Daily Surprises

Sometimes I have no idea what the day will hold. Okay well most the time. We have our schedules but those things don’t always play out exactly as planned. I guess that is life but it happens way more often then not in India. Sometimes the last minute change of plans can be frustrating, but most of the time I find them entertaining. Take this morning for example.

We had stayed home and had planned a busy work day, where we each worked on our individual assignments and projects. Pretty early in the morning, Nagaraj comes over and shows me a piece of paper. The paper was a printed out email from Dr. Susan saying that she needed pictures of night school and tutoring sessions. Fair enough. Seems simple.  

“We don’t have current pictures of those things now but that's fine” I tell him, “we can arrange to have someone take pictures at those events today and tonight.” 

“No Ashley, that won’t work. Ma’am needs it now!” he said as he pointed to the words immediately and urgent on the paper.

“But it isn’t night time and the children are already in classes.” I said. Leaving out the fact that even if we sent photos right away it would be Dr. Susan’s night in the US (She is actually in Utah right now--to be honest I'm a little jealous) so she wouldn’t get them until tomorrow morning anyways.

“I know, but we have to do it now, hence this” he says pointing out the word urgent to me once again. “So how are we going to do this?”

He stares at me blankly. Cricket cricket. 

“………………try to create night school in the morning I guess.”

“YES!!! Good idea! We will do this!” He exclaimed. “Come now.”

“Okay, I’ll be over at the school in ten minutes.” I reply—because I was still in my pajamas, hadn’t washed my face or brushed my teeth yet.  Plus I needed to pass the message along to Berlyn for back up.

Not more then three minutes after he left, Nagaraj called and informed me that we needed to come to the school right away because they are ready.  10 mins/3 mins, that's almost the same thing right? Whatever. Berlyn and I make our way over and dove right into creating and documenting “night school” mid morning. It was like we were setting up a movie set. The children were so confused. “Auntie what are you doing?” they pretty much all asked. “Having night school,” we would reply. And almost without fail every single one of them said, “No Auntie, it is daytime.” Thanks for that kids. We had totally forgotten. Turns out they recreated art club as well, so we took pics of that along with “evening school” which was the easiest of them all. It was such a random assignment. An adventure for sure. It always is.

It's convincing enough right?

Another assignment we had this week was game time with the kids. This is different then playtime with all the kids-we only had a small group of kids today and it was part of our education rotation, so the kids could practice their English. After flashing back to grade school by playing Heads up Seven Up and Bubblegum Bubblegum, we decided to play telephone. It was hands down one of the funniest things I have done since being in India. Much like the kids can’t play Red Rover without walking up to the other team’s faces and talking smack to them, they couldn’t play telephone without grabbing the other persons head, putting their lips right on their ear (or grabbing the persons ear and stretching it out before whispering in it—because this obviously helps them to hear better) and then using both hands to shove the persons head away as soon as they were done whispering. They weren’t doing this to be mean, they were just so excited about playing the game that all their actions were so intense. Then of course you have the one kid that insists on speaking total gibberish every time it is her turn, and the other kid who whispers so softly you don’t hear much of anything other then them breathing, and simply the phrases they could come up with--it was a riot.

Moral of the story is I absolutely love the diversity of my days here. I literally never know what to expect and am constantly put on the spot with the most unexpected things. It keeps me on my toes for sure. 

AND here are a few pictures from when we did delousing on the kids. I know, I know, this has absolutely nothing to do with this post, but they are too cute not to share. I love when the kids wrap their heads. It's like India and Africa unite, and it makes me a pretty happy girl.