India 2009!

Okay so then Friday. We went back to the conference and learned some more about the importance of good works. One of my favorite activities of the day was this imitation game that we played. He had five people leave the room and then told the first person to act out the process of washing an elephant. Well, I was the fifth person to go and by the time I walked into the room and saw what the person before me was doing; it looked nothing like washing an elephant. I just imitated the movements of the girl who went before me laughing the whole time. I was confused and felt like an idiot! When we explained the point of the activity it really hit me hard. It made me grasp the importance of understanding what you are doing rather than just copying the actions of someone else. I thought about all the times I used imitation to teach the children, and it was awesome to be reminded that I need to make sure they understand what they are imitating. We also talked a lot about sharing your faith though actions rather than through words. Mother Teresa is definitely my role model in that area. Her motto was to just love people and have them discover the power of God on their own.

I also got to talk with one girl whose name is Anju. She is 22 years old and lives in a poor village. When I asked her about her life she responded that she has no hope and that is why she turned to God. She is not married because she has no way to provide for a husband or children. Then her face brightened up and she told me that SOUP is trying to raise enough money to help her buy a sewing machine so she can make her own living! I hope you can grasp now the type of impact that SOUP has on the community here. SOUP is trying to help every person that needs hope! It’s actually very amazing and inspiring to see how many lives Joy and Grace have touched.

When the conference was over, I went out to say goodbye to all my new friends and somehow we ended up taking tons of pictures together. Every one was hugging me and Katie and asking to take a picture with us! It was awesome and it was so nice to see that we had bonded with all of them despite the language barrier. Jeannette, the woman who organized all the people, also invited us to come out to the village and see everyone again some day! Katie and I were both honored to get such an invitation!

Katie and I decided to take a rickshaw back to SOUP since there was no room in the car, but after waiting for like twenty minutes Joy and grace made us just squeeze into the car. So this is a tiny car to begin with and Joy, Grace, and two other men are already sitting in the car with all of their stuff. Katie and I took one look at the situation and just laughed! Katie jumped in first and then I literally positioned myself like a baby on her lap. Everyone was packed so close together it was insane! After a few minutes of laughing about the situation, Grace and Joy yelled together, “I love my India!” It was such a perfect saying because it sums up everything that was going through my head…things like this only happen in India! Both Katie and I have fallen in love with this country and its culture!

When we got back to SOUP, we sat down with Angali Didi, who is Joy’s daughter and two of the SOUP workers. Somehow we started talking about bangles and all of a sudden there were bangles coming from everywhere! Anjali and the two other women just grabbed my and Katie’s wrists and started forcing bangles onto them. The bangles were beautiful and the whole experience was just awesome! The people from SOUP are amazing and they have become like a second family to me. And now whenever I walk anywhere or move my arm, you can always here me coming because the bangles make so much noise!

He night before, I had sat down with my laptop and figured out some computer engineering things to teach Gautam. I sat down with him for like two hours that day and just taught him as much as he wanted to know. We worked with Microsoft Excel and I taught him how to make formulas, graphs, etc. He learned so quickly and just sucked up all the information! Whenever he mastered something difficult, this huge smile would just come across his face and it was just so awesome! After about an hour, someone asked him to help them with something so I went to spend some time with the other children. Up until that point, I had felt a little guilty giving one-on-one attention to Gautam when I wasn’t doing it with the other children. I went into the other room and started dancing with the children and after a while Gautam came in. When I saw him standing in the room, every ounce of guilt I had felt for teaching him one-on-one completely vanished. See, aside from Gautam and Rahul, all the children are either girls or are much younger. When I saw Gautam’s face, I realized that he has spent the past three weeks translating for us without a complaint and participating in “girly” activities like dancing and making friendship bracelets. This was the first time in three weeks that he was the center of an activity and it was actually challenging to him.

So I went to work with him for a little more and it was just awesome! He is so smart and he made a lot of progress. I am actually worried that I might run out of things to teach him. And I am teaching him things I learned in my first year of college and he is only 14! I really can’t explain how smart and eager to learn he is. After a while, the other children started to crowd around the computer so I showed them some pictures of my family and friends from home. They were mesmerized by the pictures and wanted to know everyone’s name.

Then we ate dinner with the family and it was amazing! It awesome because I don’t feel like a guest anymore in that house and that is an incredible feeling—they are really like family to me. And it’s really nice to bond with the children after all our set programs are done. Joy was telling funny stories to me and Katie and the highlight of the night was when Rahul yelled at me in Hindi to stop talking and laughing while I was eating! Everyone just burst into laughter at the table and it was such a good moment. Gautam and Chotu, Anjali’s son, dropped us off at home. It was such an amazing day and I needed some time to reflect on everything. The first thing that amazes me is the number of amazing people we have met in our short time in India. We are so lucky to call all of these people our friends. The second thing that I really needed to digest was how amazing things went teaching Gautam. See, this year at college was interesting and I actually decided to stop doing engineering at the end of the year. But I kept taking my one computer engineering class because I wanted to. And oh my goodness—everything really does happen for a reason! If I hadn’t spent a year studying engineering at Vanderbilt, I never would have been able to teach Gautam and encourage his dream! Digesting that information was just incredible. It’s so weird how things work out in the end.