India 2009!

Our train was scheduled to arrive in Allahabad at 7:10 so we woke up around 6 and started getting everything ready and packed. Our worst fear was that we were going to somehow miss the station, so I literally walked to the bathroom every ten minutes and asked the ticket man how much time was left until we would reach Allahabad. Around 7:00, Katie and I attempted to lower our bags down from the top bunks. See, when we put them up there, there was no one in the compartment. But now the compartment was full of sleeping people. Needless to say, it was a pretty entertaining event and I’m sure everyone around us was laughing, but in the end we got the bags down successfully! We just sat in the compartment surrounded by Indian families, anxiously waiting to reach Allahabad. We finally reached the station around 8:45 and successfully got off the train!

We had arranged with Reverend Qamar Joy Zaidi (aka Joy), the director of SOUP, to meet us at the train station. He said that he would be waiting on the platform holding a sign with our names, but when we got off the train we couldn’t find him anywhere. We walked back and forth on the platform for a while hoping that he would recognize us since we stuck out so much but after about ten minutes, we began to worry. Wherever we go, we attract attention and the more time we spent wandering around the train station with all of our stuff, the more likely something dangerous could happen. But see this is what all of our backup plans were for! We actually had planned actions to take if we couldn’t find Joy. So we found the ticket man from the train and asked him where the nearest STD booth was. We made it to the booth and called Joy on his cell phone. Joy told us the direction to head in and then we took off. A woman tried to stop us along the way, saying something nicely to us in English but we didn’t want to have a conversation—we just wanted to find Joy. We moved so fast through that train station. Our bags are pretty heavy but we had like superman strength and bolted up the steps in no time. When we finally got to the end of the platform, we heard someone calling “SOUP…Reverend Qamar Joy Zaidi…United States.” It was the woman that we had ignored five minutes ago but she was with a man now. It turned out that the woman was one of Joy’s employees who looks after the kids and the man was Joy’s son. We felt stupid for having ignored them earlier, but they just laughed it off and told us they were glad we were being so cautious.

Joy’s son walked us out to the car and then we finally got to meet Joy! It was so amazing to finally shake the hand of the man we have been planning to work with for so long. Joy drove us to Kamal Singh’s house, where we are living, and everyone came in to check on our living conditions. Kamal and Joy talked for a while and then Kamal showed us up to our apartment, which is amazing! It has a bedroom, a living area with a desk so we can type this blog heheh, a kitchen, a bathroom, a dressing area, and a beautiful terrace that overlooks the street below. The terrace has two swings too! On an even better note, the bedroom has air conditioning and the living room has this awesome fan that uses cold water to cool the air down. It is so nice to know that we can cool the rooms down because the heat can get so oppressive here.

After we moved all our bags into the apartment, we literally just passed out. Sleeping in shifts and then the incident at the train station had just wiped us both out. Katie passed out in one room and I passed out in the other and we just slept for most of the day. When we woke up so many people had called asking about us and if we were okay. Poor Kamal had been answering phone calls all day for us. Kamal is amazing and she went over all the logistical things with us that night. It was nice to just talk with here and hear more about her life and her experiences hosting foreigners.

Another reason why we both just slept through most of the day is because our health is in a very interesting situation right now. Katie has a very interesting rash all over her arms and legs that legit looks like a mild case of leprosy (its funny now because I know she’s okay but it wasn’t funny then). We think she had a bad reaction to the mosquito bites. The stress from the train ride just made the itching unbearable, and everyone knows that once you start itching you can’t stop itching. So she would wake up every once in a while to apply some calamine lotion or cortisone cream. I, on the other hand, had a fever and a sore throat and just kept waking up to take Advil, drink water, and apply cold rags to my forehead. Poor Kamal thought that we were both going to die, but we really just needed some time to recover from everything.