Dirty Clothing BINGO

Wednesday, December 21

It's hard to be in two places at once, but I've always been one to try and everything seems to work out. In this case, I had been missing teaching at GRACE school in the morning. I had opted to go to Assisi and spend time with Jasmine and the other kids. We were able to work it out so that I could teach for one day this week, and that's how my morning began. The children and staff of GRACE school's faces lit up when I arrived to help out. Ester, the principle was upset that I had not come earlier in the week, but she was excited and surprised to see me nonetheless. The older children were working on their exams. I was assigned to a group of four five-year-olds for the morning. Two hours of teaching the same kids at that level got a bit tiring; I was relieved when our time was up.

The plan was to head to Assisi after lunch to join Joelle and the kids until Stephen got a call that Joelle was headed to the hospital. She had a horrible reaction to something that bit her arm. Stephen wanted to check on her and I came with...on his motorcycle. Yes, I experienced darting through Indian traffic on a motorcycle. We were greeted my Dr Sr Rexline, the founder of the hospital who also founded Assisi Illam. She's quite an amazing woman and I've had the opportunity to visit with her on each trip. Joelle got some sort of shot and medication for the small price of 200 rupees (equivalent to $4)...which is less than the cost of my beer at dinner.

Joelle went home to rest and Stephen dropped me off at Assisi. I had to entertain the children myself, so I turned on some music and taught them a few dance moves. We had a blast.

Later that night, the team went to SEAM to continue on the inventory project focusing on the boys clothing and personal hygiene products. The boys brought their trunks or duffel bags full of clothing down into the courtyard and we counted how many pairs of pants, shorts, shirts, underwear (if any) they had along with toothbrush, soap, comb and towel. To make things even more chaotic, there was a large amount of dirty clothing in a community pile that had to be accounting for. So this is what we did: we gathered all of the boys into the hall with their trunks of clean clothing and divided out the

inventory sheets for the children between the five volunteers sitting at the front of the room. We brought in the massive pile of dirty laundry and had one of the boys lift up the laundry piece by piece and the kids would shout out who it belonged to. Once the kid was identified, they'd come forward to the volunteer who was holding their sheet and they'd add it to their inventory card. It felt like we were playing a practical game of BINGO. Once the child was identified, we'd have to determine which volunteer was holding their inventory card. It may not seem like it, but this was a TON of fun. I couldn't keep from laughing.

After this was all sorted out, the girls were invited into the hall and I passed out the pictures that I had taken of each child individually the day before. The kids LOVED these pictures. They were wanting us to take pictures of them holding their picture. The kids treated these photos as if it was one of their most prized possessions, which it might very well be.