Our first Kid!!!

Gina and I have adopted our first student. He still has parents of his own but we are helping him go to school. Vamsi is enjoying his first year at school and is the excellent artist who drew all of the pictures on our virtual refrigerator.

Virtual refrigerator

Good news all around

Our family is growing. We are sponsoring a young man named Vamsi Devi at the Cuddapah school. He is nine years old and very artistic. He loves to use the computer to make pictures on paint and colors in the lines very carefully.

David has lost weight, a lot of weight. He looks good.

Gina has learned how to tie a Sari

Here's the evidence

Loongies

It's Sabbath afternoon. David and I are sitting on the porch of the principal's house in Cuddapah district (not actually occupied by the principal). We have been be staying here for the last week and a half. There is an academy group coming next week who will move in here so we'll have to vacate to an obscure corner somewhere. That means giving up the nice big bed and putting a couple single mattresses on the floor. I tell him he needs to hang a curtain to separate the small kitchen area and make a bedroom for us. He suggests buying "loongies" (wrap around skirts for men) to use as curtains. We both know it's just an excuse for him to buy more "man skirts." He says they are comfortable. He bought his first pair while I was away in Gurgaon. I wasn't too excited about it because men around here grap the bottom corners and lift the fabric up above their knees. The result is something like a baggy miniskirt. David has resisted the temptation to do this (willingly, see below) for which I am grateful. I suggested sharing clothes but he frowned about that. I think it's going to take some time before he's comfortable sharing. He sure looks manly in a long skirt! : )

Sabbath afternoon is very quiet. The contractors are forbidden to work and the children are forbidden to yell and shout. After church service the teacher told all the children to go back into their rooms and enjoy themselves but not to make any noise. We laughed as they immediately began jumping between the top bunks, swinging on the window bars, and (in the case of the boys) running around naked. Finally order was reinstituted. I think the command to enjoy themselves was revoked.

We went off soon after that to find food for ourselves. If we had not made a timely exit we would have been constrained to eat with the children. Everyone here is very gracious about sharing their food but I can't eat it. Everytime I eat Indian food I hate it more. They use oil as if it were water (often palm oil) and chilis as if they were salt. The chilis are everywhere. I can't escape them. Not all chilis are equal. It's the small green chilis that are my archnemesis. My chest feels heavy and my throat constricts after just one bite. They are in every cooked dish from rice pilaf, to lentils, to vegetable curries.

We have really appreciated the generosity of the principal in giving us a small gas canister and burner so that I can cook. Keeping vegetables around is a challenge. We can't just drive to the grocery store. First I have to find someone to go with me to translate (more bodies means more arms to carry bags), then we have to catch a bus. Once in town we buy as much as we can from vendors who supply bags and try to make sure the tomatoes are stacked on top of the potatos and not the other way around. Then we start stuffing spare things in bags wherever there is room (grandma's crocheted bag comes in very handy for this). Finally I buy whatever papayas we can carry. After the necessities, we usually cannot carry as many as we would like. When we board the bus with all of our bags we hope we can find a place to sit. Usually some of the school boys meet us when we get back on campus and help us carry the well traveled bags to their place on the polished stone shelf that serves as a kitchen counter.

I ran out of gas once, I was right in the middle of frying up some eggplant. David went out to see if he could find someone to help us get more. He returned a few minutes later and told me that the children were dancing. Dancing? I had to see this. Back at the children's home Hindi music was being played on the donated DVD player (that machine gets a lot of use) and one of the translators who had come early was leading a sort of dance class. The kids put up a good cheer when we went inside for a closer look and we were immediately pushed up to the front. I kept saying "We don't know how to dance." but I think the language barrier prevented my appeals from having any effect. David, and this is the best part, was wearing a loongie. Everyone kept making motions that he would have to pull it up and tuck it in to which he turned pale and made desperate hand motions to the contrary. In the end he was pulled into a room and after a long time and much encouragement finally emerged again in a baggy miniskirt. We were then forced to improvise an interpretive dance based entirely on our brief experience with Hindi music videos. It was the first time I have ever regretted not paying more attention to Indian dance routines. Our leader made it look so easy and beautiful! I really have a new appreciation for the complexities of Indian dance now. We laughed a lot and looked like complete fools but everyone had a good time and it was a lot of fun. The children still tell me "Ginaka (sister Gina) dance bagondi (beautiful)". They are such charming little liars. Dinner was very late that night. We ate half cooked eggplant and laughed about what a great adventure we had.

David will be buying three more loongies. We determined that is what it will take to make a curtain across the kitchen area in the principal's house.

Mt. Everest???

Here is one for Mike. I think this is Mt. Everest but I will have to compare the shot to others. This mountain stood out above the clouds while flying. The shot is with my 300mm telephoto lens and enhanced with Picasa2's I'm feeling lucky. Earlier that day I had made to mistake of switching lenses without powering off the camera. I think I have managed to get most of the dust off the ccd. I am still looking for a camel hair brush and need to look at the official cleaning procedure.

