Talents and Camels

3,2,1 Action!

Every week we introduce a "word of the week" at Sambhali. Then after prayer we have an activity that reflects the word. Last week our word was "Talents" and our Saturday workshop was a talent show. After prayer everyone would break up into small groups to practice their talent. Saturday morning Amelia and I discovered that old saris make for excellent decorations and we transformed the dusty, dingy upstairs into a performance space. Many girls, especially the dancers, arrived in their fancier salwaar suits. The show was fantasic. There was a huge variety of acts. There was recitations of poems, singing songs, skipping, telling stories and jokes, clapping routines and of course bollywood dance routines. The little kids were adorable when they recited the school rhymes. One tiny quiet boy, Mool Chander, surprised me by standing up on the stage and belting out the alphabet, A for apple, B for ball etc. I don't know if i had ever heard him speak before! I really enjoyed watching the dances. The girls use music videos played on TV from the popular movies to choreograph their dances. At home, Usha often leaves the music channel on in the morning while she is doing morning chores. A few times I've seen her leap up from her task and run to the TV to practice the dance moves. The talent show ended in a class performance of the makerena and some prizes. 

Sandcastles, luxury and camels

This weekend Amelia and I decided to head to Jailsamer for a weekend getaway. We went even farther into the desert and arrived in Jaisalmer, the golden city. It is called the golden city because all the buildings are made of sandstone. This makes the massive fort in the center town look like the most amazing sandcastle. The old city has many winding streets inside the sandcastle fort as well as many temples. There are a variety of Jain and Hindu temples at least 850 years old. The temples have beautifully sculpted sandstone with an incredible amount of detail. We luckily woke up early and had the chance to explore before the heat of the day and before all the much too friendly Indian men started competing for our attention and money. Although sometimes their eagerness is genuinely helpful. At one point we were walking down a street and a man said "panani? Water?". We replied instinctively, "no thank-you" but then he responded, "but mam your water bottles are empty". We laughed and realized we were carrying around empty bottles and we really did need water. As a tourist it seems impossible not to have all your needs immediately or even preemptively satisfied. In the heat of the day we decided to splurge a little and took a rickshaw to a 5 star luxury hotel. We paid 200 rupees ($5) to use the beautiful pool. It was so much fun to swim around and a strange feeling to show so much bare skin! Completely refreshed we headed out on our camel safari. My camel's name was lal (red in English) and he was an excellent camel. I love the way the camels sit down and then it is quite the thrill when the stand up on their knobby legs. We walked and trotted through the desert and over a massive sea of dunes. The piles of golden sand were stunning. In between the dunes we trotted across plains scattered with small clumps of trees and other desert plants, sheep, cows, goats and antelope. We stopped for chai in a tiny picturesque village with about 50 mud huts filled with children.  We continued to another dune where we stopped to set up camp. Amelia and I wandered barefoot on the soft sand as the sun was setting. Then we sat with our camel driver, Duger, who made us a fanatasic meal. He made an oven out of cow patties (dried poo) and baked the most delicious bread. While we were waiting for the bread we sipped some "wine". This wine was actully a homemade alcohol made from sugar cane extract buried for a month in the sanddunes. Amelia and I ate hot bread, spicy vegetable and rice until we could not possibly eat another bite. Then we curled up in blankets under the stars, exhausted from a magical day.

The continual hug

Before leaving for India one of my biggest concerns was coping with the heat. In Setrawa it can get very hot but it is such a dry heat that it is completely tolerable. Often there is a breeze and walking around town it feels like a continual warm hug. Everyday is like the nicest summer day back home. It is wonderful to have blue skies everyday and beautiful starry skies everynight.

No spell check

I am teaching the "advanced English" class in afternoons. Although, advanced means working on basic sentence structure, pronouns, conjuctions etc. However, the lack of spellcheck sometimes leaves me questioning my spelling. A couple of times my students have corrected a mistake. The other day I used an example with my name "Jen is the tallest" and Sonu put up her hand and said "you spelt Jen wrong". Everyone else began to voice their agreement! When you write "Jen" in Hindi you use the  J, ai, n characters so to a Hindi speaker my name spelt phonetically is "Jain".