Past due update pt. 2

Here is a breakdown of my typical day. 6am wake up, lie in bed for a while, yoga on the roof. 7am chai time with the 12 students who board at the hostel, Rambilas (our “cook” and general best friend, he's a couple years older than us, has the two cutest kids in the world, and is basically the man), and my two cofellows, Sumita and Harpreet. 8am school starts for the kids and I work with the handloom coop. 10am breakfast, then my classes start. I teach 1st, 4th, and 5th standards, and then do some projects with the kids in 8th and 10th. 1:30pm school ends, we eat porridge, and our afternoon begins. For the rest of the day, we engage in any number of activities, usually with the hostel kids. Here have been a few of my favorites:

1. Swimming in the kua. Our kua, or well, is 60 feet deep. Right now the water is about 25 feet down, making it the perfect swimming hole to jump into. The kids love this. I am trying to convince them to flip (yes Gabe, flip!) but no one will do it...yet. Most of the kids here, and all of the adults except for Rambilas, cannot swim. So there are about eight of us who participate in this activity almost daily (thermometer reads 98 right now, and this is considerably cooler weather than before).

2. Working in our garden. Sumita, Harpreet, and I knew from the start we wanted to get a garden going here. This may seem silly in a place surrounded by farms, but we wanted something small and manageable that we could use to teach the kids science and also plant whatever we wanted to eat. Lucky for us, there were remnants of an old garden, although it was in very bad shape. We have weeded it back to life, and dug irrigation trenches (watering the old fashioned way!). Currently we have eggplant and peppers growing, but will plant a variety of other vegetables tomorrow. The kids also love this.

3. Going into Jhiri village. Our organization's campus/office area is a 15 minute walk out of Jhiri. As most households are on the farm during the day, the best time for us to visit people is in the evening, and most evenings we are working. However, one of our favorite things to do is spend our evenings jumping from house to house in the village, so we make time for it. Every family is so welcoming and wants us to stay all night, but we always politely decline and move on to the house of the next child begging us to come. I love spending time with the families of the kids I teach. Usually we walk back to HKS (our org) around eight or so, in time for dinner, but filled to the brim with chai.

So that basically fills in the general gaps of the past 25 days here. I am going to try to start a Picassa web album, so I'll post the link when I get that started.