Wildlife

Many of my friends already know I have a great love for animals. Here is just a few that I have found.

A little Photo Housekeeping

I'm back with more photos for the blog. Okay, I have a confession. I uploaded these pictures to my server over a month ago so I could post them easier. I figure I had better finish posting old photos of Garo Hills before moving on to our new Cuddapah project posts. Furthermore I have to confess all of these photos were taken in the first two weeks of our stay in Garo Hills. Don't worry Gina and I are headed to the main office where we will once again have an internet connection faster than dial-up.

Let's take a walk down memory lane.
The first night the rains stopped I was overwhelmed by the vast starry sky above me. I pulled our my 50mm 1.8 prime lens and took some extended exposure shots. That was fun, Gina wondered what happened to me for an hour.

Next there is a photo I like of Gina. Getting the internet through the satellite connection was a trick at times.
The next series of pictures are from around the house of our host where we stayed for the first week and a half. Local kids, lots of fruit (banana, palamalo, pineapple, papaya), vinilla bean vines, rubber tree starts, and their open well where we get our water from. I ran into a spider hanging from the tree and had to take the challenge of taking a picture of a hanging object. Grape juice was made for the church by reconstituting resins and squeezing our the juice. Last is a perspective Gina pointed out looking out one of the windows with rain falling.

Like all of the pictures in this blog I do reserve copyrights. Feel free to click on the photo to see enlargements. Please write to me in a comment requesting permission to use any of the photos for any reason. If you know me just write an e-mail for permission.

David

A rambling update, (once a year literary burst)

Life here in Garo Hills has started taking on a sort of a routine. After two weeks we have started making significant progress in spite of short work days other complications. Our upstairs small third of the triplex we will be temporarily staying in when it is finished is located third from the end. The top floor is two dwellings meant for only a couple. It has a small entry big enough for a small couch or a few chairs and coffee table. The next room behind a full height barrier wall is the bedroom. A king bed is out, the whole room is just larger than a king bed. Then another full height wall and the bathroom/shower, has the only door inside the house. Last, the kitchen. Out the back door is a shared balcony with the dwelling on the other half of the house.

That will be home as soon as we have a toilet and running water. For now we live in a room about the size of the guest room Gina and I stayed in at your house, approximately 12'x16'. That includes bathroom, a table with a propane stove on it we call the kitchen, fridge, small table that we have to clear off for every meal, and a bed I am guessing is the size of a full, just larger than a twin and I think the locals call it a queen, we are still figuring out the names for miniature beds.

I have finally given the engineers in the states the information they need to complete the septic design. The seemingly simple tasks of 1) asking people with any certainty how much water each person will flush down the drain for each building, 2) Make a relative elevation (topo) map of the construction site so the engineers know up from down and can make the water flow downhill, 3) take a picture of local water plants that fit the description of reeds, cat-tails, or bulrushes so the engineers know we are actually planting the right plant, and 4) take a soil percolation test to find the water absorption rate, takes a really long time.

Now I am on to designing the water distribution for the campus. There is already one 400 foot well and we will be digging another one on the other side of the campus in light of a water tower for redundant water supply. Digging wells is about 1/3rd the price of installing a tower. Once that is done Gina and I will probably head down to the next school site and start designing the next septic system. I am quickly feeling more like a civil engineer every day and will probably be able to write a book on "waste water management out-side the United States" by the time I am done here. The interesting thing is that Maranatha will probably have me write the standard procedures manual before too long.

Gina and I are hanging in here. The living quarters are a little tight and if anyone wanted a nice QUIET corner to call their own... well India is not the place. We look forward to having our own apartment soon. Until then, we are calling it full immersion as we live in the old bank with about 10 others and we take long walks along the peaceful village roads lined with fireflies at night and in the morning the clouds hang low over the lush green hills and flooded rice patties.

I am including a picture I was thrilled to have captured. In the middle of a 2 hour conversation the three others in the car were having I heard a few English words that threw me into action. "There's an elephant", I looked up just in time to see the rear end of an elephant that looked about the same size and shape as the trucks we had been dodging at 70 km/hr. Already equipped with the camera and zoom lens, I whirled around and snapped the photo out the back window. It made my day.

Lest I give the false impression that life is all frustration and horror, it is not. The people are very hospitable and love taking us on trips to new places and seeing new people. Visiting the 5000 year old Hindu temple was a real treat. The food is good, it will take a long time for us to get used to the amount of oil and hot peppers that are in use. Sometimes, it seems like we are going so many places and doing so many things we cannot get the work done that we need to. This, of course, is frustrating. I have had to learn that shaking my head to say "no" looks strangely like tilting my head to the locals, which means "yes". I am still feeling a little weak as my body recovers from jet-lag. My ears are starting to adjust so I can now understand when people speak to me in English. Hindi is on the list of languages to learn.

Moms and Dads, brothers and sisters, relatives and friends, I love and miss you all,

David