August 31st, 2008 Jo
My niece, Erin Lea, lives in new Orleans with her husband Derek. Three years ago, Hurricane Katrina forced them out of their homes and tonight, it looks as if Hurricane Gustave is going to put them through it again. She’s smiling in the picture, but though she is a cheerful, optimistic person, I doubt she’s got much to smile about today.
Even if their own home and business is spared (as happened with Katrina) so many of their friends and neighbors lost, and will lose, everything.
Here in India, the Kosi River in Bihar is also flooding and the situation is grim for thousands of people whose lives were already precarious in the extreme. Ravi has worked very hard for many years with his good friend D K Misra, India’s leading expert on floods, particularly in Bihar. Mishraji’s book, “Trapped! Between the Devil and Deep Waters” (translated and edited by Ravi, you can order it from PSI) will be released this Sunday in Delhi. The book explains in great detail how droughts and floods are inextricably linked and how badly human beings mis-manage nature.
While Erin Lea and Derek have much to lose and little support from the US government, I think they would be among the first to admit that their situation is as nothing compared to what the residents of the villagers from the banks of the Kosi face. Starvation, disease and drowning are only three of the calamities the people of Bihar confront.With food and medicines being dropped from helicopters sporadically, one can only imagine the specific needs of a person like Moy Moy, who requires anticonvulsants and formula G-tube feeds three times a day.
As Moy Moy’s mother, it is a situation I often reflect upon, and, to date, I have no answers. I place Erin Lea, Derek, the people of Bihar and our own Moy Moy in your thoughts and prayers tonight. May the good Lord save us all.
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August 31st, 2008 Jo
The last time Dad was in India was 1990. Moy Moy was eight months old at the time, Anand had just started school and Cathleen was only four. Dad was on a Fulbright fellowship and he was mostly touring in the South with his group. He came and stayed with us for two weeks at the tail end of the program and made friends with people herein Dehradun who still remember him today, 18 years later.
Lucy came only once, in 92 (I think!). Ever since, she has been longing to return. I still cannot believe she has pulled this off.She says she just “put it out to the universe” and somehow it all came together. Cut from the same cloth, we are.
I go to Delhi tomorrow to receive them at the airport. All month I have been getting the house ready for their arrival (actually, Dad will stay with us; Lucy and the boys in the guest house a three minute walk away). Cathleen and I designed the sleeping space above for Dad. Poor Ravi lost his study in the process, but all in a good cause!
Later: pictures of Lucy’s little nest.
Posted in Dad, Family | 3 Comments »
August 31st, 2008 Jo
It’s so easy to like this boy. I know I shouldn’t say it, being the Mom, but Anand is so charming and funny and smart it is impossible not to fall for him. He always makes me proud. He can handle any situation with grace and aplomb and he has a gift for making other people feel easy and included. I love watching him in a group - any group. He can mingle with elderly relatives, neighbors from Vasant Vihar, little kids from Latika, university professors and political activists from both sides of the fence - all with the same wit and intelligence and genuine interest in who they are. He wants to hear their stories and understand what makes them tick.
At Mom’s funeral, Anand read the Prayer of the Faithful. As I listened to him speak about his grandmother, I realized just how lucky Ravi and I are to have such a son: in India, our children are our Social Security System. We’ve got a ways to go before we retire, but watching him there on the altar that day, I knew he’d be ready when we do.
Posted in Growing Up | 1 Comment »
August 29th, 2008 Jo
Yesterday, Nileshwari and I went to see Jyotsna Brar. She is the Principal of Welham Girls, a member of the Latika Roy Foundation General Body, a long-time supporter of our work and - most important, a good friend.
Meeting her is always a pleasure as I find in her a kindred spirit - a woman who is passionate about education and sees in young people all the promise of dreams and energy and creativity. She was a few minutes late for our meeting because she had been waylaid on the stairs by two girls who were desperate to discuss an idea they had for setting up a version of the United Nations at Welham . . . she couldn’t resist the chance to respond to their excitement.
