Well I'm back in the UK now, but will try and finish off this blog for the last couple of days. I also hope to add a few more entries on specific aspects of Indian life that we encountered and maybe to tidy up some of the existing blog entries which I wrote in quite a hurry.
Friday (28th) was "Inaugaration Day" - this consisted of a ceremony in the slum, celebrating the completion of all our work on the resource centre! There was a lot more to it than we were expecting. A large tent was erected at the entrance to the slum and one of the Delhi government ministers was invited to witness the occasion. Paula (our team leader) was declared "guest of honour", and we were all seated on a platform inside the tent and draped with garlands of flowers as we had been on the day of our arrival. Various speeches were given and some of the children performed song and dance routines. We were extremely impressed by the quality of these performances - especially an Indian dance routine performed by Nitika and Puja - 2 of the girls we'd got to know in the slum. Paula gave a speech and we were asked to perform a song which we'd prepared for earlier. We'd been asked to do something non-religious for this occasion, hadn't really had any time to practice and had struggled to think of anything we were all familiar with. Apparently the previous team to have visited, in a similar predicament, had done "The Wheels on the Bus" and it had gone down fine! Accordingly we decided to do "If You're Happy and You Know it"! After the quality of some of the other performances though, we felt a bit silly performing this, but no-one seemed to mind too much although there were a few strange looks I think!
After this we went back into the resource centre and spent a long time saying goodbye to the children and taking photos. It was all very emotional with at least one of our team ending up in tears. The kids kept asking us if we were going to come back and getting replies like, "maybe" and "you never know"! It would be great to go back at some point - maybe I will - but India is a long way away and an expensive place to get to and there other things I would like to do with my life and my days off work in future!
Later in the afternoon we tried to go shopping - I say "tried" because getting to where you want to go in India, especially if you're a tourist and it involves shopping, seems to be no mean feat! We ended up at 2 emporiums we didn't really want to go to and didn't buy very much although I did get a rural Indian scene, hand-painted on black cloth which I was quite pleased with. I'll save the rest of the details of our shopping trip for another blog entry on this subject!
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