Kolkata
Author:
Cliona Hartigan
I have been asked on numerous occasions why I chose to work abroad with GOAL so soon after qualifying. After all, it is not exactly the traditional route taken by newly qualified accountants.
While working on the GOAL audit during my training with Andersens I met a girl, also a Chartered Accountant, who had just come back from a year in Angola. She highly recommended the experience to me and advised me to take the opportunity when I qualified. Following an interview with GOAL I was put on a panel and India was the first vacancy that arose.
I felt privileged to go to India as it was there that, twenty seven years ago John O'Shea the Chief Executive of GOAL started his vision of how he could help the poor. I was also there when he returned to attend an Annual Children's Programme Theatre Celebration in October.
Three thousand underprivileged children, including children of sex workers and homeless children, were captivated as John O' Shea, microphone in hand, told them how much love was around them. Responding to a tap on my shoulder I turned to find two brown eyed little boys smiling at me.
"Madam?" they said, signalling to the water bottle under my chair.
I passed my small bottle to them and they drank the Indian way their lips never touching the bottle. The bottle was returned where I had taken it from with two mouthfuls missing and no more.
I returned to the passionate antics of John O'Shea just as he was saying: "The International Community does not care one iota whether people in the Third World live or die, they never have and unless we can find a new Mandela they never will."
Too busy to die
"When I first went to Kolkata in 1977 all the great Loreto nuns here looked about 110. They said to me that they didn't have time to die because they were so busy. Similarly with guys like me there are a million things to be done. It is a desperately unequal world and it is getting worse by the second”, John O’Shea told us.
Unlike other countries GOAL cannot directly implement projects in India as a result of local government regulations. For this reason the projects in India are implemented through local partner NGOs and much of the work of the GOAL India staff involves monitoring of the local NGO programmes. GOAL India has approximately thirty local partner NGOs, resulting in a wide variety of projects, including education, mental and physical health, sanitation and disaster relief programmes.
During the course of my twenty months in India GOAL responded to disasters such as drought and floods.
I got immense personal satisfaction from this type of work and I had plenty of opportunities to visit our projects. This gave me the chance to experience what the work is really about and see the people we're helping, rather than sitting at my desk all the time.
However, the accounting work must also be taken care of and this involves preparing monthly accounts packs that are submitted to GOAL Headquarters in Dublin. This pack includes management accounts, a donor status report and expatriate costing analysis. The day-to-day job of the Financial Controller also includes preparing budgets for submission to donors, preparation of annual field budget, reviewing and auditing partner NGOs and monitoring and ensuring that project and administrative expenditures are in line with budget.
For me the most interesting part of the job is that situations change daily. I believe that this experience will be extremely beneficial to me in future jobs, as I have learnt to cope with situations as they arise and to expect the unexpected. I also believe that if a person can deal with the type of life that I have seen in Kolkata then you can manage anywhere.
It's very difficult to describe Kolkata to someone who has never experienced it. Broken foot paths with street children lying around wearing torn, ill fitting clothes. People wash, urinate and eat in full view of each other on the streets that have become their homes. Faces begging for money, old people lying on the hard ground with nothing to eat and little children trying every technique to wean 10 Rupees, just 20 cent, out of your wallet. At home people would hardly bother to bend down to pick up 20 cent but in Kolkata they most certainly would.
Learning to live simply
I don't think it is really possible to get used to the poverty and death around you in Kolkata. Child trafficking and prostitution, starvation and despair and the feeling that no matter how much work you do it will never be enough. I was not prepared for the real life faces of the little children that suffer every day of their lives because of it.
You learn to live simply in Kolkata. When you are surrounded by people who have nothing, you long for nothing. As John O' Shea said that day,
" We have no choice. We can either stay on the Titanic or get as many people as possible into the lifeboats. It is not about us, it is about the service we can provide."
One incident that I remember clearly happened in a tribal Indian village called Mundapara where I went with some colleagues to see a government run primary school that one of our local partners wanted to use as a centre to help local children of illiterate parents with their homework in the evenings.
The school had the look of a run down outhouse and Purabi Roy, the local woman who runs the project told me that they had to run the coaching centre in the early morning because the school has no electricity. I couldn't help but feel sick - the floodlit Kolkata Leather Complex, with enough energy to illuminate Galway City, was situated five minutes across the field.
Kolkata is a city of extremes and alongside the abject poverty there is enormous wealth. This is seen in exclusive clubs dating from the British "Raj which form the social scene for the upper class and diplomats of Kolkata. There are also a large number of expensive restaurants, hotels, shops and bars that cater for the needs of the wealthy minority.
In terms of my expectations my time in Kolkata has been much more than I could have ever expected. I met some fantastic people, did a job that I loved and got to experience places that I had never imagined. I highly recommend this experience to everyone.
As for my future I hope to return to development work but for the moment I will look for another type of experience somewhere else in the world. I hope it will be as challenging as Kolkata.
Accountancy Ireland Vol 36 No 1 February 2004
Recent Comments:
At
9/27/2007 5:11:56 AM
chiru
said:
Really liked your writing.Any chance of revisiting??I wonder...hugs from Calcutta