Two days worth of rambling

Yesterday, I woke up with a headache, probably from not sleeping much from the people doing strange things with glass bottles nearby. So, we spent the morning laying around and reading the Lord of the Rings. The headache went away by about lunch time so we decided to go work at Daya Dan, the home for severely handicapped orphans and abandoned children.

We got there, and since I was well prepared to be overwhelmed by Kristen's stories, it wasn't nearly as crazy as I expected. It also helped that as soon as we got there, a nun handed me a bag of laundry and put me to work with washing clothes and bed sheets. First I had to sort out sheets that were just wet from sheets that had visible clumps of poo. Then, I washed the wet ones until my overseer decided that I was too slow at washing and sent me to hang up clean clothes to dry. It was kind of peaceful up on the roof with the half-clean smelling laundry drowning out the normal smell of Kolkata. I could even partially see a game of cricket going on in a schoolyard.

After that, we spent some time downstairs with the kids who had just finished eating and were going to bed. We mostly went around to the beds/cribs and talked to them and held hands while they "napped". Several of the children were still there from when Kristen was here before, but none of them remembered her. We worked with a couple from somewhere in europe that we'd seen at breakfast one morning. Apparently, if you're from europe, you're required to have the most ridiculous haircut you can brainstorm. The guy we worked with was no exception. But that's beside the point. It was actually really relaxing to be around the kids and play with the ones who could play, and just sit with the ones who couldn't. Only one of them tried to bite me and that was because I couldn't tell her in Bengali that my arms were too tired to flip her 60 pounds over again. There is one boy that is fairly old(15 or 16) who can't really move at all. But he has these big eyes and he just stares holes through you and it's almost like he can talk that way. It was calming just to sit and stare back and try to communicate something through the look. After work, we went to get eggrolls from probably the only food stand I'll miss when we come home. I wish everyone could have one of them. I really think world peace could happen this way. Plus, they're like 20 cents, and almost a whole meal.

Today, the homes were closed for volunteers, like every thursday, so we went to the western shopping centers to mess around. We knew we were in the rich part of town because I saw three ipods within 5 minutes. We got personal pan pizzas for lunch and decided to see what was on at the movie theater. There were two movies in english. The covenant, and the Guardian. We wanted to see the guardian, but it wasn't playing for 6 hours, so we settled for the covenant. Luckily, it only cost $3, because it might have been the cheesiest movie of all time. We had a good two hours making fun of it though. Multiple cell phones went off during the movie, and twice, the guy right behind us just answered it like he would on the street and had full conversations. We thought it was pretty funny.

A little while ago, we were trying to check our email in the upstairs of the internet cafe we're sitting in now, and the electricity went out. It was completely pitch black for about 3 minutes until a guy came up with a candle. It made for a fun conversation with a british guy though. While the power was out, we sat with some people across the street and had chai. It's almost impossible to sit and talk to anyone on the street without them offering you chai. It seems kind of strange for these incredibly poor people to be buying you anything. They make up for it by asking for stuff later, but still. We also ran into a guy we know from working at kaligaht (Ryan, from New Hampshire, who is one of two other americans we have run into) and he asked if we wanted to get in on a secret santa with the other volunteers and go out for dinner or something on christmas. It should be a good time and we're glad to have some people to be with on the 25th. Well, this post has gotten long, and the rupees are piling up (at least 25-30 cents by now), so I guess we'll go back to the room now. The end. Oh, and the power did come back on.
-Stephen