Extremely Long Days

March 29, 2009
So the new school is really nice. It is in a prime location, so two out of the four hostels can walk to it, decreasing the bus trips from three to one. Also it is four floors, so there is so much room that they literally can’t use one whole floor yet, but the kids are coming in every week, so you never know. We have designed the school to have a big library, a science lab and a computer lab, which will make the school better than any of the private schools in the area. One thing that is funny is the land owner is very Hindu and in Hinduism, how your house is set up is very important, it is called Vastu. In Vastu the bathrooms have a lot of rules as to where they can and cannot be. One things that they can never be on the East side of the house, which I had heard once before, and luckily our plan did not have bathrooms on the East side by chance, but there is another rule that both Lynne and Ratnam had never heard that there can not be a bathroom in a corner, which cut out 3 bathrooms, which was quite annoying. Along with being strict Vastu they land owner and his wife are illiterate. They technically are not because they can right their names, but they are very slow and can only write in Telugu. I really do not understand how an illiterate man could make so much money that he could buy land and build a four-story building on land that is just a little less than the price of Lexington land. After a couple of stops in the road, it seems like the school is going well.

Last Saturday the wholesale tailor that was handling the boys clothes for Easter came to drop all of them off. It was impressive how on time he was. The clothes looked great on the boys. However, about a third had pants there were too long.

This past week two women from Boston came and volunteered. One was a native Indian. It was a little weird since even though she was, both of them seemed to have no idea of like the dress code. Lynne thought that since the woman from India was coming she didn’t have to have a cultural lesson and it is pretty hard to tell someone who to dress in their own country, but whatever. Besides that, they were pretty helpful. We finished sorting all the clothes that we got into when Marion and Amy were here, but we sorted them even further into sizes. It took is about 4 days to do all to boys and all the girls. They would work from 11-5 and then they did crafts with the kids, so the first night, they had third hostel do drawings. Second hostel they just played with, and first they did the craft project that Marion sent, with the boys. The kids all seemed to have fun. The only bad thing was that we always had to go back to the house to set up for tomorrows project, which meant Lynne and I didn’t get to spend much time with the kids. Friday we all worked on the library project of pasting labels on all the books. I never thought about the process that it must have taken years for these modern American library that have millions of book, to put labels on all of them. We worked straight for almost 9 hours, and we only labeled about 50% of the 1,300 books that Agape has now. For their last day here we took them to the best Biriyani in town, Bawatchi. We ended up staying out until 12, and we only went back because I was about to fall asleep at the table. I had spent two of the past night up until 1 trying to make the library software print out what I wanted. It had finally caught up with me.

Yesterday we woke up at 5:30 to get a head start before the heat to put up fliers for staff. The whole night, none of us slept, because it was so hot. I would fall asleep for maybe five minutes and then I would wake up. When the alarm went off it was so sad, I thought it had to be a joke. We got up got ready, while we did that Thanuja made some homemade glue to put the fliers up with. We left at around 7, half an hour off schedule and drove the hostels to pick up a couple of boys to help us paste. We took the mini-van. Hafeez and Ranjete (the driver) in the front. Lynne, one of the boys Ratan, and me in the middle, and three more boys sitting on the floor in the back with the seats lifted up. We started out in Uppal, but decided that we couldn’t put up flies to steal school teachers from schools in broad daylight, so we decided to go on the main roads out towards the village and past them in major intersections and bus stops. We drove probably a total of 1 and a-half hours away from Uppal, but we stopped a lot to put up fliers, so it took us about four down and two back. We stopped at a place for lunch that was actually pretty good for being so far outside of the city. We had a system down. Whenever we saw a place, all the boys hoped out we popped open the trunk. Lynne and I handed back the amount of posters for that specific stop. One boy laid out newspaper and pasted the back of each with the glue and the other three boys ran them out to where they wanted to post them. We all then piled back into the car and moved on to the next place. While were out we got pulled over by the police twice at checkpoints. It was nomination day, so there were a lot of police checking for bombs and there were big huge mobs of people marching around, making it pretty difficult to get were we wanted to go. When we got pulled over, they wanted to see the trunk and whenever they opened it they were surprised to see the boys in the back. The boys just waved, and the police officers waved back and then we were on our mission again. By about five we were on our way back to the hostels and I was pretty beat. I was tired last night and I didn’t get really any sleep, so I was now exhausted. We went back and laid down with the girls for about an hour before we went and ate at first. We then decided to go back out at 9 so that we could paste on schools and shops without anyone there to object. We took the ambulance too with a couple extra boys to get the job done. We didn’t take the ambulance in the afternoon, because we would have boiled to death with out the AC. Ratnam, and Jayapaul, along with 3 other boys joined our group. We put up a ton of fliers. Then at around 12:30 some cops pulled us over to tell us that there is a curfew up, which none of us knew about, because of the elections coming up. We drove away from them and put a few more, but at one we stopped, even though we didn’t do nearly as much as we had hoped. Surprisingly I was able to stay awake until we got back to the house at around 1:45. At 2 I crashed.