India 2009!

Whoa!! Today we finally got to leave the apartment and go to work with the children today! I will let Katie fill you in on the stages of my sickness, but here is the story in a nutshell. Basically, I had a bad case of diarrhea during our trip to Agra this weekend. Since I didn’t want to miss out on seeing the Tag Mahal or partaking in the family activities, I decided to take a butt load of medicine to stop the diarrhea. Well, all in all I took 7 doses of Pepto Bismal and 3 Immodium caplets and it was beautiful while we were actually in Agra because all the stomach problems just stopped. It didn’t cross my mind for some reason that taking that amount of medicine could literally have clogged my system for a month. So for the next three days I was extremely constipated. Luckily, the Indian doctor gave me some great medicine and now I am doing much better!

During our rickshaw ride this morning, I literally was so excited to see the children. Both Katie and I have gone stir crazy just chilling in our apartment and we missed the children for the three days we weren’t able to work with them. When we got to SOUP, we started by teaching the children some new English words! We taught them opposites, months/days, emotions, and prepositions. It was so nice to just be with the children again, but the high point of the activity for me was working with Rahul. Rahul is mentally handicapped but he is very functional. It is difficult for us to work with him because he speaks very little English and mostly just keeps to himself. Today though I decided to sit down with Rahul and actually work individually with him. I went through the list of words that we were learning and had him copy each one down. And it went so well!! He could write and spell and he understood what I was saying to him. Working with these children has really proved to me that the only thing that really matters in this world is love. We don’t speak their language and there is a huge cultural divide, but none of that matters to the children. They know that we care about them and so they are so patient and willing to learn from us.

There also was a new little girl there named Gongon who is four years old. She is adorable! It’s amazing to just sit back and watch the children interact with each other because they are like a little family. They all love and take care of each other in a way that inspires me! They are just incredible! Once everyone was antsy from learning far too many English words for one day, it was dance time! I have been waiting since we got here to teach these children dance. I was a little rusty on my Mrs. Devenney moves though and had to give myself some time to remember everything. Finally, last night I was able to pull enough things together to teach them! I cannot even explain to you how well the dance class went. I whipped out some American music and the children just started dancing all around. They love to just grab partners and dance around the room. The highpoint of the whole thing was when I finally got Gautum, a fourteen year old boy, to get up and dance with me! I taught them some basic hip hop moves and then Katie and I whipped out the hip hop dance I did senior year in high school and we taught parts of it to the children. The children were amazing and it was so nice to just let loose and laugh with them. Then we took the dance class outside and put the kids in a line to learn some more complicated moves like leaps, toe touches, cartwheels, backrolls, and handstands. It was a half hour of mass chaos with children running everywhere and crashing into each other, but it was incredible! They were o eager to learn and it was amazing watching them understand the moves.

After dance class, everyone was dripping with sweat so we went inside and played this amazing game that I don’t know the name of…something complicated in Hindi J. It was a lot like pool but it was played on the ground with little pieces that look like checkers. Some of the children taught Katie and I how to play and but then regretted asking us to be their partners because we failed at the game. It was much harder than it originally looked but it was so much fun to learn. While we were playing, some of the other children got bored and started drawing all over our hands and feet. The children are amazing artists and pretty soon we were covered with beautiful marker drawings from head to toe. The first thing that Katie or I could think of was that Kathryn Pall belonged in that situation with the children! Literally, she would have been in heaven!!

After lunch, I sat down on the computer and tried to figure out our train tickets for the way home. One of the little girls, Tanu, was staring at the computer screen so I picked her up and taught her how to type some things. Then Gautum came up and stared at the screen and was like, “Why are you buying train tickets? You mean you’re going to leave us?” That question is still ringing in my head tonight. I literally just wanted to turn off the computer and ignore his question because I don’t want to think of leaving these children or explaining to them that we have to leave. Oh goodness…its insane how connected Katie and I feel to them after just a few weeks. While I was working on the computer, Katie whipped out the flutes that we had bought for the kids. My illness was secretly a blessing in disguise because it gave Katie enough time to somehow figure out how to play the instrument. Literally every time I would wake up from a nap, I would hear loud screeching noises coming from the next room. She is awesome though and somehow became amazing at it in less than three days. The flutes were a HUGE HIT! The children have NO idea how to play them and the room was just filled with high pitched squeaks for twenty minutes, but the thing that really touched me was how much the children valued the instruments. They each wrote their name on their flute and carried it around with them for the rest of the day. At random times, you would just hear a little kid experimenting with the instrument. It was above and beyond what Katie and I ever could have asked for. We just wanted the children to have something that was their own and that they could improve at with time. One of the best moments was when I tried to put Gongon’s instrument back in the box and she literally ripped the flute out of my hands and sprinted the other direction because she just wanted to keep playing. Another awesome moment was when I caught Rahul just lying on the ground rolling back and forth playing the flute with a huge smile on his face. It was the happiest that I had seen him since we have been working with the kids. And he kept running up to me and Katie and pointing out his name on the flute which was amazing because he understood and appreciated the fact that it was HIS instrument. Just seeing him be so happy made me want to cry.

