Ok so I didn't manage to post a last blog from India and this one comes to you from my living room at Davey drive back in Brighton. The Crow has landed.
The last few days away were a mixture of just spending time with my mum and dad, thinking about coming home, waiting to meet Hannah again, trying to reflect on my time away. It suddenly all went pretty fast and sitting here now I have all sorts of other thoughts about the days and weeks ahead jostling for space in my brain.
Returning to Kolkata after having been in Cambodia for 3 weeks just made me have even more respect for my parents living there, doing what they are doing. It really isn't an easy place to live. The noise, busyness and pollution really do assault you and even though as a city it has a really good feel and is friendlier than some of the others we visited in India, I just know if I had to choose a place from my travels to live it probably wouldn't be there. On Saturday evening there was a CNN documentary report on the sex trade operating through Kolkata- with a particular focus on trafficking of under age girls. It was a very confrontational piece of investigative journalism exposing the hypocrisy of the sex workers trade union, who are adamant there are no under age girls in Kolkatas red light districts, through to the corruption of the police force who are ineffectual and underhand. It confirmed or alluded to much that mum and dad and their colleagues face on a daily basis. The most shocking thing that they have discovered recently is that under age girls who are 'rescued' by the police or other agencies are then put under the care of the government in government houses. In reality once in these houses the girls then become the sex slaves of the police and other officials, suffering greater abuses without the care of a madam, or the financial benefits which they could expect working in the red light districts. It is an ongoing challenge for my parents project and other NGOs to find ways to educate or make people aware of the injustices and abuses that women are suffering in this industry, particularly when the common mindset is that most of them have brought it on themselves in some way or are choosing to live like that.
I am certainly very grateful that I have had the opportunity to visit my parents over in India, to see first hand what it is they are doing. However many photos you see or descriptions you are given it is often hard to empathise or appreciate exactly what it is someone is trying to tell you until you have seen it for yourself. Now when they email or phone I will have a much greater sense of what they are talking about and the difficulties they often endure.
I have felt like from time to time during writing this blog I may have jumped up on my soap-box and had a bit of a rant- I hope it hasn't come across like that, more that it has just expressed some of the tensions of travelling. At the end of the trip reflecting on it all there is a funny tension. Just packing up a bag and heading off for 10 weeks to see a bit of the world is an enormous luxury in many ways. The number of conversations that I had, helplessly trying to explain to someone how or why it is that I have enough money to do this, even though I'd been saving for years, illustrates the crazy inequalities of our world. But I did love being able to do it- To see all those new things to experience so much beauty, to spend time with people that I love, to know that all of that will be stored up and will inspire me, and will no doubt change me in some small ways that I may not even notice. I guess it's a tension that I've been happy to live with. I'm glad that I've been able to pull a few of you along on the ride with me, and that it has brought some virtual sunshine to the grey days of winter.
So it is that I'm back here and my journey from Heathrow back to Brighton welcomed me home with the very best sort of winter weather; driving rain clouds with blue breaking through. The beautiful shapes of bare winter Oak and Beech trees against a shining sky, the back drop of the Sussex countryside, the Downs looming on the horizon, even a rainbow.........
Ok ok I know I've been away and you're all fed up of the miserable weather, but when you've not had it, and it's so familiar, and you've got used to seeing the beauty in things well I just know I had the biggest grin on my face all the way home.
