Hello India!

After many hours (around 30 to be more exact) of traveling/sitting in airports on airplanes, buses, and taxis, we finally made it to the rising star campus in India!!! It is such a relief to finally be here! We are having the best time so far and it is only going to get better.  When we got here we had a little tour of the campus and then were told to change into an Indian churidar (traditional Indian clothing) and get ready for “play time”.  This is a time for us to run around and play with the kids.  The little kids are soooooo cute!  I honestly want to take home every single one of them.  Most of the kids here have parents that live in the leprosy colony a few miles from the school.  The kids want you to play tag with them, or take their picture, or steal your camera and take pictures of you.  The all speak really good English so it is easy to communicate with them.  Now to the weather… Let me just say that I have never been hotter in my entire life.  Even though it is extremely hot we have all had an amazing time so far and I can’t wait to see what comes next.  Today my group went with the medical team to the leprosy colony so more pictures of that to come.

A typical store in the village outside rising stars campus

The kids are so cute!             

The bathrooms are a little bit of a problem.  I can’t squat to save my life so this next 3 weeks should be interesting.

Left: Squatty toilet, Right: Bucket shower

Adventure of the Day:  Today were were broken up into groups and given an assignment.  There are 3 groups and 3 assignments and about 8 people in each group.  The assignments are helping the medical team in the leprosy colony, construction projects out in the village, and tutoring the kids at the school. and we will rotate every day.  Today my group was assigned medical so we drove about an hour and a half away to one of the leprosy colonies.  After we were done with our work, we got back in the bus and our bus driver said "want to go to the beach?" "Good, i take you to the beach".  so off we went to the beach.  He said it was a short drive but it ended up being around an hour drive on a windy dirt road where we experienced more that 20 near death experiences.  The cars drive soooo crazy here!!  So eventually we got to the beach and there were two indian men who came up to the bus and asked our driver if we wanted to go on a boat ride.  Of course he said yes and we followed.  Honestly i was a little bit nervous.  The waves looked pretty rough and i was not sure exactly how this was going to turn out.  but i decided to go along with it anyway because i will probably only be in india once.  so we followed these men quite a ways down the road to a little beach area that was an outlet of the ocean.  This water did not have waves so I felt much better about boating there.  It turned out to be the most amazing experience that only the 8 of us in our group got to do.  I felt so lucky to be apart of the bus drivers spur of the moment decision to take us to the beach.  The surroundings were beautiful and they even took us to some ruins along the beach.  A lot of the ruins got destroyed in the tsunami but some were still standing.  here are some pictures of our adventure...

Alamparai Fort is where we stopped to see the ruins

I cant wait to see what adventure tomorrow brings!