats how I did it.

Yesterday was one of the best days I've ever had.  The girls and I made our way to the Dusit Zoo and pretended we were on a third grade field trip for about 6 hours.  It was wonderful.  I didn't get to ride an elephant but I did get to feed, kiss, and be hugged (and slightly violated, much to the amusement of the elephant trainers) by the massive creatures.  I'm convinced that elephants are smarter than most people.  We faced our fears and took a tuk-tuk to the zoo, the driver was pretty honest with us the entire time about our fare which was really nice.  However he did like my watch enough to ask if he could try it on (just to see if it fit, of course) then he offered to buy it from me and somehow I don't think I got reimbursed for it fully.  Oh well, I bought a new one on Khaosan road for about three bucks.  Zoos are strange places, it seems to me that I shouldn't be satisfied (And I don't think I am) with seeing a solitary animal in a cage rather than seeing how it actually interacts in it's natural environment.  I'm convinced that my interest in how people interact with each other is directly tied to my interest in animals and that when I see an animal in a cage at the zoo it's very similar to watching a person in jail, it's just not the way it's supposed to be.  We are just "smart" animals right? 

After the zoo we went out and explored the nightlife around Khaosan road.  It's entirely different than anything you can see in the States (not that much is that similar, but this is just another STRIKING difference).  At about 7 o'clock trucks pull up to every bare stretch of sidewalk and start unloading chairs, tables, coolers, blenders, and people to set up miniature bars right next to all of the street vendors that seem to be the only constant on the streets of Bangkok.  Taxis, tuk-tuks, and people from every corner of the world flood the streets and hop from bar to bar and makeshift shop to makeshift shop buying everything from knockoff designer clothes to light up alarm clocks and wind-up dancing robots.  If there ever was a place to just sit and watch people this is it.  Everyone seems to be selling something and I will admit that most of the t-shirts are very very cool and very very funny it's quite overwhelming to not be able to walk more than five feet without being stopped by a "MISTER MISTER!" or a "Come look, you like."  But maybe that's part of the appeal right?  I mean I am looking for a new experience, and this is certainly new.

Today was spent at the Grand Palace which was built in the 1700's and is home to the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, a 60cm tall statue of the Buddha carved from pure jade.  It in itself isn't the most impressive thing in the entire world, however the devotion that people have to it certainly is.  The temple is massive and the buddha sits on a shrine about 40 feet off of the ground, everything in the room is either gold or a very dark red and the walls are painted in a single magnificent painting depicting different stories from Buddhist manuscripts.  Outside of the temple itself are hundreds of huge pillars, statues, and other buildings that are simply made for decoration and presented as offerings and respects to the teachings of Buddha.  The Grand palace also holds several government buildings (I'm not sure exactly which ones but I believe parliament is somewhere in there).  Simply amazing, that's all I can really say.  After the palace we ate a late lunch at a janky little market and walked back to our neighborhood.  We found a travel agency, one of about thirty on our block, and booked our tickets to Kolkata!  It's nice to finally have the tickets in our hands after a couple of fiascos trying to get tickets previously.  We tried booking them in the airport and almost got ripped off royally, we tried booking them online and our reservations kept getting cancelled, we emailed a couple of travel agencies and never seemed to hear back.  But all of that is over with and Kolkata HERE WE COME!  It's about 10:30 on sunday the 13th as I write this, and we're going to fly out on thursday at 3:00.  I'm so excited to be done with being a tourist and get started with what I set out to do.  Serve, live, and love with people.  That's what I think this trip is going to come down to and I am extremely excited.  I'm going to stop typing now and head to bed.  Michelle's got the right idea, she was in bed about an hour and a half ago. 

Goodnight and sweet dreams Bangkok.

Namaste Friend.

oh and if you'd care to see some of my pictures so far they're on my flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27395614@N03/sets/72157622219004137/

they're not all there because uploading times have been kicking my butt but there are definitely some keepers in there.

buddha buddha buddha RAMA EVERYWHERE!

