slight change of plans

It has been one crazy and eventful week. I don't even know where to begin.

I said in my last post that it would be one of my last because we were headed to Thailand for a two week trip and then home on May 8th. Well things have gone quite a different direction since then!

Last Friday we left our school with tearful goodbyes to our of our friends and kids. We took a train to Chennai accompanied by our two good friends Vara and Ramana who helped us a ton with our 6 giant bags we planned to check on the plane. Each of us also carried a full backpacking pack... too much luggage! On the train we had a minor mishap because three of our tickets we had booked were still waitlisted and were never confirmed, but we ended up paying a small fee and were on our way. We reached the airport in Chennai and said some more sad goodbyes to Vara and Ramana and headed for the check in counter...Here we spent the next two hours struggling with the Air Asia people about our bags. Apparently it is not possible to check an extra bag without a major kick to the your wallet. We were going to have to pay $480 for our excess weight between the three of us. Instead we unloaded as much as we could bare to part with and left it in the airport for some lucky security guard who would find it. The fee's were now only $200. Lucky us. Next we got in line for customs, which we barely made it into with our giant carry on backpacks. So far we felt like we had gotten lucky, but then everything went down hill... At the counter, we were stopped and told that we didn't have the proper registration papers to leave the country and we needed to go back to Kadapa in order to get them. No begging, pleading, or offers of money would help us.

We left the airport stunned and at a loss for what to do. The rest of the weekend consisted of many stressful events including sleeping on the ground, getting ripped off by a cab driver, phones calls to the US embassy, waiting and waiting and more waiting only to get to the Foreign Registration Office which opened on Monday and be told that we needed to go back to Kadapa once more. Talk about false hope!

We finally accepted the fact that we would be going back to Kadapa and got on the next night bus. This is about a 7 hour journey, and then 1.5 hours more out to our school. So this last week we have worked our tails off getting these papers and only yesterday (Sabbath) did we finally have the triumphant moment of holding them in our hands! Countries like this don't make it easy to get stuff like this done, especially in a timely matter. For more details about "getting our papers," which a long, but good story in itself, you can visit our joint blog sidtrevandbrookeinindia.blogspot.org. We will be posting the long version (in a nice, entertaining list format) very soon! But long story short, we were illegally living in India because we didn't properly register with the police when we came and we stayed longer than 6 months. If we had left just 20 days before, we would have gotten out just fine. Since we have our papers, we have been instructed to leave the country immediately (which we have no problem with).

Tonight (Sunday) we are finally heading back to Chennai and will be getting on a plane bound for North America on Monday night! We decided to skip to Thailand adventure this time and are really excited to just get home... It has been a long ten extra days in India and I think we are all ready for some American culture.

This last adventure in India was full of miracles and we are so thankful for everything who prayed for us. I don't know if I've had that many people praying for me at the same time ever in my life. So thank you to everyone who contributed! God worked in so many ways helping us to get those papers. I know there is some reason behind our extra stay in India. Although I may not know it now, I sure I will sometime in my future!

See you soon America!

Native places

I am sad to say this is going to be one of the last blog posts from India! I can’t believe we’re down to our last 10 days here. So far we’re keeping our last two weeks busy and it is going by incredibly fast.

Rented bicycles in Nuzvid--USA cycling team in India

 

Two weekends ago, our friends Zach and Jeff came down for the weekend and gave us a surprise visit which was very refreshing. They were only asked to preach for church a few times on Friday night ;). We had fun talking in our habitual Indian ways and laughing about it. In India, Zach and Jeff have become Jack and Jeff…according to every Indian person. All the kids knew their names by the time Friday was over. The boys took off on Sunday night back to work. Then this last Thursday we made a trip up to Nuzvid where Zach and Jeff are working at the Gifford Memorial Hospital to visit for a day, and then continued our journey a little farther north for Easter weekend to our brother Ramana’s home village outside of the big city Rajahmundry. So last Wednesday night we began our adventure with the same ten hour overnight bus ride that Zach and Jeff made from our little town of Vempalli to Vijayawada and followed up with a one and a half hour bus ride to Nuzvid. Nuzvid if famous for mangos—everyone tells us. And yes there were lots of mango trees there! Sadly mango season doesn’t really start until May so the mangos aren’t very sweet yet. It was really fun to hang out with the Gilbert boys and funny to see the different parts of “Indian-English” that we all have picked up so nicely. In Nuzvid we rented bikes for 3 rupees an hour (about 6 cents an hour) and rode like an awesome cycling team through the mango fields—it was so nice to be back on a bicycle, even it was an Indian Hero bicycle with scary brakes and a seat tilted at the most uncomfortable upward angle. (One thing I cannot wait to do when I get home: get on my road bike!) We got the grand tour of Nuzvid and enjoyed hanging out in the AC guest room that Zach and Jeff have at the hospital. These boys have learned the Indian way of hospitality and spoiled us with a gourmet breakfast of Morning Star Sausage links, fried potatoes, and eggs! What a treat. We were sad to leave them, but excited to head off on another adventure to see Ramana’s ‘Native Place.’ This trip has been planned since before Christmas time and we knew Ramana was excited to show us his home, which turned out to be everything he has ever described it as—paradise! 

