Alright. So I’ve been here nine days and only blogged once. Why? Because internet access is scheduled. And those few scheduled hours happen to be the exact same hours dinner’s served, meetings are held, and school lessons are prepared. We also share those few hours with trips into town, service projects, and visits to locals who have been helping us. I’ve been able to pay my Tmobile bill and try (unsuccessfully) logging into my work email. I’ve been able to check a few messages. But other than that, I’ve had to sneak things into Word documents here and there – all so I can paste and send in the few moments I have the chance. I just have to remind myself I didn’t fly to the other side of the earth and get current on Tetanus just so I could Facebook in a dirty hostel.
So here are just a few of the things I’ve noticed in India:

People ride three and four to a motorcycle – sometimes it’s a bunch of grown men, sometimes it’s a family with kids. Neither of those things would last long in the states.
Men pee in public everywhere. Even police. I guess they see it like blowing your nose: it’s gross, and people would prefer not to sit and look at it, but it’s part of nature. Shrug.

Garbage is everywhere. They don’t really have a sanitation plan anywhere in this country, so they just throw their crap wherever they can.
The last two points are probably to blame for the fact that bathrooms and garbage cans are hard to find here.

Grown men like tween-girl music. Mostly Justin Bieber. They walk around with their phones out in front of them playing Bieber and Taylor Swift and Jesse McCartney from the speakers. So weird.

I thought I’d be a genius and pull an all-nighter the night before we left, so I’d sleep on the plane! Except that I didn’t sleep on the plane. I can’t really sleep in the seated position. Ambien gave me a couple of light dozing minutes, but no real sleep. I was awake for three days. By the time we got to the Delhi train station, I was beyond delirious. It was probably the filthiest and most dangerous place I’ve seen in this country, so as we all know, that’s when and where my body would finally need to stop/collapse. I found myself sitting cross-legged on the platform, my backpack perched in front of me, and my face planted directly in it. The train rolling up to the stop is what woke me. It leaves when it wants to, with or without ticket-holding passengers onboard. The train station experience was not pleasant in any way.

You take off your shoes (and typically your socks) anytime you enter a holy site. That includes busy inner-city sites, pavement and dirt, grime, etc. We stopped at two Hindu temples and Gandhi’s tomb. That’s a lot of barefoot. In a lot of city grime.

With my last-minute tetanus ache, the swelling from the flights and sodium-packed plane food, and raw fatigue made my whole body feel like one walking bruise. My face still has not shrunken back down. I look about 30 pounds heavier than I am. It’s freaky.

At one point in Delhi, a couple of men asked for their picture with me. I thought it was funny, but shrugged. After that, a few more approached me. A small line formed, of men and their cameras wanting a picture. Since I looked like a fat little old man by then, I knew better than to take it as a compliment. I figured they’d never seen Americans before or something. Americans must be cool, I thought. Then our ambassador, Raj, told me to start being rude and saying no. Evidently, guys like to photoshop stuff in inappropriate ways. I guess that means they superimpose your face onto porn and put it on the internet. All I heard was “your face is going to be all over the internet with a smoking Indian bod you didn’t have to work for, but will get credit for!” I told them I failed to see how that’s a problem. I am not sure they knew I was kidding.
I know India is a dirty, dangerous place, but we were safe and unthreatened the whole time in Chamba. The second time we went to the shops in town, I was able to roam freely on my own. I got funny looks from locals for being dressed weird. But never felt creeped on. The Hindu religion seems peaceful and relatively all-encompassing (compared to most other faith traditions). My kids were wondering about the suicide rate here, and we guessed it was significantly lower than the USA. One of them suggested, “There’s just so much less disappointment.” I can personally attest to how true that is. Sometimes what brings you to your knees in life isn’t dramatic or sophisticated forms of devastation; it’s just disappointment.

There are a lot of things here I don’t want to forget

- Rock hard beds and the smell of mothballs
- Pigeons waking me up in the morning
- The fact that all the women wear the same outfit, just in different colors and textures
- The people’s skin
- The children, when asked for their favorite foods, listed things like potato, tomato, lady fingers, and cabbage. Can you imagine American kids eating any of those things?
- How easy it is to make a difference. I was still afraid, deep down, that it would be a joke. It wasn’t. These teenagers really did something here.
- How much I don’t miss beef (or even meat).
- Having to use squat-holes for the bafroom
- Brushing my teeth out of a canteen, which takes forever to refill from the filtration tap outside.
- How good the warm shower feels, even if you have to be careful not to let it in your mouth
- Living without high-fructose corn syrup and how I eventually found myself picking around the chocolate chips in my trail mix to get to the nuts. How awesome it is to stop craving it.
- The sassaman meal they handed out at roadside checkpoints on holidays. It is a form of worship to that god. And it is tasty. They stop your truck and make you take it. It was one of my favorite meals here. I’d take another roadside gift to God any day.
- Going to the shops and buying a knapsack. Indian kids use knapsacks to go to school. However, urban trendy women in the USA use them to wander around town and be trendy in front of each other. Indians don’t know this. The merchant guy almost wouldn’t sell me the knapsack because I’m not an 8 year old boy. Apparently acting like one doesn’t count. Then my translator came over and yelled at him in Hindi for letting me pay full price for it. I am the village idiot in Chamba. I’m like that stupid Russian in the movie Maverick.
- The little school children line up front to back in the school yard as we come down a dirt ramp into the school. They clap for us every morning. One morning, it was awkward and we kinda just stood there. I think the kids wanted us to do something. So to fill the awkward silence I said “GOOD MORNING!!!” Then 55 kids responded to me in unison “Goooood MORNING, maaaaaaam.” I said "I'm a MAAAAM in India!"
- Doxycyclene to prevent malaria actually just makes you fry like scones when the sun even so much as peeks out.
- Men hold hands and walk with their arms around each other in public. It's not gay. It's friendship and it is so refreshing. I wish men in the USA could do that without it being considered gay. Actually, I wish they could just do it either way...but that's another blog.
- I had to say goodbye to the kids and teachers today after six days in school with them. It hurt.

That's all for today....

xo/km