Follow Me Around the World

Today would be a special day in that the group would be visiting a girl’s ashram.  An ashram is like an orphange where caretakers provide for girls.  This particular one had 46 girls ranging from 2-3 all the way up to 13.  After 13 they are placed in homes, hopefully or in other types of half way houses.  Now before we came to India, the program director told us to bring some stuff for the girls of this Ashram, so when I was in Mumbai I bought 30 cute hair clips for the girls, which I thought was nice and a sufficient gift for them.  So after lunch at around 230PM we all started to fill the bags like a ford motor company old school conveyor belt.  Each person had their own job and mine was to distribute my gifts and fill bags.

At around 4PM all of us got in to jeeps and smaller cars and started our journey to the Ashram.  Now I wasn’t aware but the ride was approximately 21 kilometers away which doesn’t seem that far (about 12 miles I think), but since you drive slow along the mountain, winding left and right, it took 1.5 hours to get there.  Once we arrived we were warmly greeted by the girls, the indian students made themselves useful to introduce us as a group and we started to hand out the presents.  The look on the girls faces was worth every penny and the 1.5 hour journey to the Ashram.  Every single girls absolutely loved their bag of goodies.  We spent the remaining time taking pictures with the girls, playing with them with the toys we had just given them and then we exchanged dances and songs.  We decided to show them the Hokey Pokey and the second time the girls joined us.  Many of them could follow along while I helped a 3 year old girl do it, it was really cute to see.

After that the oldest girl in the Ashram sang a beautiful song with I recorded, did a Bollywood dance from a famous movie, along with songs and then another group did a little dance, all of which I videotaped.  After that we started to say our goodbyes which was emotional for some of the girls in the touro program.  They felt a connection to these girls and it was hard to say goodbye.

The way home definitely felt like it took a lot shorter, maybe only 45 minutes, as we didn’t really stop much and the cars infront of us were going a lot faster.  Once I got back,  I went to dinner, tried to do some reading, but just ended up hanging out with people around the hotel.

Tomorrow, weather permitting I am supposed to hang out with those four local boys again who are supposed to take me to another hill station for some food, drink and good time, that is what I’m talking about!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 2:33 am and is filed under 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.