a break from the city

the last few days have been......eventful. on tuesday night we worked at daya don and there is a little boy there who can't be more than year old and has downs syndrome. after dinner i was putting his in his crib for the night when i realized that this little guy doesn't get held every night or rocked to sleep, no one sings sweet little songs over his crib when he's restless. so i picked him up and walked around with him and sang to him until he seemed to get sleepy. we all say that all people are equal and that handicapped people have just as much value, but it is so evident in that orphanage that they don't. if they did bashkar wouldn't be there, he would have never been abandoned or some family would have wanted him, but he will never be "normal" so he stays in his crib, just another orphan.
yesterday was exciting as well. if there are any avid blog readers out there see if you can follow me here. urmilla is jorah's sister as well as the wife of the guy we've taken to the doctor and bought medicine for, her family lives on sudder street and we gave them money to go to their village for a few days over christmas. on wednesday she asked stephen and i if we wanted to come to her village with her for the day on thursday and she would cook a big indian meal for us. i think she offered to do this as a thank you for all we've been able to do for her and her family. so we thought, only one day, sounds like an adventure, so we told her we'd meet her at 7am the next morning and go to the train station. we got up early and ate breakfast then met urmilla and her three year old daughter and left for the train. from stories i'd heard last time i was here i knew that in most cases that when you go to the village with a homless person you'll pay for yourself and them, but that was ok with us. so you can understand our surprise when she payed for her own train ticket, which was all of 7 rupees (about 40 rupees make a dollar). while we were waiting for our train i noticed that stephen looked a little under the weather, but he hadn't slept very well the night before and we got up early so i didn't worry about it. we caught our train and forced our way to a few crowded seats where stephen continued to decline. at this point i started asking what was wrong and he said that he was feeling achy and he was cold. i found this rather alarming since i wasn't the least bit cold, and if you know stephen and i you'll know that i get cold when it's like 75 outside and stephen goes shirtless in the snow. i tried to keep him warm, but there wasn't much i could do until we got off the train. our ride ended up being a little less than an hour and we arrived in kalikapur, urmilla's village. as we weaved our way through the streets stephen told me that he was continuing to feel worse. we finally got to the house that her children live in while they go to school that their aunt her daughter also live in. urmilla set to work right away cooking us breakfast over their little clay fire pit/stove. she made us each an egg sandwich like thing that could have fed a family. after one bite stephen said there was no way that he could eat his and not get sick, so we managed to tell urmilla, who speaks very broken english, that he wasn't feeling well and couldn't eat it. thankfully it didn't appear that this hurt her feelings at all and she rushed stephen into the house and made him lay down and cover up with a fleece blanket. he continued to feel bad and dozed on and off for an hour or two while we talked and i looked around. each time i went to check on steve i felt to see if he had a fever and finally about 11am i checked there was no doubt about it, he was blazing, so i called urmilla in there and told her that he had a fever and she became very upset. she told me that we had to go to the doctor and get him medicine immediately. so off we went weaving back through the village streets to a little pharmacy where she told a man that she needed medicine for fever and body pain so he gave us six pills, three to take with lunch and another three with dinner, and again urmilla paid for them, it did only cost 8 rupees though. since we were already back in the heart of the village urmilla picked up some stuff for lunch at the market with the money we'd given her to buy us food. she decided we'd have fish. we came to a man with a bucket of fish and she pointed to one, then to my surprise he pulled it out and smashed it against his dull blade until the head came off. he continued this until it was all cut up and then he wrapped it in plastic and gave it to me. once it was cooked it was great, but i kept having flash backs of the guy smashing it's head as i ate. anyway, we went back to stephen and had him eat a little rice and take the first dosage of the medicine. to be honest we didn't have a lot of faith in it, the ethnocentric part of us came out and we thought how can cheap indian medicine work on stephen? but two hours later we had our answer when his fever broke and he finally re-emerged from the house to join me for our rice and fish feast. he continued to feel better and was back to normal by the time our train left at 5. we spent the afternoon taking pictures like celebrities with all the kids in the village and awed them with the video capabilities of our camera.
you may think, oh how awful, but really being in urmilla's village was the best place for stephen to get sick. it was quiet, and full of clean air (of which there is none in kolkata), and i never would have thought to go to an indian pharmacy and get medicine, but it worked and steve-o is back to himself today. God continues to take care of us and knows just what to do and where to take us each day. that was definitely evident yesterday.
please pray that:
1. we'd continue to be healthy
2. we'd know who to give money/things to and who not to
3. we'd have patience and compassion for people that lie to and manipulate us (ie. tell us they need milk or blankets for their baby and then sell them back for half the price, after telling us they won't sell them back)
thanks!
kristen