If you didn't get that joke you're either too old or you've forgotten your roots.

Yesterday was another amazing thai day.  The girls and I walked all over from ten in the morning until about 6 or 7 at night.  We saw the Reclining Buddha and visited an amazing Wat (Monastery).  We tried really hard to make it to the Grand Palace but it closed at three and we got there at 3:05.  Another day I suppose.  Overall it wasn't the most eventful day ever but i know that none of us ever took our goofy smiles off of our faces.  

My mom emailed me yesterday and something she said has been stuck in my mind since yesterday morning, "It is weird to think that you are on an opposite schedule than us.  I'm headed to bed on this Wednesday evening and you are already past lunch on Thursday.  Are you realizing how many people are on this earth that we have no idea exist?  Weird to think about that, but God knows them all and loves them all"

The question that I have is one of interconnectivity, I've never been closer (and I'm still not close at all) to realizing the actual size of the world than I am now, surrounded by 65 million people.  I only know 2 out of those 65 million and will probably only meet about a hundred of them.  Each one of these people have had a childhood, and each one of them has memories, a mother, a father, maybe a dog, maybe a home, maybe not.  Seemingly randomly we were born where we were, with the advantages and disadvantages that come with who our family is, how much money they have, what they believe in, and all the other endlessly complicated factors that play into our own individuality and who we are as people.  Every single person in this gigantic city has the same set of factors that are infinitely important and complicated to them.  How is this possible?  How have I become so ingrained with an inflated sense of self-purpose and worth that I forget that I am no different then the woman selling fruit on the streets of Bangkok or the leper in the camps of Kolkata?  Does this apply to everyone or is it just me that thinks this way?  Are we all really connected to each other or are we randomly placed where we are with our desires and passions and hopes and dreams?  My heart leans towards the former.

This isn't really the place for philosophical discussion but it's something that my mind won't let me stop thinking about.  And this is MY blog so I figure I can try and get some of the people who are reading this thinking the same things I am.  :D

Back to Bangkok:  Today the plans are to hit up the zoo and try our hardest to pet some tigers and ride some elephants.  We might try to be brave and take a tuk-tuk ride to the zoo but we're a little afraid of getting ripped off.  A tuk-tuk is a motorcycle contraption with three wheels and a three-seat bench on the back with a little covering that goes over where the passengers sit, think of it as a motorcycle taxi.  Tuk-tuk drivers are the most insanely persistent people in the entire world.  You can't walk more than 15 feet on the street without someone saying, "HELLO! Welcome to Bangkok! Where you from?  Where going?  Faster! Here tuk-tuk faster than walking.  Get in, Get in, 10 baht each! Cheapest tuk-tuk." And from everything we read if a driver tells you 10 baht each you'll either end up paying 50-100 baht each or taken on a mini tour of Bangkok, visiting every tailor shop and massage parlor in between and you're not able to leave until you buy something.  So Emily, Michelle, and I have come up with a few ways of getting them to leave us alone:

A. Act like you're not from the U.S., the little bit of french that I retained from school this year has been extremely helpful in these situations although a few of the drivers are tri-lingual and my French really isn't that good.

B. Just ignore them.  This is the least effective of our tactics because they will walk in front of you or just keep following you until you say something back then it's impossible to get out of the conversation.

C. (My personal favorite) Start screaming in jibberish until they're scared enough or say, "I don't understand?!?" Then you are automatically the least important person on the street to them because they know they aren't getting money out of you.  My favorite conversation so far was "TUK-TUK! here look here!"

"AY papi! I left my calzones in france, no pui poo paaaa! Do you have an olive and tiger sandwich?"

"Wha?" (very confused look on the driver's face)

Then we turned, laughed, and skipped away back to our hostel.

I put some pictures up on flickr, enjoy:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27395614@N03/sets/72157622219004137/

what's the capitol of thailand?

BANGKOK!

That joke will never get old. Ever.

