June 23, 2010
Both today and yesterday, for community service, I went to the orphanage/school that half our group has been going to. There are probably 30-40 kids there, ages (as far as I can tell) 7-15. They are absolutely amazing. Most of them speak at least some level of English, and the older ones typically have achieved a level of proficiently. The girls love my blond hair, and braided it today into about a thousand braids that they then linked together into pigtails. The boys love playing a game called “Ten-Twenty” where you sit an a circle and slap the hand of the person next to you saying with each slap “Ten! Twenty! Thirty! Forty!”…and so on until one hundred, when the person whose hand is being slapped has to pull his hand back or else he is out. If the person slapping misses, then he is out. They love these games. They draw pictures and give them to you, and their spelling in English is beautiful. Their names are absolutely beautiful, names that are clarified in a giggling Marathi voice, difficult for me to pronounce and usually absurdly stumbled through a few times until they again leak through the linguistic cracks in my mind. Some of the girls have their ears or noses pierced, but often instead of earrings there are tiny bits of straw through the holes. All of them are so much fun, and each time I see them I feel the need to adopt one…So if anyone knows someone who is looking, I’ll give you the name. Please come get these amazing kids. Oh and by the way, all of them are extremely talented artists, can sing well, are energetic and fun and many of them are beautiful dancers. Other than that, not too much has been going on. Yesterday I bought a bollywood movie from a store nearby, and want to get a few more. Recommendations for good ones? Today I went with the professor and some other girls to buy Saris, and we spent SOOOO long looking for ones we liked. I ended up getting an absolutely beautiful turquoise and yellow one, which I was hesitant about because it was slightly expensive, but they all were. Afterwards we went straight to the market to get tops fit to be made, and also buy skirts to go with them. They should be ready on Monday. We’re planning to wear them in Madurai because we’ll need to be covered up a little more there. I’ll send pictures when we get them back! Anyway, leaving at (surprise) 4:45 am tomorrow to catch a flight to Delhi, then a bus ride to Agra to see the Taj Mahal and other wonders. I’ll try to post while I’m there.
