Viratnagar is both cold and foggy in the early mornings. My limbs take some time to adjust to the cold as I hop out of bed every morning. My Dad and I woke up early and walked over to the Bal Ashram at around 7:00am. I then chatted with Lasya, the new on-site counselor, during our morning chai time. I must say that Bal Ashram is turning me into a chai person. The concept of sipping on chai and dipping your biscuit is relaxing and encourages me to bond with the people around me for some reason.
After many requests from the boys, I whipped out my film camera today and carried it around with me everywhere I went. I clicked a few pics of the boys and one with someone new I met today - Julia. Julia has been living at Bal Ashram for 3 months now and has been teaching the children English. She's from Paris, but traveled to Jaipur a couple times, where she met the 3 friends that visited the Ashram today. It's amazing how many new people I've been able to connect with at the Ashram because there is always someone visiting and doing some sort of work.
After chai, it was time to split up into groups and get warm in the fire. I was a part of the Bhagat Singh group. While chatting, one of the kids shrieked and instructed me to turn around and capture a picture of the sunrise 😅. It was so freaking bright and beautiful.
I met some new kids today, who essentially did not leave my side at all for the entirety of the day. My friend circle keeps growing and I am loving it. Learning and remembering all of their names is a bit of a struggle at times, but definitely an acceptable challenge. They made me sit next to them during breakfast, the morning prayer, and were about to make me stay for the entirety of their class as well. I taught another English class today using the children's textbooks. It was mainly vocabulary (such as 'herd,' 'destroy,' 'trap,' 'route,' etc.) and sentence building work. I realized that English is such a difficult language to teach. We have the present tense (i.e. destroy), the past tense (i.e. destroyed), the "occurring" tense? (i.e. destroys), etc. And it is so hard to teach these kids the difference between all of those tenses. I just teach them the word and then cook up some random sentence and hope that that is helping them put everything together.
After lunch, I had a meeting with Meetu Ji and Ikanshi Ji about the work surrounding mental health that I can conduct here at the Ashram with the help of the counselors. That meeting left me feeling energized and ready to implement some of the ideas discussed starting from tomorrow.
For the rest of the day, I spent majority of my time with the children, who were correcting and teaching me Hindi (I learned numbers from 11-20 today in Hindi!) and also goofing around with me. One of the kids came up to me - practically choking in laughter - and pointed at his shoes. He was wearing his sneaker on one foot and some other kid's shoe on his other foot. It's the little things that bring a lot of joy here and I am here for it.
After playing badminton and cricket with the boys, I joined in on their English class. We played 'Spin the Bottle,' and whoever the bottle lands on had to introduce themselves in English. It was funny watching the children attempt to speak in English and then asking me to translate their Hindi to English for Julia to understand. My broken Hindi comprehension was valuable to some extent in this situation LOL.
The best part of the day was dinner. During dinner, all the little kids flocked around me and wanted to speak to me about anything at all, with their mouths full of dal and their hands covered in rice. They are so insanely wholesome - my heart is healing every day I spend time with these boys. The older boys clung to my Dad and supposedly asked him about his journey to the U.S. and what he had to go through being an immigrant. Each and every single boy is so eager to learn both within the classroom and outside.
I realized that these boys might not be accustomed to seeing people who look like them - fellow Indians - living in foreign areas. For them, Indians are people who only live in India. However, seeing my Dad and especially me, I think they realized that it is possible for Indians to live abroad or anywhere they wish. I hope that we've given their dreams some wings and are encouraging them to let their dreams fly and not restrict them to any extent.
I'll end this post with this one thing one of the older kids said to me as we wrapped up dinner and convened outside of the dining hall. He told me that despite all of the people that often visit the Ashram, he has never spoken to someone as much as he has spoken to me. Truly melted my heart because I live for children and I adore the absolute crap out of them. Hearing him say that further amplified my desire to work with children as a part of the Foundation and also once I become a doctor. Helping them physically & mentally as well as encouraging them to become agents of change for society is and will always be my lifelong dream, ambition, and goal.
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