All I want is to be dry!!

I didn't sleep at all last night! AC is broken so now its hotter inside our rooms than outside! Plus the fans don't work very well cause our power goes out every 15 minutes! I'm also running out of peanut butter...MAJOR PROBLEM!! And to top it off, because the power is so terrible, the fridge cant get cold, so warm drinks it is! I am so hot and sticky, I can't even remember the last time my body was dry. I took a bucket shower last night before I went to bed, or rather before I tossed and turned for 8 hours, but as soon as I stepped outside, I was instantly a sweaty beast again! Soooo annoying!! Good thing today is our last day of work for the week! Three day weekend in Dehli couldn't come faster!!

Cobra on the Loose

Medical team yesterday!! Construction today!! Woo hoo!! I love working in the colonies!

I did blood pressures and blood sugars with Ally and Steven!

One of the ladies didn't like the feeling of the blood pressure cuff blowing up and squeezing her arm. She started to panic, and I couldn't communicate with her or say anything to her to calm her down (it's not like I speak tamil here people!) but I reached out and held her hand during it and she seemed to be fine after that!


I met a cute family in the colony who invited me into their house and showed me around! The older women took me to her room and showed me a picture of what I think was her son (again, I don't speak tamil so we struggled with the whole communication thing) but then she pointed to heaven and began to cry. I realized that, whoever the man in the picture may be, he was definitely one of her close family members who had passed away, and she missed him and loved him very much! We just stood their in the doorway of her room, hugging each other as she weeped. It was a very touching experience for me...


After we visited the colony and provided some medical assistance, Dr. Susan was given a tip off about another leprosy colony nearby that was in need of help. Once she heard that, there was no turning back! She was determined to find it! The two RSO 12-passenger vans began their off-roading adventure to find the lost lepers! About an hour and a car sick stomach later, we stumbled upon a very small colony! Everyone came out of their houses as the colony's leader and Dr. Susan were talking. Apparently they want us to come back when we have more supplies and help them out...there's some more politics to it, but that was the jist of the conversation! It was a very happy time for everyone!

Today after we finished our work at construction, we were invited to come see an snake charmer milk a cobra!! OH MY GOSH!!! Scariest thing of my life!! I had never been that close to a poisonous snake before. I posted some videos below so you can see what happened! But what I missed on video was the fact that after all was said and done, the snake charmer put the cobra back in the bag and it escaped! All of the women freaked out! I made a run for it! When the natives start screaming, that's when you should be worried!




All and all, it was a very fun and exciting past two days! Oh one more thing: I tried dying a streak in my hair with henna...don't recommend it! It didn't turn out as expected...just made my hair super red-orange! But it was fun!

Swimming in the Bay of Bengal

Mamallapuram=

• quaint beach town near Chennai
• crazy traffic (I seriously almost got hit by a bus)
• a little smelly
• Awesome shopping...I got a custom made chudidar and salwar for 1400 rupees (about 30 U.S. dollars)
• Good food (a.k.a. pizza and popsicles which I have been craving like nobody's business)
• Krishna's Butterball- a stone that is so heavy, elephants can't even move it
  

• Temple ruins and stone carvings

I did some meditating while I was there! Don't forget to take off your shoes before you enter the temple!!

• Beach...PLAY TIME!!

On the way home from Mamallapuram, we got purotas (spelling??) which are like croissant/naan hybrids!! They are soooo yummy!!

Today we went to church about 2 hours away in Chennai!! I got to wear my new outfit I purchased yesterday so that was pretty fun!! All of the women looked so beautiful in their sarees (I wish I knew how to tie one).



We had a ton of fun this weekend but tomorrow it's back to work!! I'm excited!! I love India!!!

Heyyyy Macarena!!!

