Rosanne, 23 mei 2009
India , Tiruvannamalai

last entry

Dear All,

More than a month has gone by since the last time that I wrote on this website, and I’m actually back in Holland at the moment. But let me tell you what happened in the rest of my time in India. I won’t go too much into the details of my last 3 weeks because then I’d bore you to death. Instead here are some of the highlights and a plea for help for some of India’s poorest children.

During our last week at SINAM, we spent a lot of time working on a final report and giving all of our students extra English lessons. Luckily, they all passed the final exams that we gave them, and after having shown Evelien’s parents around Tiruvannamalai, Evelien and her parents went traveling and I spent a few days traveling alone before my mum came to visit. I didn’t really like traveling alone. It’s so much more fun when there’s somebody with you who you can talk to! Luckily my mum came and I took her around Pondicherry and Auroville (and we got picked off the street to play in a bollywood movie!! (as the loose western woman who walks out of a drug store! But hey, we do drink alcohol, so I guess we must be loose western women like they think we are!) we are presently awaiting our Oscar nomination for best non-speaking background actor). Afterwards I took my mum around Tiruvannamalai where she roughed it like we did. Luckily she had come with a backpacking attitude and only a really light backpack, and she didn’t mind the buckets of water that served as a shower or the open sewage outside our front door. All of the SINAM staff really liked her, which was great . We were even invited to Tamil Selvi’s “house” (two windowless rooms that house 6 people), so my mum got to see how the people around us really live. She was especially surprised when we went to Stalin’s village where we had taught English every day for two months. While we were eating dinner from banana leaves on a bamboo mat outside his mother’s shack and wood fire, my mum suddenly realised that she really was in India in the middle of nowhere in a low-caste, poor village eating dinner from a banana leaf on a bamboo mat next to a wood fire and a tiny shack! And that her daughter had been doing this for 2 months already!

After a few days I took my mum for another ‘Indian experience’. We spent a few days traveling around Tamil Nadu and seeing palaces, temples, full beaches with people “bathing” in sarees, busy chaotic cities and a lot of Indian food. Finally, we came to Madurai. I had a slight “dip” there. It was really noisy, chaotic, busy, dirty, polluted, and full of people. And that together with the blistering heat taxed me slightly too much. I decided I’d had enough of India and wanted to go home....right away!

Instead, we went to an ashram where I stayed for two weeks (mum only for one because she flew home a week before I did). An ashram is a type of monastry where people go to learn about religion, meditate, do yoga, and pray. Now, I’m not religious at all, had never meditated before in my life and had only ever been to one yoga class where I completely screwed up every movement I was suppposed to make. Needless, to say, I was slightly worried about the prospect of 2 meals, 4 hours of prayer and 4 hours a yoga a day! Luckily, all my fears were misplaced, and it was great! I ended up spending two weeks learning how to do yoga and failing miserably at learning how to meditate. We had to get up at 5:30 in the morning and then meditated for half an hour and then chanted hindu chants for another hour. After that there were two hours of yoga before we finally had breakfast at 10:00. Then came the daily chore, the so-called ‘karma yoga’, basically the idea that doing good things gives you good karma ( a great way to get people to feel good about cleaning the toilets! Which is naturally the job that I was assigned to! How cliche). In the afternnoon there was always a lecture about yoga, and then there were another two hours of yoga (this time in the 40 degree heat!) before we had dinner (there were only two meals a day, but somehow that was fine). In the evening we had to do more meditation and chanting (where I usually spent most of my time looking out of the window at the monkeys in the trees. They were so cute!) and that was the end of the day. It sounds slightly austere and strict, but it actually really wasn’t. The people were really nice, and the yoga was great! I am proud to announce that I can now stand on my head! By the end of two weeks I could stand on my head! That achievement concluded my India adventure, and now I am back in Europe.

It was great to come back home. India was great, but it was so nice to have hot water again and even after two weeks of being back I haven’t yet gotten used to the fact that I can touch food or hand people things with my left hand! Every time it seems like I’m doing something scandalous that people are politely ignoring!

I also haven’t completely left all the thoughts of India behind. After 3 months of seeing how poor most people are and living amongst them, Evelien and I decided to do what we could to help. We are currently looking for sponsors for 18 children who are all very poor and would have a much better life if they were sponsored to go to a special boarding school/orphanage. At the moment, SINAM is building a new office, and in part of the office, there will be an orphanage for 50 children. Only 1 or 2 of them are orphans. Most are either half orphan, have parents with drinking problems (I saw far too many drunk men in the streets of Stalin’s village), or have parents who are simply to poor to be able to care for them. Just like the dock labourers in Europe did 100 years ago, most poor people are daily labourers, which literally means that they go to construction sights or large farms every day in the hope that they will be chosen to work that day. If they don’t get chosen, they go home empty handed that day, and the family tightens their belts. This means that most of the people in the village where we worked were really poor. They all come from the lowest caste, they barely earn enough to survive, and most children wear the same clothes every day because they don’t have any others. As soon as they are sponsored, they will get clothes, soap, shampoo, school notebooks, pens, free evening tuition classes and after about a year, a place in an orphanage where there will be people to look after them properly and make sure that they go to school each day and are motivated to do well. I have worked with the organization for 2 months and can definitely vouch for the dedication of its staff. Mr Perumal, who runs the NGO is Dalit himself and has devoted his entire life to helping other people from his caste (really, he barely even sleeps!), and this is definitely a charity where you know that you’re money will arrive safe and sound and that all of it will go to the children instead of having half of it go to bureaucracy and corruption.

If you can spare 10 euros a month (or even 5) you can fully sponsor a child to get a chance to go to school and be well fed. We have so much, and they have so little, and so little of what we have cold help them so much. Please think about it, and if you’re interested email me back (Rsanne.mulder@gmail.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">osanne.mulder@gmail.com)

xxxxx
Rosanne

Met HalloBuitenland.nl kun je Rosanne in India echt goedkoop bellen!