Home Sweet Home

Sorry I haven't updated recently, the last two weeks or so in India were just mass chaos trying to get everything we needed to complete finished before we left. But I succeeded in finishing all of the projects! James and I built two bookshelves from scratch, painted them, catalogued over 1,000 books for the library, made library cards for all of the students at St. Mary's and teachers, and arranged all of the books in the library space they gave us. So now St. Mary's has a real, workable library, complete with a laptop (I donated my old Villanova one), scanner, and barcodes on the books. The headmistress says she will give the kids a "reading period" every day to take out a book and read it, and all of the 7th graders and up can borrow books whenever they'd like. I am such a huge book-nerd and I think that this is awesome-- kids who had probably never in their lives read a book for fun will now get to take one out every week if they want! Yayyy.

Besides this project I also wrote a health play for the elementary school kids and had one of my Indian friends translate it to Tamil. Then some of the boys we were living with acted out the play, and afterwords all of the kids practiced washing their hands with the hand-soap the program got for them. I bought 10 big bottles of soap, so hopefully it will last them a while. We also bought and organized a much needed first-aid kit for the elementary school.

The last day in India came all too soon. There was a bit of a flurry of activity at the end when we thought our flight might actually be canceled because of the volcanic ash over Europe (bizarre!) but it turned out James and my flight was ok because our layover was in Dubai, not Europe. Our friend and co-intern Sarah was flying British Airways and her flight was actually delayed/canceled until May 1.

It was so hard to say goodbye to everyone at SAMSSS and the schools where we worked. I feel like even though I was there only two months that I have known all of them much longer. Especially the four boys who lived at SAMSSS-- I started calling them my "thambys" (younger brothers in Tamil) and I was their "akka" (older sister). We gave each other parting gifts and we exchange emails every day, but still it feels kind of heart-breaking to be so far away from people I care about so much. Its hard to think of them sleeping on the floor, eating rice every day, and sweating without air-conditioner in the 100 + degree heat of India while I am living up life here in America. If only life were fair for everyone.



But I know that somehow, someway I will see them all again-- my goal is to have enough money someday to buy them all plane tickets to come visit us here when they finish school.

And that pretty much sums up India-- I'm sure I will write more as I continue to adjust to life in America. For right now, its time to move to Washington, D.C.!

Vacation

This past weekend all of the interns here had a little break for the Easter vacation, so we went on an adventure! Our first stop was Mumbai (Bombay) the site of the recent Slumdog Millionare movie. I wasn’t expecting it to be like this, but it actually does somewhat represent the way the city is portrayed in the movie. There are huge modern malls that rival any mall in America (in fact we saw Alice in Wonderland in 3D there) right next to shantytown slums where people dressed in rags are practically starving to death. We ate a meal in the Taj Hotel (one of the most famous hotels in the world—but at $800 a night we definitely were not going to be checking in!—and saw the Gates of India.


One night we saw that there was an artsy documentary on poor rural farmers being shown nearby so we showed up for that. It turns out there was a famous Bollywood director there (I never would have known!) and a bunch of elite well-educated Mumbai-ites. The film talked about how hard life was for rural people and how debt is causing them to commit suicide in record numbers. James and I kind of just looked at each other as the rich Indians around us gasped in shock throughout the movie expressed how moved and surprised they were during the discussion afterwards. Could these people really not know what is going on right outside of their doors? Literally a few hours on all sides of Mumbai there are rural people living this way—and people who lived in India their whole lives did not realize until they saw this movie? After spending just a little over a month in rural Tamil Nadu it seemed that us Americans were way more informed about the rural poor of India than some people who had grown up in Mumbai. It was a crazy experience and left me with a sour feeling. It made me think of Americans and how a lot of us do not understand poverty in our own country as well.

Overall Mumbai was not my favorite, because the stark contrast between the rich and the poor just made me feel too guilty to actually have clothes on my back and food in my stomach.



Next we headed to Goa, which is a stretch of about 2 ½ hours of just gorgeousss beaches, as far as the eye can see. The whole place does not feel like India at all, it has a more laid-back, less-chaotic, almost Latin American feel to it. The random Indian cows hanging out on the beach definitely helped us remember where we were though. We rented a beach hut on the beach for $8 a day and kicked back and enjoyed ourselves for a while. It might have been the first time since arriving in India that I actually felt completely and utterly relaxed. $2 Daquiris in a beach hut next to softly rolling waves will do that to you. It was a terrific retreat from the frenetic and overwhelming chaos that is the rest of India.