Catching up

Haven't been able to get to a computer for nearly a week now due to lack of time and lack of free computers at the YMCA.

Have to try and catch up very quickly as we have a team meeting in 25 mins and then I'm for an early bed. Had a very long day yesterday and we're catching a plane home in the early hours of Saturday morning so not much time for sleep tomorrow night.

Mussoorie was great, plus we saw a lot of Indian life on the 10 and a half hour bus journey there! Very busy roads, mostly single carriageway and full of ox carts carrying sugar cane to the refineries, plus all sorts of other things. Hence a very slow journey full of lots of hairy overtaking manoeuvres as is the norm in India! Mussoorie itself is in the foothills of the Himalayas with some beautiful views, plus we visited a large waterfall with a cable car ride to the bottom, which is a very busy Indian tourist attraction. We were the only white people there and several Indians asked to have their photos taken with us!

On Monday we were back in Anna Nagar slum again, doing some more painting work on the resource centre. The murals we've been asked to paint are coming along great - we've all discovered hidden artistic talents which we didn't realise we had!

On Tuesday afternoon, we did some songs and games with some of the children from the slum. I think they were all from the Bal Mandal - the children's group which looks after lane hygiene and various other community concerns. I had to teach 20 - 30 children - far more than I was expecting - how to make an Origami flapping bird! Amazingly, with some considerable help most of them got there and were pretty pleased with their creations. The down side though, is that the birds wear out fairly quickly after a lot of use - the paper tears and the wings stop flapping so there were a few disappointed children. Unfortunately I didn't have time to teach them well enough so they would remember how to do it again. :(

On Wednesday we visited the Taj Mahal, which was awesome. We also went to the Red Fort which is also in Agra, just across the river from the Taj Mahal. We left Delhi at 7am and got home again at midnight after a 5 hour bus drive in each direction.

Today we were back in the slum again, finishing off our creations and tidying up a bit. We also went for another walk around the slum and were invited into some more houses and asked to pray for a couple of the women we met. In the afternoon we did some more songs and games with the kids and I did a very short talk for the children about the message of Easter. They weren't sure what day Easter was (it was last Sunday, the day after the Hindu festival of Holi), but apart from that they seemed to know the Easter story about as well as I did! I asked them what happened to a Hindu after they died, expecting them to talk about reincarnation, but the first answer was that they burned the body, then got rid of the ashes, then had a 7 day mourning period (or something - I can't remember all the details), and eventually we got to, "and then we go to heaven" - which wasn't the typical Hindu answer I was expecting!

We've seen a lot of desparate poverty over the last few days and the worst of it certainly hasn't been in Anna Nagar. Anna Nagar consists of cramped ramshackle dwellings, it smells, there are lots of flies, but it has drainage, a clean water supply and electricity, and the people have access to basic medical care and education. Elsewhere we've seen people living on rubbish heaps, picking through rubbish, sleeping on streets, begging and doing anything they can to extract money from richer Indians or from tourists. We've been advised that it's generally best not to give money to beggars as many of them are professionals and involved in or victims of organised crime and if you give to one you will likely get mobbed by many more. None of us have felt entirely comfortable with this I don't think but we've also all felt overwhelmed by the need and not known how best to respond to it so we've tended to shut it out rather than to try and engage except with the people we're specifically here to help. I'm still not sure whether this is the best policy but it certainly seems like the easiest one at the moment...