India 2009!

GREAT SUCCESS!! Today on our way to SOUP, I used my first Hindi words! As you have read, we haven’t been so successful with communicating with the rickshaw drivers. So, yesterday I asked one of the children, Gautum, to teach me directions words in Hindi. I went over them a few times in my head and then assumed that I would forget them. But this morning, we got into the rickshaw and everything seemed fine but then out of nowhere the driver started making a very sharp right turn where we needed to just keep going straight. I panicked for a second and then out of nowhere the words, “SEE DAY CHOORO!” belted from my mouth. Both Katie and I were stunned for a minute because the rickshaw driver quickly started heading in the right direction!! It was such a great moment and now we won’t have any problems getting lost anymore.

After recovering from our triumphant rickshaw ride, we started teaching English to the children again. We decided before to give ourselves two days to just see how we could be of most help, but we both felt very unorganized today. Teaching English is difficult because the children are all at such different levels. What I ended up doing was writing sentences in a few of the children’s copy books about myself and my goals for the future and asking them to write their own versions of the sentences. Their answers were AMAZING! Gautum responded that he wants to be an engineer and preacher, Pooja and Sweety both want to be teachers, and Kajul wants to be a school principal. I also learned that the children are very eager to travel and see other countries. It made me so happy to see that the children have such great dreams for their future. I am a strong believer in the fact that if you just enable a child to dream, they have so much potential despite any type of difficult situation they are in. I also got to teach Gautum some math problems. After hearing he was interested in being an engineer, I decided to challenge him a little bit. He is only 14 years old, but he caught on to the advanced math very easily!

After teaching some English, we played some games like red light, green light and hot potato and then danced! I know Katie talked a lot about the dancing, but it truly is amazing to just be in a room with these children and watch them dance. They are so happy when they are dancing and they aren’t self-conscious about their dance moves at all. It’s very liberating to be in a room full of children just dancing their hearts out!

After lunch, we sat down with Joy and discussed the types of things we would like to start doing with the children. We shared some ideas and Joy shared some ideas, but the best part was that we were able to bring each child and teacher into the room individually and ask them what they would like to learn from us. That is one of the amazing things about SOUP—the amount of freedom and respect that the children have. Some of these children are very young, but it was essential to Joy that each child be able to talk with us individually about what they would like to do. This is the type of love and respect that nurtures a child and enables them to one day stand on their own two feet. It is a very rare privilege that a child would never receive in a government run shelter home.

I cannot even begin to explain how inspiring it is to just be in the same room with these children. They have faced horrible things in their lives, but they never let their past get in the way of their future. They are so happy, so loving, so full of smiles and they are just all around amazing kids. For example, when we asked Rinky what she wanted to learn from us, she responded that she wants to learn how to be a good girl and take care of the house so that she can take some of the burden off of her mom and dad. First of all, this is a nine year old little girl. Second of all, the mom and dad she is referring to are actually Joy and Grace, the founders of SOUP. Rinky doesn’t know her real mom and dad. Joy and Grace found her at the train station in Allahabad when she was four years old. She was riding the train completely alone and had no idea where she was from. Joy and Grace rescued Rinky because they feared that she was in a prime situation to be trafficked. Hearing Rinky talk about Joy and Grace with such affection just completely solidified my faith in the work SOUP is doing. Because of SOUP,these children are not growing up in a cold, unloving environment. They actually have a greater sense of family and love then most children I have met. And if you think about the issue of child trafficking, love is the best solution to the problem. These children have been abused, exploited, and rejected by the people who should have loved them, but when they get to SOUP they are loved, appreciated, and welcomed into a home bustling with energy. Like when you ask Gautum or Rinky who their siblings are they don’t respond with a list of their real siblings. Instead, they respond with a list of all the children living at SOUP and all of Joy’s real children. It’s amazing and it blew me away! SOUP is literally giving these children a sense of family.

As I mentioned before, Katie and I have been so eager to bring some structure to the children’s days. It has been killing us to show up unprepared these past couple of days, but it was important because we needed to get to know the children and what they already do everyday before we could decide how to best help them. Our conversation with Joy and with all the children went so well! We came up with lots of ideas of fun, structured things to do with the children. First of all, we really want to have the children do some artwork. The children are so good at drawing, and we thought it would be amazing to have them paint a huge canvas that can eventually hang in the new shelter home. We want each child to draw where they want to be ten or twenty years from now. The dreams of the children are so inspiring, and I think it would be amazing to capture those dreams in a huge painting. We also talked to Joy about buying a new notebook for each child. Right now, they are using old notebooks and just filling in the empty pages. This works, but we want the children to have something brand new that is their own. We plan on having the children do some inspirational things with the journals, but also to have them write lists of the English words we plan to teach them. We also talked to Joy about getting some other materials to supplement our work with the children. He offered to have Grace take us to the market tomorrow to look around and see what we could find. Its amazing talking with Joy and Grace because they are so open to our ideas. Anything that we think will benefit the children is 100% okay with them.

When Katie and I got home, we went into super brainstorm mode! It was amazing bouncing ideas off of each other. That has also been one of the amazing things about this trip—being able to share every experience with my best friend! Katie and I literally complement each other so well. When I am stuck and can’t think of anything, she always comes up with amazing idea! It’s just so awesome to be able to talk about everything and debrief at the end of each day. I really want to try and explain to you the shenanigans that went down in our apartment tonight. First of all, we couldn’t even make it though the door without starting to share ideas. When we finally got inside we passed out on our beds and just thought for like an hour. Then all of a sudden there was this amazing two hours of just exchanging ideas. Katie thought we should teach them some yoga moves, so I whipped out some old surfers’ yoga instructions I had from a long time ago, and we turned our eating area into a practicing yoga floor. Then I decided that we should teach the children some songs! So, Katie and I proceeded to spend the next hour teaching each other words and hand motions to different Jesus songs and fun children’s songs. Then Katie thought that we might be able to teach the children to play the harmonica…since we secretly bought two harmonicas before we left so that we could learn while we were here lol! So, we plopped ourselves down on the bed and attempted to play the harmonica until we were lightheaded. A little word of advice—playing the harmonica is NOT as easy as it looks. We were both exhausted from breathing in and out so quickly. We also talked a lot about how to best teach the children English. This is very challenging because usually when we are trying to teach English to someone, we have some knowledge of the other language they speak…like Spanish. But neither Katie nor I have any idea what words mean in Hindi. It was amazing though because we just sat down and pulled ideas from different experiences we have had working with children in the past. Thank goodness I went on that spring break trip to Brownsville, Texas because we were able to use a lot of the strategies I used on that trip to teach English. What we decided is that we are going to make a theme for each week and try to teach the children as many words under that category. This week we started with a list of beginners words, like colors, fruits, vegetables, shapes, and body parts. For the week, we will try to incorporate these words into all the games we play with the children. Then, at the end of each week we will have a fun competition day where the children can win prizes if they remember how to use the words and sentences we taught them. It was amazing to brainstorm and prepare everything! I can’t wait to see how the children respond to everything tomorrow!

After all this intense thinking, we decided to make some dinner! And we finally branched out from our classic toast and peanut butter and jelly!! We successfully cooked rice in the pressure cooker and we made this wonderful concoction of Indian bread, butter, and sugar in a pan! It was DELICIOUS and we fully intend on bringing the recipe home with us! On a less exciting note, Katie has not been feeling too well. Her stomach is a little upset, but we are crossing our fingers and hopefully she will feel better in the morning!