We had a day off from teaching as the schools were off for a Muslim holiday. Stephen said between the Muslim, Hindu and Catholic holidays, schools and government offices are closed for about 25 days each year.
Sr Rose had invited us to join the kids for a trip to the countryside to visit one of Dr Sr Rexline’s projects. She is building a farmhouse complete with animals and 30 acres of land for crops. We had all the Assisi Illam children (about 30 in total) piled into a bus. The bus ride was a blast. Every time someone saw a train, everyone would yell, “train, train!” with excitement. There was even more excitement for airplanes. As we passed through tolls, all of the children would wave and say hello. I had one kid on my lap and one at my side leaning on my the entire way. We stopped at a church at the base of a mount on the way. It was too hot to walk up to the top (I was the only one that wanted to anyway) but we arrived just in time for mass. I sat with the children in the front of the church, which was given in Tamil. I was impressed with how well the children sat through mass, especially having so many of them so close together without a parental unit.
The kids had a blast playing at the farmhouse, they have so much energy that they needed to get out. I love witnessing the creative games that these children come up with. I haven’t seen one child play video games since I’ve gotten here.
The next stop was the beach in Chennai. I had never been to this beach, so I was just about as excited as these children were. As soon as they were off the bus, they ran for the water. Several beggars followed us around; I know I was a target being white and all. We also seemed to get a lot of looks; they were probably wondering what Westerners were doing with so many Indian children. We drew a line on the shore and didn’t allow the kids to step past it. We stood and waiting for the water to it. There were a few big tides that got us wetter than we anticipated. We had a bit of a picnic snake and we played on the beach a bit before returning home.
On our way home back to the guesthouse, we volunteers were commenting on how tired we were. We couldn’t imagine that Sr Rose and Sr Matilda still had to feed these kids and put them to bed. Bless their hearts.
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