January

Its hard to believe January has come and gone, I realize I have been a bit slacking on my blogging duties -- it was a very busy month here. The minute I got back from my trip to the States, we had big groups here, the last of which just left on Saturday. At one point we had over 70 international students here, that takes quite a bit of coordinating! It was a lot of fun though and great to meet so many people. Other work has been good, our first newsletter finally went out (yay!), and I am working on lots of other projects although there never seems to be enough time to get everything done that I want too. We just opened a new preschool which is very exciting, it will run 6 days a week and give the kids 2 nutritious meals. We are almost finished a house across the street for that family of children that I wrote about in November, someone did some fundraising in Europe and we were able to build it really quickly (picture attached). We had Republic Day for India (pic attached) and Australia day when our group of Aussies were here. A friend and I made a homemade pinata out of plaster of paris...it was interesting but the aussies seemed to like it (pic attached). I saw a partial solar eclipse a few weeks ago. I went to Pune last week for a night with an anthropologist that has been here, she had a meeting at the university and I did some food and other shopping. I had a horrible stomach thing over the weekend, will spare the details. I watched a very interesting (if not one-sided against modern day birthing practices in the U.S.) documentary on giving birth called "the Business of Making Babies" for those of you who like that sort of thing (you know who you are, Ashley) I think it was from PBS. So that's a lot of random happenings from January!

Life in India continues to be interesting and sometimes dramatic. The longer I'm here the more I pick up on stuff between the staff, local politics, poverty. Not all of it very pretty. I was walking in the slum across the street and saw a little kitten tied to a rope...I won't tell you what will happen to that animal but you can guess. A lot of what is considered ok/not ok goes out the window when you are struggling just to find enough to eat. I was walking to my room one day and a group of kids surrounded me wanting to shake my hand (not unusual) but then I quickly discovered one of them had taken my key and coin purse. He was quickly found hiding in the field and nothing was lost, he comes from a family of robbers and they don't know any other life, his father got a "talking too/warning" (which is a nice way of putting it) by staff here because obviously that is not acceptable behavior. But needless to say I'm not shaking so many kids hands anymore!

That's the quick lowdown. I am heading this weekend for a week away at a yoga retreat, this is something I have wanted to do while in India and I'm very excited and slightly nervous about it. I'm not sure what a lacto-vegetarian diet is but I'm pretty sure its not what I'm used to :) I also do not know about waking up at 5:30am but I guess we will see, I will be channeling Elizabeth Gilbert to get me through it! Really it should be a nice break and time for reflection.