Here in Kolkata, it is 9:40pm...HOT and HUMID. A group of ten or so of us have just returned from an unguided walking tour of the Pandals in the neighborhood where we are staying.

These Pandals are temporary temples erected for the occasion of the Durga Puja religious festival being celebrated this week. The streets are packed with hundreds of people dressed in their holiday best because it is the custom to wear new clothes for Durga Puja. One of the Pandals is erected directly in front of the Asha Niketan L'Arche Community...the loud music, the bright blinking lights (just like Christmas) and the crowds would certainly make it hard for anyone to get to sleep!

Early this morning a number of us attending the Federation meeting walked down those same streets to attend morning prayer with the members of Asha Niketan. It was really a quite a moving experience to share this time together. Prayer in the community is inspired by all the major religions of the world so it is a very different experience than the Christian worship that we share back in Ottawa. As we walked to the community through the narrow winding streets just before 7am we encountered tons of people beginning their day. Washing up at the communal water tap, brushing teeth, some women washing clothes, a cow, a couple of goats, a cage full of chickens, many tiny shops—some only a few square meters—being opened for business... the sounds, the smells and the heat, and constantly stepping out of the way of the cabs, buses and auto-rickshaws; these are the experiences of walking around the neighborhood in which we are living this week.

This experience is certainly confirming for me the wisdom of the decision to hold Federation 2008 in Kolkata. Those of us who are privileged to be here are experiencing in a very sensual and direct way an important reality of L'Arche—the richness and the poverty that together are so pervasive in this environment. As we have been reminded frequently, India was one of the first countries where L'Arche took root. Now, some forty years later, we are able to sense how the complex reality of India might be shaping the ways in which L'Arche will live the Identity and Mission that is being voted upon during the 2008 meeting.

John Rietschlin
L'Arche Ottawa

Watch the following videoclup and listen to Vinod of Asha Niketan Kolkata speak about the purja.