India is Amazing!!!

Let me start by saying "India and Rising Star are both amazing", I love them both! The past couple of weeks have been great. We just got done with session 1 and they were an awesome group! It was really sad to see them leave. I hope all the groups coming are as amazing as them.

It has been an eventful couple of weeks, we went to Mamallapuram, there was a fire behind campus, I got to go with medical to a colony, and I went to education.


Mamallapuram was a ton of fun. I hungout with some of the other long-term volunteers. We went to a restaurant called Moonrakers and I got some yummy butter chicken (one of my favorite India dishes). We also did some sight seeing and went to the shore temple and the Five Rathas. Then we went to the resort called "Ideal Beach" and just hungout at the pool and worked on my tan lol.


It was really cool to finally get off campus for a change and go to one of the colonies with medical. This colony was only about 30 minutes outside Chennai. I remember it from last year and I remember a couple of the leprosy patients. One of the leprosy patients was dancing and singing and then said a prayer in tamil. It was so awesome to see that he appreciated what we were doing there. I remembered this man from last year and he still has the same attitude, he is amazing. 



This is the view of the beach from the shore temple in Mamallapuram, it was so amazing!

 The shore temple is pretty cool, I believe they said there are 6 more but they are underwater!

When your allowed to sit and take pictures on really old ruins, you have to do it. GO BULLS!!! AT the five rathas in Mamallapuram.

 Me and some of the long-term volunteers at the five rathas.

So this is part of the fire that was right behind campus/behind the house im staying at...

This is how close that fire got to setting a giant pile of leaves/ palm leaves on fire. If that pile would have caught fire so would the house im staying at... It was a miracle that it stopped just a couple of feet away...

Construction Day 2!!!

Yesterday Dr.Susan came up to me during playtime with the kids. She told me "be careful for what you wish for" and boy was she right. She later went on to say she has a real project for me. This project was to help with the second story construction on the "Green House" (the green house is where I am living now because the sessions are too large for me and Dane to live where all the other volunteers are living). We started at 0900 and ended at 1600 which is a couple hours longer than we normally work for. Our job was to move the 5 towers of bricks up to the second floor. We did not just do a ton of work today we did a couple tons of work today. How I am able to write this now in a miracle, i really should be asleep; I am that exhausted! I am so happy to have a real project but man standing outside in the sun for 6 hours throwing bricks is a lot of work. I just hope that I can keep up the hard work for the rest of the summer!!!

First Day of Construction

Oh man today was crazy! The title of my blog says it all "TII". Today was just one of those days where you feel that you are going to lose it. It started with me running around at 8:45am trying to gather all the supplies needed for the projects that were planned for the day. I was told that the supplies would be ready the day before but of course that did not happen and I spent about 45 minutes preparing for the projects. Then we started doing the projects, which were cleaning out some storage rooms and organizing them (i was not too thrilled about the projects).

At first I thought the projects we were doing were just busy work and not very important (and I feel that is what the volunteers thought too), but then I had a meeting with Dr. Susan (she is the director here on campus and is pretty much in charge of everything). She was telling me that the work we are doing is needed and not just busy work. This is taking some weight off of her and the 2 yard workers here on campus. 

Before today I was a little upset that we were not doing a true construction project at one of the colonies for this session. But then I realized the only reason I was upset is because I had "expectations" from last year that we would being building bathrooms or some other project. What we are doing on campus does make a difference for the staff at rising star but also creates a cleaner environment for the kids here at rising star.

THE KIDS ARE BACK!!!

The past week and a half have been a ton of fun; the kids have come back and I have been playing soccer and just hanging out with them everyday. It is so great to have the kids back, I have missed them so much. It was awesome to have some of the kids remember my name. I loved seeing the 3 boys that I sponsor: Karthik, Balakumar, and Sanjay. I will post pictures of all of them once I get a battery charger for my camera.
We watch movies with the kids every Saturday night and it is a lot of fun. The past two Saturdays we have watched tamil movies and it is awesome to hear the kids laugh at curtain points of the movie and get romba excited when the "hero" is about to beat up the bad guys (those scenes are pretty funny). Its great to just sit back and just chill with the kids. I can not explain how awesome these kids are, they are just the best!
This past weekend I went to Puducherry with all the volunteers. It was nice to get off campus and rest a little. A couple of the long term volunteers and I got some Italian food at a restaurant on top of a roof and it had an amazing view, I wish I had a picture. The cook/owner of the restaurant was this older Italian man that has been living in India for 30 years and he was super funny and played us a bunch of "american music" for us (Ali I think you would have liked this guy lol).