I do believe I have not had enough sips of India yet but I can even already begin to see the effects of continued tastes. Sadly I do not think that the mere three weeks we have here will be close to enough time to begin to get acquainted with India and all it's splendor that has been promised by those who have already experienced it. Never the less we have landed a huge amount of luck, or whatever you want to call it, and her name is Pooja.
Pooja is the name of the woman who responded to our urgent email looking for a place to volunteer "immediately", after realizing that our previously arranged plans when awry, starting all the way back in Bangkok with visa issues and delayed plane tickets. We had been stuck in Mumbai for a week trying to make our original plan work, to no avail, and desperately needed rescuing. So this is Pooja, our rescuer. Dear Pooja, Thank you for rescuing us from ourselves and the jaws of India.
Sincerely,
Your desperately lost guests, I mean volunteers.
Now to describe the life of a volunteer with Pooja:
First we have our chai tea served to us in our room. Then we step out of our room onto a second story balcony looking out over the Himalayan valley on our way to breakfast. A
After a delicious home made breakfast on the porch we go down and watch the kids practice for their upcoming play, in which the lever of extreme entertainment can not be described with words. But I will try anyway; adorable, hilarious, riotous, amazing, heart enlarging. Then after the kids finish up we follow them as they all line up and parade through the village back to the school room.
We are bombarded by a million little school children all saying "Good Morning Ma'am" at the same time and undeterable gawking as we walk by. We are then served more chai tea and lunch. The afternoons tend to be free so we do some combination of wandering through the hills on villagers paths, taking a siesta, having more chai tea, and reading.
All our meals are prepared for us by a shy Indian, named Jindendr, who works for Pooja. With out getting too involved, lets just say the food is GOOD!! All the time!! Besides that, he pretty much helps us with whatever we could possibly want or need. He's a good guy.
It is hard here to distinguish the line between guest and volunteer. Our travel arrangements to the Taj Mahal and airport are being completely arranged and taken care of by her and her husband, we are taken to dinner and out shopping. We go on tourist outings and if we mention that we like anything, like chocolate bars for example, we wake up the next morning with several at our disposal. Basically, we are totally spoiled!
As far as the actual volunteering goes, it couldn't be more perfect. The school is out of session for the full duration of our stay so the class rooms are empty. Pooja has been wanting to paint murals on the walls of all the classrooms so now is the time to do it. Little did Pooja know that she was going to be making one artist's life very happy by giving this project to us, the luckiest volunteers ever. We have spent the last several days designing and starting to paint the 4-5 classrooms, wall to wall.
Providence has it that there are two other volunteers here at the moment. Alex, from Ashland, Oregon, who has already been with Pooja for some time now, speaks Hindi and has pretty much adapted to being Indian, well except for the hot pink and yellow smiley face ball cap that he likes to sport.
Temuz is an Israeli girl who has the face of the ancient middle eastern goddess sculptures. She arrived at the school two days after us, also looking for something urgently after recently recovering from a bad illness that India so graciously offers to her travelers. She has already traveled much of India and was much at ease with everything.
So four of us paint, talk, listen to music, and get to know each other.
The kids peer into the classrooms like there is a new candy store opening up right in their school. We have to work hard to keep them out, ensuring paint goes only where we want it. It's sweet to see how ecstatic the kids are about all the changes that we mysterious new strangers are bringing to their environment. Next week we will be able to help with the final production of the play that the kids have been working on. Needless to say, my heart squeezes with happiness and gratitude every morning.
To give a sense of the setting, I will describe the Village. There are probably 20 concrete houses, each painted a different solid pastel color along a 50 meter stretch of mountain road. There are several of these residential groupings dotted all through out the area, making the mountain side look like a fairy land at night with all the delicate twinkling lights.
During the day everyone hangs outside under their roofed patios attached to the front of the buildings (by everyone I mean generally old men and shop owners). They cook all their meals here as well as, so if you walk by during meal time you will be confronted by delicious Indian food smells.
That is not the only thing that confronts us when we walk by. I think somewhere in the education of Indian children, "don't stare" got misplaced because as we walk down the stretch of road through the village everyone stops what they are doing and come out to stare at the western women. I must admit we are a shocking sight to see compared to what they are used to seeing, but the courtesies I am comfortable with never kick in, even after a polite greeting to all the on-lookers in their own language. Instead they just stare, a jaw dropped, unmovable stare until we are out of sight. Yup, what can you do? Personally I prefer to pretend I am part of a circus in my head. At least then the reaction seems fitting and my tiny brain can handle it.
There are paths from the village that go all over the hills and valley and to neighboring villages. You see villagers walking to and from on these paths during the day; women in saris carrying huge bundles of leaves or twigs that are half as tall as them on their heads, and men working in the fields on the terraced terrain. These are the paths that we wander on in the afternoons. Whenever we cross the path of a villager they stop to see the curious sight of us on their path. We quickly greet them with a 'Namaste' with our hands together in front of our nose and they decide that the world is not so strange after all and we both carry on.
Such is life at this strange and small moment here in this village in the Indian Himalayas. We count ourselves blessed.
More to come about the exponential growth of our hearts in response to this beautiful place filled with beautiful people - said with a squeeze of my heart.
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