Lucky for us, she responded to our excitement too. We had gone to talk about ways to involve Welham Girls in our work in a more concerted way and we left with a commitment to do a career workshop in the next few weeks, a promise of volunteers for our afternoon therapy sessions at the EIC and the possibility of having a table at the Welham Founders’ Day exhibition.
It’s just the kind of decisive action we have learned to expect from the very dynamic woman.
Posted in Inspiration | 1 Comment »
August 26th, 2008 Jo
Here they are. These are the people who are going to change the world for young adults with mental handicap. Mothers all, these are women who know that the future of their children depends upon them. No one else.
Now that Moy Moy is in the CVT, I will be attending monthly parents’ meetings along with the parents of the 26 other young adults who attend the centre every day. At Friday’s meeting, I was the only new parent to turn up. Of the parents of the old students, about a dozen had come.
It’s an interesting quandry. Everyone talked about the problems they had in attending, about the difficulties of getting away from work or home or the demands of family life and no one doubted anyone else’s story for a moment. They are genuine concerns, real limitations, absolutely insurmountable difficulties.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter. The universe (the same one that sent Shruti just the day I called for her - see below) doesn’t care about our difficulties or problems or inability to find the time. Our children will still keep growing, still keep moving along that forward curve into the future and like it or not, one day, very very soon, we are going to turn around and see that they are adults. They are not sitting around, waiting for us to get it together Where are their jobs? Where is the day centre where they can go to meet their friends and have some meaningful activities in their day?
After a lifetime of education - 12 or 15 years in school, skills acquired, routines established - are we really ready to ask them to sit at home now and rot?
Come on, parents! It’s up to us. We can do it!
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August 26th, 2008 Jo
I’ve been looking for this girl. And I’ve been looking hard. Shruti is a speech therapist who worked with us for several years before going off to London to do a Master’s Degree in Pediatric Speech Therapy. The idea was that she would return and work with us after finishing her degree and earning enough to pay for it. And you know how hard it is to find speech therapists!
The last time I saw her was in September of 2007, when she dropped in to say hello while in town to visit her parents. After that I lost her! I let her slip away!
Every now and then I would send her an email, but I never got a response. Three days ago, I tried again, but, as usual, there was silence.
Then this morning, I woke up with a backbone made of steel. Determination was my middle name. I sent an email to four colleagues, asking if any of them had a contact for her and I sent my prayers to the universe: Find Shrutigya.
My email went out at 9:30. At 11, Shruti walked in to my office.
Turns out her email address has changed. She’s ready to come back and work. She’s ready to start in a month. One small problem. Her parents want her to get married.
So it’s back to the universe: Find this good woman a good man.
After coming through with a SPEECH THERAPIST, the universe replies: “Piece of Cake.”
Posted in Bright Ideas | 1 Comment »
August 20th, 2008 Jo
August 15th at Karuna Vihar is always a festival of color and a celebration of ability and self-reliance. I love seeing the children perform - each year the older ones get a little more sophisticated and the little ones a bit older and more confident.
It’s a benchmark ceremonial day - we measure our progress and theirs as we raise the flag and count our blessings. For me, it’s also a photographic challenge: Edmund set the bar two years ago when he took an amazing series of pictures at our Independence Day event, many of which made it into the 2007 calendar and I now feel I have to at least try to match his work.
Last year I was happy with my results (some made it into calendar 2008) , but this year - well, not so much. We moved into a new building just a few days ago and the verandah isn’t big enough for the kids to perform on. They had to do their acts on the lawn, in full morning sun, and the shadows were brutal, and, and, and . . . excuses! I know.
But I like this one of Sakshi and Sana. And by next year, maybe, Insha’Allah, we’ll be in our own building and I will be a more talented, versatile photographer!
Posted in Fun! | 2 Comments »
August 17th, 2008 Jo
St John Chrysostom said “Those whom we love and lose are no longer where they were. They are now wherever we are.”
