Ramblin Road Trip.

Just as a heads up, this blog will mostly be random ramblings (ten points for redundancy!) about South Asian life.

I never understood what it felt like to be dirty until I got here. I thought I did, but I was wrong. I still haven’t experienced it like I’ve seen it, but I can say that Wednesdays around lunchtime, I’m usually the dirtiest I’ve ever been. It will only get worse, too. It’s only in the upper 80s right now, but as it gets hotter, it will get stinkier. I’m learning to embrace it though. Wednesdays are my days at the Free School, and since it’s in the middle of the biggest network of slums I’ve ever seen, it’s not exactly pretty. There was some “remodeling” of the short path I have to walk to the door (the car can only go so far) and where I used to have a tiny bridge over the sewage canal, there is none anymore so I get to carefully jump across strategically-placed bricks in the garbage. It’s kind of fun. Inside the school, I use chalk all day, and as chalk becomes more and more obsolete in the US I’ll just remind you that that white dust can stick to every area of exposed skin relentlessly.

I am growing to love Wednesdays so much.

We have government-issued books to follow, so I try to use them everyday, but as I mentioned in the One Fish, Two Fish blog, I like to bring in outside resources. Today, with one of my classes, we read I’ll Teach My Dog 100 Words and that was a blast. I’ve learned the best way to teach English words is not by translating them but by demonstrating or drawing them, so when the dog would “tickle a pig,” the only way to teach it was to tickle one of the girls. I’m so used to tickling the girls at the Center that it’s second nature now, but since this is a more formal and co-ed school, it blew their minds and they loved it. The next line was “kiss the goose” and as I said something to myself about not being able to demonstrate that, I watched as one of the boys (5th graders, keep in mind) kissed the boy next to him on the cheek. It was precious. (It’s normal here for men or women to hold hands or kiss, as long as it’s same-gender. It’s not romantic, it’s just brotherly love.)

I was excited about sharing this book with the 6th graders, since they had loved the first book, but I never got to read it to them. They like to ask me questions about myself, partly to learn about me and partly to practice their english, and after asking questions, they asked if I could sing and begged me to teach a song. I put the book up and taught them “Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes” and they loved it. As if that wasn’t enough, I decided to see just how awesome these kids are and taught them the Hokey Pokey. They went crazy. I was genuinely upset when the principal came in to tell me it was time to go. It’s crazy how much I used to look forward to him relieving me. As wrong as it is to pick favorites, Class 6 is totally my fav. There’s only 13 of them and I usually don’t have a teacher watching in there, so we have loads of fun.

Tomorrow, we’re taking the train and visiting the capital city of this beautiful country. I’m super excited. I won’t lie, this is pretty much 100% a shopping trip, but I feel no shame. My main goal is to find pearls and beads (which are super cheap here) to use with the jewelry-making internship. We started that this past Sunday, and these girls are catching on so quickly! Yarp, though, as finding an outlet to sell is turning out harder than we anticipated, ironically, because of child labor laws. We may just have to sell to people we know and visiting teams and all, but we’ll see.

I looooooooove our house helper. She cooks and cleans and washes and irons and when she changes our sheets, she wraps Em’s teddy bear up like a baby and, most importantly, she just walked in while I was writing this to give me a bowl with two fresh, hot, powdered donuts that just came out of the oven. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Anyways, I know this was a long blog, so I’ll reward those of you who read the whole thing with one more fun story. Yesterday, we took Em to get her nose pierced and long story short, N and I succumbed to peer pressure and had ours done too. It was at a rich, upper class parlor that was packed with women and we paid a whopping 9 USD to get them done. That's for all three - $3 each. Yup. It took less than half an hour for all three piercings, which were done right in the lobby in front of everyone. They use a gun here, not a hook or needle, so it was actually very quick and for me, it was less painful than my ears (which were done by a very poorly-trained girl at Claire’s just over a year ago.) It still is pretty sore if I touch it or when i turn it, and I plan on buying a better one in the big city this weekend and changing it soon, but overall, it’s going quite well. I’ll post a couple pictures.

Love you all!