Wow!! I finally got to work on the medical team and it was absolutely amazing!!! I don't even know how to express in words the impact it had on me. To be able to see and clean the wounds of the leprosy-affected people was amazing!! We went to a very small colony called Moot. Here, one of the ladies, Saroja, had one leg amputated at the knee, the other leg amputated at the mid-thigh, one eye, and two little nubs for hands! I believe she had contracted leprosy at the age of 14, so she basically has lived almost her entire life in the colony. The colony is literally out in the middle of no where, there is about 10 of them which is extremely small, and there only main source of food staple is a huge bag of rice which they get every couple of weeks.
Although their living circumstances are rough, they are the happiest people I have met. You can just see it in their eyes and face! You should have seen how happy they were when we arrived! They all came running out of their homes to say hi, and this one older man, Jaya Raj, started laughing and dancing and shouting things in Tamil! He reminded me of Rafiki from Lion King. He was so cute! Then all of a sudden he started doing the macarena!! No joke!! There we were, out in the middle of rural India, dancing the macarena with people we could barely communicate with. Yet, that was the happiest I had been all week! It didn't matter that we were speaking two different languages or that we came from two completely different ways of living, we found common ground in a simple dance!

Jaya Raj's wife, Jaya Mary, came to me at the very end of our visit and asked me to clip her toenails for her. I know this may sound like an easy task, but let me tell you, it wasn't!! Her toenails and toe had so much dirt caked on them and were so thick that it was near impossible for me to cut them. I couldn't tell where her nail ended and her toe began! I was so nervous I was going to cut her skin instead of her nail and I was sweating, and shaking, but she was so kind! After I cut (well more like filed) each one, I looked up at her and she shouted, "Super!!" It made me laugh! What a wonderfully sweet women! I think both her and her husband kept that colony laughing!!

As we drove away from Moot, each one of the colony members stood and waved goodbye! They gave us bananas as a token of their gratitude, we thanked them, and then we were off! It was so precious to see them wave and wave and wave until we were out of sight!

I've been thinking about their small colony all day today! They are seriously the hardest working people I have every met! Everyone in India seems to know how to work hard, even the kids!

We took a walk this morning through Thottanaval village (the village right outside RSO campus) and to see each of the families carrying water from the pump to their homes, hanging laundry, milking the cow, cooking breakfast over an open fire, it made me realize that the people of India are an incredible people! They are hard-workers (I mean most of the time I see women and children doing the manual labor...that tells you a ton right there), they live in very simple and humble homes, they have a beautiful and rich culture full of many traditions, and they are seriously one of the happiest people I know!!

Below are pictures I took of some people in the village! I kind of had an obsession with the women carrying pots of water on their head! But my favorite was of this little boy wearing nothing but a cloth diaper helping get water at the pump....absolutely adorable! Can I have him??

Brick by Brick

Yesterday we went out into the colonies and moved bricks!! It was hard manual labor! I was dripping with sweat, covered in dirt, and my muscles had never ached so much in my life! But it was seriously the sweetest experience of my life. The last house we brought bricks to was the family of an elderly man with leprosy. He had just lost his wife on Wednesday and was very very poor, but he was so grateful for our help he went and bought all of us bottles of coke! I couldn't believe what an optimistic kind man he was considering the circumstances he was in.

In one of the colonies, Bharatapuram, we had a chance to stop by the Bindu School of Art! Here they sell the artwork of those with leprosy and their families!! It was so cool to see all the colorful paintings! They had pictures of everything from tigers to flowers to penguins to fish! Every single one of them was unique in their own way! I didn't have any cash on me so I couldn't purchase one, but I hope I have an opportunity to go back cause I definitely don't want to miss out on these one-of-a-kind treasures!!


Today after tutoring, I ate lunch with the kids at the school cafeteria! It's nothing like you would expect...no tables, no chairs, no cups, no napkins, no forks....They all sit in a circle on the floor with their bowls of food, scraping the sides with their hands to get all the rice! When they want a drink, they help each other pour the water from a communal pitcher directly into their mouth. It's the cutest thing to watch them try to aim to get the water in their mouth and not all over their uniforms! Surprisingly they are really good at it!!





Are they not the cutest??


This is one of the boys sweeping up the cafeteria with an Indian broom!!