I love these words. I love them especially because, living in India, I have felt so far away from my mother for many, many years. I would have loved to have lived closer to her, and to have had my children know her better. Now that she has left her physical body, I feel closer to her than I have since I was a child, living at home, constantly in her orbit. Because even then, in the same house, even then, as a young child, I sensed that there was a fundamental danger in loving anyone. It is the danger at the heart of any human relationship - the danger of loss, of parting, of death.
And today, as I sit in Delhi keeping Cathleen’s plane in the air (did you know that’s how planes fly? Some mother somewhere in the world is always keeping them aloft - it’s a responsibility we all accept with the birth certificate), I reflect on the way she is repeating my history, as I repeated my mother’s: leaving home, leaving parents, forging far out into the world to make her own destiny, as I did mine, and as Mom did hers. It’s a loss, and yet not a diminishment. Her going enlarges our world because of all she comes back with, all she sends our way, all that she adds to our lives through her work and her thoughts and her friendships and her discoveries.
It’s a practice run for life. We have to learn to let go in these smaller partings to prepare us for the larger, more final ones.
But death, in spite of its finality and implacable reality, turns out to be so overwhelming that we realize, against all reason, that it cannot be final, it cannot be the end. And so I hold close to St John’s words for their truth, for the expression they give of what I have felt in my heart since Mom’s death. She is with me now as she has never been before.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Mary Oliver
Posted in Serious Stuff | 1 Comment »
August 17th, 2008 Jo
Now that Moy Moy is in “college” (the CVT), she needs to decide on her major, as well as her research topic.
Cathleen is halfway through her college career, so she’s in a good position to help her make up her mind. After some discussion with her sister, Moy has decided that her major will be Serenity and her research topic will be: “The Effects of Sleep on Happiness”.
She spends several hours after school each day doing “head down” research and hopes to have a definitive answer very soon.
Posted in Fun!, Growing Up | 2 Comments »
August 15th, 2008 Jo
I wish everyone could have a daughter like our Cathleen. This summer, she came home for three months and we were all so excited about the prospect of so much time with her.
One of her main reasons for coming was that she wanted to spend time with Moy Moy. After her illness in January, Cathleen had been feeling anxious about her little sister - when she got an opportunity for a fellowship to come here and teach Theology in our parish, she grabbed it, mostly as an excuse to be with Moy.
But beware what you wish for.
She had been here only a few weeks when I got the news that Mom was dying. I rushed off to the US, and Cathleen took over the house. A few days later, Moy’s babysitter stopped coming - HER mother was also very sick, and she needed to nurse her. So Cathleen swung into her new 24-hour-a-day job without missing a beat.
Normally when I go away, Moy Moy mopes a bit. She often develops mysterious small illnesses and generally keeps everyone alert and on their toes. This time, she basked in the lavish care Cathleen didi bestowed. When I got back, she was glowing.
Now, tomorrow, Cathleen is leaving. Oh, the dreadful rituals of departure! She has been packing for the last two days. The sight of the large suitcases on the living room floor is a constant reminder. Mummy and Masiji keep averting their eyes, as if pretending it isn’t happening will change the inevitable.
She has been wearing my clothes since hers are all packed now (I like that); and suddenly, she has remembered a dozen things she needs to do. Yesterday, she got her eyes examined and bought new contact lenses, shopped for last minute gifts, and picked up all the new sari blouses she has had stitched. Today, her last in Dehradun, she went to visit the nuns from her old school, tried to visit her friend Prashant Uncle (he was in Delhi), got her eyebrows done, crazy-glued the earrings she has been meaning to repair for weeks, printed out two long homework assignments, burned a few CDs for a friend, and still managed to make me my cup of tea in the morning, attend our Independence Day celebrations at Karuna Vihar and spend hours with Mummy and Masiji and Moy Moy.
The house comes to life when she is here. She brings order and joy wherever she goes. Everyone should have a daughter like this one.
Posted in Growing Up, Inspiration | 3 Comments »