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??