friendhsip day and visiting the neighbours

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The past few days here have been pretty quiet. It has been raining pretty much non-stop until today, which makes I hard to go out and do things. I have spent my time trying to type up the never-ending report that Rachna gave me, and cleaning up parts of the volunteer areas. There has been a small problem with the dinner dishes, which the volunteers are supposed to do on a rotating basis. Shanti Bai comes every evening around 7pm to make dinner for the volunteers and, inevitably Sathyu because he is always sill here at 9pm, when dinner is finished. The volunteers are supposed to take turns doing the dishes, but the system seems to have fallen apart, and often the dishes and leftover food are left out over night. Normally this wouldn’t be such a problem, but because the kitchen is fairly open concept, the food attracts massive numbers of flies, ants and those Indian chipmunks. I generally get up early in the morning to discover the mess in the kitchen, and frequently end up doing the dishes. It annoys me to no end, but it’s hard to be the one to try to instill order, so I haven’t made any complaints so far.

The current group of volunteers are slowly moving on to other travels and back to the States. The other Emily and Aaya left early this morning, Genevieve and Juliet leave late tonight, and Joe leaves first thing tomorrow morning. So then it will be myself, Casey and Anisha. I think that the dishes will be easier to monitor with a smaller group, so that is a perk. It has certainly been nice to have such a large group of other volunteers here for my first few weeks though. It has meant that there is always someone else around to do things with and to show me around.

I spent the morning trying to clean out some of the communal spaces, and managed to rope some of the other volunteers into my efforts. First we attacked the volunteer room, where the internet works, which had gotten pretty sloppy. We wiped down all of the tables, took all of the books off the shelf, wiped it down and rearranged the books in an orderly fashion. Anisha organized some of the papers from a survey that she conducted last summer, and put back a lot of the material that had been taken from the library. I think that we may have even curbed some of the ant problem in this room (which I am especially happy about because I was getting worried that the really little ones were infesting my keyboard and slowly eating my new computer!).

Next Joe, Casey and I moved al of the stuff that wasn’t being used from the room behind the gazebo, where Mel had the kids come and do activities. A lot of it just got thrown out, but we salvaged some of the paper, crayons and whatnot that was in better shape for future use. Then I did a brief tidy of the two-person room that Aanya and Emily had been staying in. I’m hoping that I will be allowed to stay in that room once the other CIDA volunteer gets here, so I thought that it wasn’t a bad idea to get rid of some of the garbage so that the cleaning lady could give it a sweep. I know that its boring to hear about all of the cleaning activities but the neat freak in me just can’t stop organizing and cleaning once I get started.

In other news, there is a mouse (or rather mice) living in the girls dorm room. There isn’t really anywhere to put food in the kitchen where the chipmunks and ants won’t get at it, so we have all been storing our non-perishables in the bedroom. This of course has attracted our friendly neighbourhood mice. Anisha, as it turns out, it utterly terrified of the furry little rodents, so when Casey found one in her bed the other night Anisha freaked out a little bit. Mice don’t really bother me, aside from the initial startle that you get when they creep out from somewhere, but I am concerned about sharing food with them because of all the diseases that they can carry. Since the initial sighting of the mouse in the bed, Genevieve has seen them a few other places, so I have resolved to buy some of the big metal storage containers that they use for rice and flour in the kitchen so that I can put all of my food in them.

On a side note, the other day the staff had some sort of meeting in the afternoon during one of the biggest monsoon storms I’ve seen yet. Ankeeta and her husband Paupoo, who run the canteen, made these delicious fried-potato things as a treat for the staff. There was some left over, so they invited the volunteers down to the kitchen to have some. It was really nice hanging out in there with the whole family. They have three adorable little kids, who were all in there with us. Hersheeta, the youngest who is about two, was sleeping on the kitchen floor. We were making so much noise laughing and horsing around that she woke up though. In a few moments of quiet we could hear this squeaking and rustling around under the cupboards. I assumed that it was the chipmunks, which invade everywhere and are impossible to keep out, but Ankeeta told Anisha that it was rats!!! Anisha freaked out again, which the kids thought was hilarious, and the middle one, Sumit (who is a holy terror), made a game out of opening up the cupboards to scare her. At one point we even saw a big black rat run by!! Anyway, it was after that that I decided that constant vigilance was in order to keep the rats at bay!

Rita came by today and explained to us that it was “Friendship Day” in India (which explains all those text message ads I keep getting on my cell phone saying that you can get special rates for “Friendship Day”). From what I can figure out, this is kind of like Valentine’s Day in North America, but an even better marketing scheme because you have to buy everyone little presents. Anyway, big Vishal (there are two of them) came by and gave Anisha and Joe little presents), and when I went to buy some mango juice Nancie gave me a little white flower, and asked if I could come over later. I was happy to have something to do, so I told her after lunch would come by. She lives in this kind of compound right in front of Sambhavna, where Ankeeta and her family and about a million other people also live. So I went over and brought some cookies for “Friendship Day”. I was immediately accosted by Nikita and her many “Didis” (older sisters), who I quickly realized were not all actually sisters. They wanted to know who had done my mehendi and insisted on painting my nails (again), so I let them do that. They were asking where all the other volunteers were, and I explained that Joe, Juliet and Genevieve were leaving soon, so then of course they wanted me to go and get them so that they could say goodbye.

So I went back to Samnbhavna to retrieve Joe and my camera, and went back to the compound. The kids always get a huge kick out of the camera, so I have about a million photos of each and every kid, mostly with Joe (who is a human jungle gym for some of the little kids). Juliet and Genevieve showed up then, and started taking photos and horsing around with the kids. It was madness, Genevieve started a dance party in one room, Juliet and I were taking photos, kids were yelling and screaming and running all over the place, a cow kept stampeding through the courtyard. It was a bit of a relief when Ankeeta and Paupoo invited us into their little room in the house and made us coffee, which lucky for me is sweetened like nobody’s business and has more milk than coffee. Ankeeta is so sweet. Make sure that you check out the photos of her with Hersheeta and Sumit in the house. So cute!!

Anyway, tonight we are going out to dinner at Manohar (sp?) for Joe, Juliet and Genevieve’s last night in town. The other volunteers all love Manohar, so I’m looking forward to that. Apparently they have pizza that almost tastes like North American pizza…

Dan's birthday is tomorrow, so I will be thinking of him. Email him and wish him a happy birthday!!