The girls are obsessed with playing Concentration. You know the game where there's a category and you have to clap your hands in time while naming something in that category without messing up!! It's so fun!! Everyday at break and playtime they run up to you and will say, "Auntie, Auntie do you know how to play this?" putting their hands in the air, ready to play the hand game! It's hilarious!!

One of my favorite girls is Thrisha (see picture below). She is a fourth standard student from the Bharatapuram colony I mentioned above. She is such a sweetheart and so smart! I tutor her sometimes in math and she just blows me away with her skills. Her mother has one leg and I believe only one eye. Last night she showed me a picture of her sister who died as a baby. She loves loves loves that picture. She keeps it on her at all times: at school, at home, on the playground. Its precious. In fact, as she got up to leave from her tutoring session today, she said, "Wait! Where's my picture?" She wanted to make sure she had it before she left. She really will not go anywhere without it!!


I'm excited to say I am slowly but surely adjusting to the heat!! Today it thunder-stormed which was absolutely wonderful!! And very beautiful!! And apparently this weekend we are traveling to a beach city to go swim in the ocean so that will be a nice way to cool off!! I'm excited!!

Vanakkam

India…I can’t believe I made it!! After 2 ten hour flights, a 3 hour layover, and 4 airplane meals, I made it to Chennai, India. It seriously is incredible here!! I’ve never in my entire life ever experienced anything like this before. There really are no words to describe it. Mary Katherine put it like this: “It’s like real life slum-dog millionaire out there” as she looked out the hotel window. No movie could be more accurate!

The streets are crazy. I mean people told me they would be really crowded, but it is seriously out of control! There are traffic lights, traffic signs, and dotted lines to indicate where the lanes are, but they really are just suggestions. The Indian drivers could care less. Most of the time they are driving in the middle of two lanes, honking their horns at the bicyclists, trying to avoid the cows that are walking in the middle of the road, and flashing their lights at the buses to make sure they are seen (otherwise they would be smashed to smitherines!)

The Rising Star campus is located on seriously the most beautiful land I have ever seen. It’s about an hour and a half outside of Chennai. We eat dinner on banana leaves on the roof of the hostel and eat mangoes every day, all day, cause well it’s located on a mango plantation. We also have been eating a lot of the traditional Indian food, and well, it’s surprisingly extremely delicious!! (No food poisoning yet…thank heavens)

Some of us do yoga in the mornings on the roof…nothing too intense, just a little something to start out the day. This morning, while we were in the midst of our stretches, I hear this rustling in the palm tree next to us. I glance over only to find a man climbing up a rope to the top of the tree to cut down coconuts (which by the way are dirt cheap here…something like 20 rupees, which is like 25 American cents)!

Today I was on the education team! I tutored the second and fourth standards (or grades) in math and english. They are all so smart! I am so impressed with all of them. They seriously are the most loving kids I have ever met. As soon as you walk on to the playground or into their classes, they run up to you and grab your hand and say, “Auntie, Auntie…come here! Come play with me!” They just want you to hold them and take their picture and play games with them. The older ones, especially the girls, just want to talk and braid your hair! I love it! I still need to work on my pronunciation of their names! I got the easy Sonya, Anitha, Asha names down but there are quite a lot that are seriously impossible…like Poongvanhanagam?? Yeah right…Help!!!

The Heat: I seriously don’t know how people live in this climate!!! I have never sweated so much in my entire life! I mean I’m sweating in places I didn’t even know existed. And my ankles are huge and swollen, not to mention I have a heat rash on my arms and legs…Lovely! It can be kind of draining being in the hot sun, so we try to stay cool in the shade and the fans! Let me tell you…bucket showers are the best thing ever! I was a little scared of how I would be able to handle the whole showering with a bucket thing, but I am here to say that there is nothing like a cold bucket shower in the middle of the day to cool you off! I love them!!

The picture above was taken as we were traveling from the hotel to RSO! They were all dancing and going crazy as we took their picture! Sooo much fun!!