Blog Fail

Ok so it's been exactly two weeks since I updated my blog - bit of a fail there. Just assume that no news is good news, and no news normally means I have busy having an amazing time!! It definitely does in this case!! 

The last time I updated, 19 Australians were about to fly in... Well. 18 Australians flew in, but they had an amazing time. We ran an event for them called Essence of India, which basically means we crammed in as many cultural experiences as possible! We went to Laxmi Road, they did the Pune Challenge, they did the Wadi Challenge (these are both challenges for them to go out and explore the local areas by themselves!). We took them to two of our community partners, SOS Children's Village and Aditi. SOS is a village where orphaned children live (orphan in India means a child without both parents to look after them, rather than both parents being dead) and it's an amazing place, very quiet and peaceful. There are "mothers" who run a house, with roughly 10 children in each one. They live like proper families, brothers sisters, and when the kids grow up, SOS helps them get further education and jobs, particularly the girls. Apparently lots of them go back and visit their "mothers" and even save some of their wages to give to them, which is very sweet! 

Aditi is a village community out in a rural area. There's a learning centre there, the person who set it up initially wanted a teacher training college, but when she discovered how many of the local girls weren't getting any education at all, she set up a school for the girls. It's awesome. They're so good, and they get girls from all the local villages and give them free education, right up to standard 12, which is like year 13 at home, and then help them get to college if they want to. After we'd looked round the school, we went to two of the girls houses, which was very cool. There was a 15 day old calf in one of the houses - so cute!!

The Aussies had lots of fun, they're on a four world centre tour, so as I write this, they're in Switzerland at Our Chalet, then heading to London and Pax Lodge, and finally to Mexico to visit Our Cabana! Sounds like a good trip right?!  It was fun learning all sorts about Australia - they don't have snow at Christmas, but they do put snow on their Christmas cards - weird right?

Since the Aussies left, it's been pretty packed - the birthday event starts on Saturday - 45th! WOOP! it's going to be amazing, but it's a BIG event to organise, so it's been all stations go basically, hence the significant lack of update since the Aussies left last Friday! 

However, on Saturday, I had a day off. I spent the day with Claire, we went to the zoo in the morning, which was very cool. There were LOADS of animals, tigers, leopards, elephants, wolves, deer, tortoises, terrapins, turtles, iguana, porcupine, snakes, some that I hadn't heard of, and some birds, owls, peacocks... it was a very fun morning, and well worth the hours rickshaw drive there and hour back! 

In the afternoon, we chilled out a bit, and then went to MG Road for some shopping. I bought baked beans which has literally made my week - Heinz and everything!! Then in the evening we headed out to Phulenagar to watch Sayali, one of our Volunteers-in-Training (VIT), in a dance competition. It was sooo much fun! All the little kids were dressed up, and they paraded them all on stage before the dancing started, and they were very cute - one girl had the most sparkly sari I have EVER seen! I was very jealous. 

Today I also have a day off. The new volunteers, Philippa (UK) and Jessica (USA) arrived yesterday, so I spent the morning showing them around a few places, chatting and generally getting to know them (they're both very lovely, hello to you both if you're reading this :P )  and this afternoon I'm chilling out, getting some washing done, etc... 

Still working on that sari picture, need to steal it from Claire's laptop! One day, I'll just have a blog full of pictures from the last month and a half!! maybe...