Week 6: Funny Moments

There’s a lot of deep, reflective stuff that can be said about my time here. You will not find that on this blog post.

This week was not filled with too much adventure or glamour, but I can definitely say that I feel more comfortable in this country. Learning experiences aren’t always pretty. Traveling, adjusting, and living can be hard. But when you find humor in the smallest of things, things become light, doable, and enjoyable. So relax, take a break, and don’t take things too seriously.

Here are a couple of our *happenings* this week that Andrea and I can just laugh about for hours.

• Cars constantly honk here. They honk as a “hello”, as a “move over”, as a “oh look, there is a cow on the road”. Cars honk just cause.
• Electricity will randomly go out. You may be in the shower and it will be pitch black. You will be okay.
• We call/text the founder of Aarti (Sandhyamma) every night so that we can have a car pick us up and take us to work every morning. Sometimes the van is on time. Sometimes it is 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or an hour late. Sometimes it doesn’t come at all.
• We were assigned to condense a 105-slide PowerPoint presentation of the Women Human Rights Defenders Project. One of the counselors video-calls us and we go through each and every single of those 105 slides for edits and revisions. She had a fever. This took hours. At the end of our “condensing” the PowerPoint was still 95 slides long.
• There was a semi-aggressive monkey trying really hard to get in to our front door during breakfast. Monkeys can be dangerous animals, especially with a mama monkey around. I no longer think monkeys are cute.
• I hung up my clothes to dry but did not clothespin my underwear to the drying rack. My underwear flew away and somehow my sweet 9-year-old host sister brought it to me. I wonder where my underwear flew. And I still wonder in whose hands it landed.
• In the evenings, Andrea and I visit one of two small shops in our little neighborhood for snacks and entertainment. These shops are a two-minute walk from our house. This makes for an exciting *outing*
• One of my toenails is turning blue.
• I get heartburn every time I eat especially when I eat very late & have a big serving of the delicious veggie curries :( Andrea told me this is common in middle-aged women :(( This really hit me hard because I was told earlier this summer that I act like a “doña” :(((
• My armpits are turning a different color.
• The soles of my feet are cracked, callused, and unrecognizable.
• Sometimes our digestive systems go berserk and we don’t even know what exactly it was that hit us.
• Our computers shock us. Like bzzzzz everytime we charge them.
• Our showers shock us everytime we turn our water on.
• We never know how long our work day will be.
• Sometimes, as we work at the school office, Sandhyamma randomly sends us a message that she has a car on our way for us that will take us to her home. So we go with the ~flow~ and go to her fresh & wholesome home. Then we stay for some chai tea and some good talks.
• When we are in a car, we manage to squeeze in more than the max capacity. Andrea always has to sit on me & her neck always ends up messed up & crooked.

Smiling, but at the end of each car ride, we can’t feel our legs

A black & white pic w/ my camera-loving girl Deekshita to *spice* things up since India is always so colorful

Every morning, Andrea’s eye gets more and more swollen and now there’s a jelly-like thing that like oozes out. It’s pretty gross tbh