 So Friday afternoon we hopped on a bus, switched to another bus, met Ramana, switched to yet another bus, and then met Ramana’s good friend Srinuvas who was waiting with a motorcycle and a scooter to take us out to the village. Trevor and his backpack, Sid, and Srinu packed onto the motorcycle while Ramana and I balanced on the scooter.  I wore Sid’s backpack on the front, and mine on the back. After stopping shortly to pick up some freshly cooked egg noodles in a parcel for dinner, we took off down a tree tunneled road dodging the bugs and potholes. 

We arrived in the small rural village of Kaleru about thirty minutes later and were welcomed by a giant banner and a bunch of village kids and people. We stayed at Ramana’s brothers house and slept on a mat on the floor. Everyone was so excited to have Ramana’s foreigner friends staying right in their own little village… Since no one there speaks any English, Ramana became our translator. At school, other people translate for Ramana because he doesn’t speak English…but over the last 6 months of talking with us, we have learned to understand each other even through his very limited and broken English. (When my mom and Debbie came to visit, we had to translate Ramana’s English to them because they couldn’t understand. And the same went for Trevor’s mom and Zach and Jeff!) Thankfully we speak Ramana’s language. I couldn’t believe how much they pampered us the whole weekend serving us endless amounts of tea, fresh coconut water, strange new fruits, and too many meals. They even tried to fan us when we sat sweating in the heat!  To go along with our bucket showers from the freshly pumped well water in the small outhouse that doubles as squat pot, the weekend was full of more motorcycle and scooter riding, Telegu church going, village touring, a cloth market, coconut rice and egg curry eating, and entertaining people by simply being a foreigner! We also handed out the left over tooth brushes from Peach Ortho to kids in the village and at Ramana’s church. It was a chaotic and busy, but slow and full of ‘time-pass’ at the same time as India always seems to be. There’s a book called Shantaram about a guy who comes to live in India after escaping from prison in Australia and at one point he goes to live in a village of his Indian friend for about 6 months—our weekend reminded me so much of this story. The family water buffalos living right outside the door are milked in the morning for the daily tea and curd, everyone lives close together and the men shower outside at the water pump and the women take bucket showers from the freshly pumped well water in the small outhouse that doubles as squat pot. What I am realizing is that even with all of the strange awkward and sometimes uncomfortable situations we found ourselves in, we were relaxed and went along with whatever came our way. How things have changed… I know that if we had done this trip during the first couple months of our stay in India, things would have been handled much differently! If India has taught me anything, it’s that when life hands you uncomfortable situations, you sit back and enjoy them because each one will pass without fail and you can laugh about it later. This truly was an amazing and humbling experience that showed me another incredible side of India. 

Sid got to hang out in his lungie with all the other village men

swimming in the River! Ramana has talked about this place
 for many months where he grew up swimming

Successful shopping at the whole sale cloth market

Ramana (center) and his two brothers (elder-right, younger-left)
In front of the house that he hopes to purchase someday with Chandu...

Ramana-left holding some munjakia palm fruit
The boy on the right climbed the tree to confiscate these fruits

"Very taste!"

Today we made one last trip to Kadapa to buy sports equipment for the school. Some close friends of my grandparents were incredibly kind and donated money for this purpose. We are using the money to fix the swing set that has not been used this entire year, and to get lots of sports stuff for the kids to play with. Before today they only had a few cricket bats and only one volleyball that Sid, Trevor, and I bought in Kadapa after their only ball popped. We were able to buy an arsenal of items for them to use for this last week and the rest of next school year. When the kids ask who donated all the things, we tell them it’s from an auntie and uncle in the U.S. and they always tell me to make sure I tell them thank you! So HUGE THANKS to Doug and Joyce Ellington for making these kids extra happy!

It’s hard to think about leaving these people and never knowing when I will see them again. Our goofy brother Ramana and his “my understanding” and “my written back” personalized English language, my tiny sister Chandu and our baking extravaganzas and inside jokes… And of course Vara, Prim, and little Nancy who turned three yesterday, and our TBSVPN Bakery shop that we invented (Trevor, Brooke, Sid, Vara, Prim, Nancy—creative I know!) where we roll too many chapathi and experiment everyday with new curries. I can’t believe all of these things that have become part of my daily life are coming to an end.  It’s going to be a bittersweet moment when we take off for Chennai next Friday.