We had another volunteer arrive last week, Manun. She is very sweet. She is from France and speaks very little English. This seems to be the trend for the French volunteers. Tove and I have been trying to be her personal dictionary. We now have three girls to match the three boys. Other than that nothing hugely exciting has happened this week. Our outings have slowed down a bit so we are working on the farm a lot more. I made the mistake of offering to get the farm organized on paper. I was thinking I would put together a few charts in excel and that would be good. Not the case. I have been given the task of organizing the entire farm. A chart for every animal, three charts dedicated to seeds alone, a plot watering sched, blah, blah, blah. It’s been fun and has gotten me out of the sun a bit. The less than thrilling part is that I have found that Indians do not think linearly. There is no order to their lives or their brains. Raisa will come out with 3 conflicting thoughts in one brief sentence. This makes it very hard to figure out the needs of the farm. I know what I believe is needed and what would make our lives as volunteers easier. But I am not the one that will have to make sense of it in the long run.
This weekend we went to Bangalore, which is now being called Bangaluru officially. It was a very long night bus ride there. It should have taken 8 hours, it took 10.5. This time we were on a semi-sleeper bus. I would say this is much preferable to a sleeper bus except my seat was broken so it didn’t recline all the way. Oh well. We did very little site seeing while we were there. We spent maybe 20 min at the Botanical Gardens, which were beautiful, but everyone just wanted to go find a bar instead. The theme of the weekend outings seem to be maybe see some sites, but mostly go find the bars and western food. This has worked well enough for me being that is gives me a glimpse of what I want to see when I go back in August. Oh and we also went to the Bangalore Palace. Bangalore is the first real city I have seen here. Madurai is technically a city but Bangalore being the Tech Capital of India looks like a functioning big city. It was also multi-cultural. We spent both nights there at the Hard Rock Café. I think we were all on the verge of tears when we were brought the nacho plate. It was amazing. No I am not drinking that much. I am actually feeling rather boring for not drinking, but I really hate King Fisher beer and I am not that comfortable with what they call a mixed drink. I did however drink at the HRC. Nice to see alcohol I recognize. We had a great time and seeing a group of Indians get up on stage to perform YMCA was a fantastic topper to the night.
Monday was back to normal at the farm. Tuesday we had a new volunteer from Arkansas start. Her name is Lindsay. WE now have 4 of us in one small space. This will only last through this week. Manun leaves on Monday for her next project then I leave the following Monday, 6/6 for my Care Project.
I finally received all the details of my next project. I will be 10km outside of Dindigul. That is the larger town near the orphanage. I am still about 65km outside of Madurai. The orphanage has 174 kids ranging from 2+ to 17. My day starts at 6am getting the kids up and dressed for school at 8:30am. They return around 4:30 when I will help them with their homework, set up activities and help them with their spoken English. I have them till they go to bed. During the time the kids are at school I will be working at the adoption center with the little ones. I am really hoping I have another volunteer there with me to help me wrangle that many kids. I am ready to leave the farm so this will be a nice change of pace for a while.
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