Week 9 already for our Gappers in India!

It's been 9 weeks for our Gappers in India... Bec gives us the latest update of their adventures!

I can’t believe we have been in this amazing, beautiful country for 9
weeks now, it feels like only yesterday that we arrived! We have
truly experienced a lot of what India has to offer but still
anticipate for more surprises which it may throw at us. I thought we
might start off our blog with a few things that we have learnt about
India..

1. That the country runs on “Indian Time”, your food will come when
they decide to bring it, your train may be an hour late and kids come
to class half way through.
2. That there are NO traffic rules, no one drives on their side of the
road, the only thing they do try not to hit people and cows.
3. That the country is full of people who are willing to help, buy you
chai or a cold drink, and simply just have a chat with about their
story and of course where you come from!
4. That the electricity can go off at any moment, and stay off for
hours on end sometimes!
5. Teaching English as a second language can be extremely challenging
at times. I now know how all you LOTE teachers out there feel
sometimes!
6. Most of all we have learnt the value of friendship, being in the
same boat as 12 other people at a time forms strong friendships that
would last a life time!

Enough about what we have learnt being here though, here’s what we
have been up to the past two weeks.

As the school holidays have now officially ended, a lot of our older
kids at day care have gone back to school. We now have about 15 kids
that come on a daily basis. Some of them are quite challenging as they
can’t speak any English at all as they are only two years old but they
are so cute and do respond with actions a lot of the time. The kids
who are about 3-4 though are really improving and talking more and
more! One little girl, Reika, who is blind, has finally stop crying
every lesson and the other day, when we heard her voice of the first
time, was the most amazing thing ever, she just wouldn’t stop say “I
am Reika, I am Happy”. It really melted my heart. Over the past two
weeks we have started to teach them new songs such as alice the camel
and wheels on the bus. These two are their favorites and they
absolutely go crazy over them!

At orphanage, as the holidays are over and kids have returned, we are
finally able to teach there! George and I are teaching 5th and 6th
grade, which is a nice change to day care. The kids in our class are
incredibly well behaved and are quite smart too. We are teaching them
things such as verbs, maths, spelling and lots of different vocab. we
don’t have a proper class room to teach in (no one does at orphanage)
and sit on the floor, but we make do with what we have.

As well as our regular teaching we have been quite busy these two
weeks with social events. We went to visit a new shopping mall in
Udaipur called Celebration Mall. While we were there we all did a bit
of shopping and treated ourselves to McDonalds! We have also been
bowling this week! I teamed up with another Australian in the house,
Jo and We formed TEAM AUSTRALIA!  There are only two lanes at the
bowling alley so we always have to bowl in teams of two, which is fun!
We have also been to café coffee day quite a few times to indulge in
some amazing coffee! We have also visited a lot of local cafes and
restaurant this week for some amazing food and beautiful views

Last weekend we got to experience the Indian cinema! We saw Delhi
Belly at the movies, and what an experience it was. The crowd went
wild at numerous different parts in the movie which made it that much
more interesting. The movie was in Hindi and it didn’t have subtitles
but we were surprised by how much we could actually understand. It was
well worth the visit!

This weekend we are welcoming 12 people to the house!! That will bring
the total number of volunteers up to 21! That will be a completely new
experience in itself. It will make our last 3 weeks in the house
memorable! We are looking forward to arrival of moonson this week as
the rain we had a few weeks ago turned out only to be pre-moonsonal
rain.

Until the next time,
Bec