Mumbai, India June 2009

Part 2
by Emily Sernaker

This weekend I had the opportunity to visit all of the programs I will be evaluating for Wellspring International in the coming weeks. Medical clinics in the red light district, children’s homes and rehabilitation centers both in the district and an hour outside it, vocational training centers, and a home for children with HIV/AIDS were among the places I visited. In 48 hours I drank a lot of tea, listened to a lot of stories, and shook what must have been over 300 hands.

One of our early stops, a girls’ center outside of Mumbai, had teenage girls that were especially happy to see me. They asked me a couple of questions about home and suddenly started looking at me differently. There appeared to be a situation. Apparently, the girls believed me to be an Emily from America that had stayed with them a few years back.

“But, she was thin,” they explained, “and you are fat….so we figured that she had just gotten fat.” They paused. “But it turns out that you are not the same person.” Before my trip I had been going to the gym several times a week but apparently India didn’t notice.

In addition to being introduced to the programs outside of the city, the rain brought some other fun creatures that insisted on meeting me. Although I was startled to see that ants here are the size of my thumb, I quickly learned to put things in perspective. Now, I am glad to see the flies because a fly is not a mosquito. A cricket is not a cockroach, a lizard is not a scorpion, and thank God the walls on the bathroom are white so at least I can assess my company before I shower and decide on which bug is my biggest adversary.

Perspective doesn’t just come from the insects though - I have never felt so glad to see toilet paper or to drink cold water or to even just feel a breeze. It is an intense experience to be learning so much every day. It starts off simple, like trying to learn how to position my thumb to eat goewy rice with my hands. But that learning to eat the rice is nothing compared to trying to comprehend the stories I hear while I am eating.

Before coming here, I thought I had a basic understanding of the problems I would encounter. I memorized the statistics before my trip - ‘70,000 women in prostitution in the red light district of Mumbai, over 80% have AIDS…’ My second day here I met a woman. She had been sold into prostitution, locked in a room for 8 years and raped repeatedly. If she put up a fight she would be violently beaten. The only reason she had escaped was that one day, the madam of the brothel forgot to lock the door to her room.

To learn that the majority of the girls in the red light district are victims of human trafficking, to see the bars on the windows and actually imagine being trapped is sickening. During my tour of the district I was allowed to see one of the rooms the girls were forced to use at night. There were three mattresses with sheets hanging between each one. “Six customers at a time,” the madam explained to me. Over the beds were pictures of Jesus and signs that said “God is with you.” To know that the girls see those signs every night before, or as, they are forced to lie with their customers. I will never forget that image for as long as I live.

These last few days I have been staying in a women’s rehabilitation center outside of the city. All of the women have been victims of human trafficking, prostitution, or AIDS - usually all three. This morning, while I was talking with some of the women, a girl my age picked a white flower from a nearby tree. She came up to me and focused so intently on putting it in my hair just right. Her eyes narrowed, forehead scrunched, fingers worked intently. I thought about how hard she was trying to be in that moment and tried my best to be in it with her.