After playing with the flutes, we just had some relaxing time with the kids and allowed them to do whatever they felt like doing. Some of them napped, a few of them played games with me and Katie, and two girls even decided to draw some legit henna on Katie’s hands and arms. Let me tell you—the henna was interesting. The girls were amazing artists and it looked beautiful, but as we all know, henna takes a long time to dry. I looked over at Katie a few minutes after they had started, and literally henna was everywhere—on her pants, on her shirt, on the ground. And then Kajul decided that she wanted to do Katie’s hair. So Katie’s body was covered in wet henna that smeared every time she touched something and Kajul was pulling and braiding her hair. I felt so bad because she was just so vulnerable, but she was an amazing sport about it and just allowed her body to be used like a doll for a half hour.

While Katie was surviving her henna experience, I took out a deck of cards and asked some of the children to play. Pooja, a thirteen year old girl, had an interesting reaction to the cards. She took one look at the deck of cards and launched into this speech about how it is not appropriate for Indian women to play cards. She talked to me for a while about how cards are often used in India for gambling and men will actually bet their wives and daughters on a card game. Pooja’s story blew me away because cards is such an innocent game in my mind. I grew up playing cards with my family and friends. The disgust she had for the cards scared me because she wasn’t telling the story as if it is something that happens sometimes in India. Rather, she was telling the story as if something like that had happened to her. Oh goodness—these poor children have just been exposed to such terrible things at such a young age.

After talking to Pooja, I hesitated to even go near the cards again but then Gautum asked me to teach him a game and I decided that maybe playing card games with them would show Pooja that cards can be an innocent, fun game. So I sat down with Gautum and started teaching him how to play War. He caught on very quickly and got so into the game. It was awesome! We sat there playing for twenty minutes and I felt bad that the game still hadn’t ended so I asked him if he wanted me to teach him another game. But he looked at me like I was crazy and just responded, “Michelle Didi, we haven’t finished yet.” It was a great reminder to me that there is no need to rush through things while we are spending time with the children. To Gautum, war was the most exciting game on the face of the Earth at that very moment.

Katie and I played some more games with the children and then we sat down with Joy to talk about some logistical things. As we have mentioned before, the biggest problem SOUP is facing right now is a lack of funding. There is an organization called Free for Life Ministries based out of Nashville, Tennessee that sends funding for the children every once in a while. I actually had the privilege to meet the directors of Free for Life Ministries while I was in Nashville for school, and they expressed a desire to send more funds to SOUP. Before they could start sending more funds, they needed more information about SOUP and its everyday budget and operation costs. We talked with Joy and wrote an email to Free for Life explaining SOUP’s situation and everything that we have experienced while working with SOUP. I know Katie and I have mentioned the price of the land for the new shelter, but on top of that money, SOUP also needs funds to prepare the children for school and pay school fees. Kajul goes to a special boarding school for blind children and her education costs around $500 a year. There are ten other children whose expenses come out to about $100 each per year. This amounts to $1500 that SOUP needs before the children start school again in July.

After talking with Joy and spending some time updating things on the computer, we got to sit and talk with Joy and Grace and some of the children. We talked to Kajul about her experiences in the United States. She travelled there for six months a few years ago to have an operation on her eyes. And she went to Vanderbilt Hospital and stayed in Nashville!! Kajul’s story is very depressing, but what almost brought me to tears this time was finding out that her blindness is actually not permanent. If Kajul has two or three more operations, she could regain a good amount of her vision. Joy and Grace have already set up a deal with Vanderbilt Hospital and Kajul’s surgeries can be completed free of charge, but it is expensive to fly her and Grace over to the United States and have them live there for six months. The whole situation just completely overwhelmed me. I could hear the sorrow in Joy and Grace’s voice because they couldn’t afford to get this surgery for Kajul. Imagine having a child who cannot see the beautiful, amazing things around them in the world and there is a simple way to allow her to see again but you can’t afford the $10,000 in travelling and living expenses that are required. I think that story is heartwrenching to any parent.

Grace and Joy invited us to stay for dinner and it was amazing getting to spend some more time with the children. It was weird realizing that the shelter home runs on a 24/7 basis. Katie and I come and work from 9-5 but those children live there. It gave me even more respect for SOUP and the work that Joy and Grace are doing because they have literally devoted their whole lives to these children. Katie and I got to just relax with the children. Rinky did our hair, we got to talk about funny things with the children, and then everyone just exploded into one big tickling fight. It was amazing and I feel like I got to know the children on a whole new level. Then we ate dinner with the whole family and had lamb! After an all carb diet for about a week, both Katie and I were salivating at the sight of meat! Katie even got a little carried away and ate way too much of this spicy sauce that reminded her of the salsa from Chilis! Her mouth was burning for a while after dinner but it was totally worth the taste of home!! It was an amazing day and we can’t wait to go back again tomorrow!

Also, PS Katie and I thought that we were being babies complaining about the heat here. The temperature was only ever written in Celsius though and we thought that it was around 90 or 95 degrees. But yesterday, we decided to actually do the conversion and the temp came out to 110 degrees!!!! It was insane and it made us feel very proud about how well we are handling the heat situation considering its too scandalous to even show our ankles here J