Team Destiny
Today marks two weeks from the day we landed in Kolkata. The moment of walking out of the airport of carrying my giants bags, towering so high I couldn’t see where I was going, one on the front of me and one of the back while one dangled in my hand, will forever be etched in mind. The heat and humidity took away my breath as the taxi drivers yelled at me, only giving us just a taste of the chaotic nature of this city.
After settling in a bit, I started to question why I came here and how much I am actually doing for Destiny. Ali and I became accustomed to our routine of waking up early, doing some yoga in the morning heat, sitting and reading on our balcony, and then not knowing what to eat for breakfast because we didn’t have a fridge to store food. Quickly, peanut butter and crackers became our saviours. Soon enough, we realized the black water coming out of our shower, the cockroaches making themselves at home in our flat, the continuously lost and long ubers we took each day, and the isolated nature of our living situation wouldn’t be our best option. We gleefully ran from Santoshpur and moved into our new flat with our fellow Santa Clara global fellows living above us. We look forward to the end of the day of sitting on our building’s roof, sharing about the good moments and the hard moments of our days while watching the polluted sky turn into a mixture of flawless colors. The sounds from our roof, the call to prayer at 6:31 each day, the spatula of the man cooking on the street next to us, the constant honks and yelling of Bengali from the angry drivers, and then the booms of fireworks for unknown reasons to us, have all created a sense of comfort and peace in my heart as I have accepted that this is my home now.
Now that we settled into the city and our flat, as the novelty of the men selling bloody fish on the street, the women doing laundry and bathing from the wells on the street, and the ridiculously foreign food we are given each day have grown normal, I have tried to take a greater time figuring out what my role at Destiny is. The other day, Ali and I went to Destiny’s Community Center in the Red Light District and turned a tough week into a reminder of how eager, welcoming, intelligent, and inclusive these women are. I returned to the office with a renewed sense of excitement for these girls, and asked my boss, Smarita, about someone in particular. She told me this woman was sold over 20 years ago, when she was just 14 years old, and taken from Nepal to Kolkata. This woman told Smarita once that she felt no more than an item in a store, like a lipstick being sold from person to person. When Destiny met her, she did not have any skills and did not have an escape from the trade. Now, she is the best student in our English class, already knowing how to speak Nepali, Bengali, and Hindi. Although, Destiny cannot fix the big problem of sex trafficking and cannot save every woman, they give these women a chance to feel empowered and worthy of more than an item, providing opportunity to realize their dignified potential and opportunity.
The other day, a group from SalesForce and Google came to Destiny to learn about our work, our mission, and our business model. They kept questioning about the success rate of the company. As Ali and I sat this with our lips sealed in fear of saying something wrong or stepping on anyone’s toes, I witnessed the clash of my worlds with the business minds of the Silicon Valley sitting in the same room as my new world and role models from Kolkata. Their lack of understanding that success rate is a poor representation of what Destiny is doing just showed to me that to understand a company like this, you need to struggle with and try to understand the culture first. Ali and I always joke that ‘everything is hard in India’. Just going to the market or bank is a long task, not anything similar to the simple walk down Bellomy to Safeway in Santa Clara. Getting someone to respond to an email, having working or fast internet, even finding buyers to support a cause like this, or even solving the global problem of human trafficking is truly another story, and a story that the minds of Silicon Valley had trouble understanding. At the end of our last meeting with them, their team looked at Ali and I and pointed out how quiet we had been, asking what our thoughts were. This is when we both knew what to say. To stand up as Team Destiny. As frustrating as it is to come from the fast paced work environment of home to the painfully slow and inefficient country like India, everyday we look at their data and their work over the few years and realize more and more how much Destiny has done for these women and the world of anti-trafficking in Kolkata. I told the team about the woman in my English class from Nepal and how while some of the women at the community center will never leave the trade, Destiny gives them an opportunity to feel dignified and human. Step by step possibly influencing the children of these women to not enter the trade or to inspire them enough that they now have skills to find another job. While India is frankly a hard place to be, each day I feel lucky to be Team Destiny.