Yesterday we landed in Bangkok, Thailand after about twenty-six hours of traveling, starting in San Francisco we had an 12 hour flight to Taipei, Taiwan then a 2 hour flight to Hong Kong, China and finally followed by a 6 hour flight to the land of a thousand Buddhas.  Our flights were fairly uneventful with the exception of transferring flights in Hong Kong where Emily became an enemy of the Chinese government by trying to smuggle in firearms and ammunition, specifically teargas (that's the royal chinese police's way of saying she forgot to take her bottle of pepper spray out of her purse, apparently it's illegal in China.)  We had a little delay as she got questioned as to the origin of her pepper spray and why she had it, in the end we got out unscathed.  

When we landed in Bangkok we wandered around the airport looking for a place to buy our tickets to Kolkata but everywhere we went we kept getting sent in a different direction so we decided that it would be cheaper, smarter, and a whole lot less stressful to just buy our tickets online, so hopefully we'll get that done later this afternoon.  We hopped on a bus from the airport to take us to Khaosan rd. the heart of Old Bangkok where the hustle and bustle of the giant city seems to reach a climax.  There are 7-11's on every street here and at least 4 or 5 youth hostels around every corner, so when we decided to rent a room it was really a bit of a shot in the dark, however we met a girl named Marsha on the bus who is from Holland and has been traveling around southeast asia and australia for the past year.  She was amazingly helpful and helped us find our home for the week, "The Happy House Guest House."  Marsha had some amazing stories that stretched as far as Delhi, India to Singapore to New Zealand and a Holland accent that would send even David Hasselhoff into catatonic shock.  

Our hostel is very nice, we have a triple room on the fifth floor which consists of three beds about six inches apart, a tv, and a bathroom where the shower head is above the toilet (Try figuring that one out!)  After we got situated last night we decided to go on a walk around our new neighborhood to try and get a little bit of a bearing on this city, we walked down two streets and realized that we were just about as lost as we could be, between every street vendor selling the same t-shirts and bracelets and every tiny street looking almost exactly the same we knew we had a little bit of an adventure in front of us.  We wandered around for a couple of hours making sure not to get too far away from Khaosan rd. and eventually got a little bit of a feeling for our new neighborhood.  We ate some great pad thai and listened to a little thai boy play covers of everything from "Hey there Delilah" to "I walk the line".  I've only been here for about 13 hours and I'm falling in love with the city, I've never seen or experienced anything like this.  While we were walking last night, everyone we stopped and talked to, even the shop owners who were trying to persuade us to buy their stuff, were the nicest people in the world who were just looking for a good conversation.  So we gave it to them. 

Namaste,

Heath

Here are some quick pictures from the last couple of weeks, there aren't any from Bangkok yet but hopefully i'll be able to put some of those up later today or tomorrow:

today's the day

We leave for bangkok tonight! ahhhhh! exciting!

Here I am,

In Pacifica California,
last night I slept on the beach,
and this morning I made twentyfive dollars and a turkey sandwich
playing music outside of the Hog's Head Delicatessen.
An idea that was brought up to me today:
"Do items themselves hold sentimental value or are they only important to us because of the value that we place on them?"
I'll stand in support of the former. I believe that an inanimate object can hold it's own value based on the experiences it has been through.
But that's just me, and really this discussion doesn't matter, what does matter are the experiences that we go through and the objects that we bring along with us.
Take this for example:
For almost a week now I've been living out of a backpack or two with very little money in my bank account and traveling down the western coast of the united states and only very very rough plans. I've kept my pockets full of shells, change, paperclips, a knife, a wallet, cellphone, and a denim pouch wrapped in suede string. I've been walking around strange cities and talking primarily to people i don't know. The moment that this trip is over i want to remember everything that has happened to me, I know that that's impossible but isn't it worth a shot?
So here's what i'm thinking:
Keep every scrap of paper, knick-knack, paperclip, plastic hair tie, bracelet, or bookmark that I stumble upon or pick up out of the indian dirt. And maybe that will help me remember the things i've already started to forget.