Framing

Kolkata, India and San Francisco/Oakland/Berkeley, USA

This blog was intended to be a holding place for a collection of writings about two years spent living and working in Hyderabad and Kolkata (and Delhi and…), India. It skips over most of the daily details, although some overview of those can be found in these types of posts – the pieces I posted here allowed me to hang some glittering words around an assortment of experiences that stretched my mind in every possible direction. As I tried to sum up my ‘learnings’ for a closing presentation to a community that raised me, these are the bullet points I came up with (and the details? those are in the blog posts):

• The mutability of language and the vagaries of communication
• Patience: total capacity vs. current reserve
• Resources and the impact of American consumption
• Comfort as a choice
• Experiencing otherness

Both years were spent with the same NGO, and with support from AJWS, but everything from the type of work to the type of office, from my room-mates to my dance classes, from the cuisine to the root of the language was radically different, in wonderful ways. I don’t have a review article for the whole experience, but below is a volunteer report, a short piece I was asked to write up by the office I worked with in Kolkata. Considering that I left from Kolkata, I think it’s an appropriate place to leave this archive – for now.

Volunteer Report for Sep 2008 – May 2009

I first met members of the NGO’s Kolkata office at the all-office Program Management Retreat, which was held at a small beach-side resort south of Chennai, Tamil Nadu in December 2007 – and I felt an instant companionship. There was something excitable, something subtly deviant, about the group that caught my attention, and from the World AIDS Day shirt to the gender-bending I knew that these were people I should get to know. As we discussed the inter-related but often competitive strategies of empowering women versus breaking down the idea of gender entirely in between sessions on grant writing and program management, my first impressions were confirmed: the Kolkata office had a lot to teach me.

Effective social change work requires a dynamic and inclusive ideas of community, and that is exactly what I found when I arrived in Kolkata, a city dedicated to the goddess in all her forms, and exported as the poverty-ridden once-shining center of the painstakingly dismantled British Raj. I came looking for intellectuals, artists, communists, queers – and found all that and more, in abundance (if there is anything that India does not lack, it is abundance). As I started moving around Kolkata, meeting different circles of people, both through work and through friends, I was amazed at the strength of the influence that the office, and especially it’s director, have had on the queer and AIDS activist communities – everyone linked in to those circles knew of the director and the office’s work, and felt that it had been influential in encouraging them to pursue their interests and to seek answers to difficult questions.

My main work in the Kolkata office was technically based outside of it – helping to organize and expand the NGO’s national and regional advocacy work with a focus on women’s empowerment and access to resources – but this work fused naturally with learning about and assisting with the office’s emerging advocacy projects, as well as the community events and resources that it has become known for in Kolkata, from the Pride march to the film festival to the resource library. I got to know other projects within the office as I helped individuals with project planning and document preparation, and was lucky enough to visit a major partner in Orissa while assisting them with grant writing. Although I traveled frequently, especially during the second half of the year, Kolkata remained my home.

One of the highlights of my year was the Jewish festival of lights, Chanukah; with another volunteer, I was able to host a gathering for the office in my home, and after many months of learning about Bengali culture, food, and traditions, had the opportunity to share some of the traditions that I had grown up with (not to mention fried potatoes, which seem to be a fairly universal dish). From sharing lunches to late-night abstract editing to celebrating holidays, marches, and successful events together, my time in the Kolkata office was both a precious opportunity to learn and to give, and great reminder of the power of community in the face of adversity.