Welcome to India!

After three flights and roughly 30 hours of traveling I’m finally here in Bangalore (approx. 8580 miles from home).  The colors, the noise, the smells and sheer mass of people are all equally astonishing.

My home stay in a nice area of Bangalore called Cooke Town and I live there with the host father, Ram, the host mother, Ammini, a boarder named Hemant, a helper/boarder named Tuktuki and another volunteer named Tom.  Ram is 71, looks 40 and worked for a British chemical company called ICI until last year.  He has a book for everything and knowledgeable on many things under the sun.  Ammini is 65, looks 50 and gives singing lessons on a daily basis as well as run the household.  She loves cooking and is pretty darn good at it, and as Ram put it, “I don’t go anywhere near the kitchen when she’s cooking, that’s her domain.” Hemant is 25, is from Rajasthan and works here in Bangalore for an SAP consulting firm.  He’s looking to get married soon and will probably only be around for another few months.  Tuktuki is 13 and is working in the house until she can get her papers to go to school.  Her father is a construction worker in Kolkata and her mother works in Ammini’s sister’s house, Tuktuki was living in a slum in Kolkata with distant relatives until Ram and Ammini took her in.  Lastly, Tom is 25 and he finished University in England a year and worked in a factory for a year to pay off loans and save up money for this trip, he works at the same school as I do. 

Before Bangalore grew into the bustling metropolis that it is today and had, what could barely pass as, a sewer system put into place, all of the refuse was thrown in small alley ways behind the houses.  These alley ways didn’t have any sort of draining feature to them and therefore needed to be cleaned and thus developed a whole workforce of people whose job it was to clean up everybody’s waste.  The Annasawmy School was started for the children of these workers in 1909, Tom and I volunteer at that School.  We work in a building dubbed “The Learning Center.” The primary goal of the center is to help improve the student’s English, the secondary goals of the center are to help the students improve their creative writing, reading comprehension, presentations/public speaking, etiquette, social skills, health and hygiene.  The children that we work with range from 5 -15 years old, they are very disciplined and seem to have a profound understanding that their education is their ticket to a new life; it is inspiring to see.

Here's a few of the pictures so far.  When there are more, they will be added to the same album.

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