Birthday Celebration

Tuesday, December 20:

I was reminded how India isn't much different than the states this morning when our yoga instructor took a call in the middle of class. Luckily we were in between poses. :)

Roshan, Stephen and Sheeba's 3-year old son, is taking a liking to me. He insists on sitting by me at meals and he tends to get his way. Having him around sure makes things interesting. At breakfast we plan out the days activities and read the team journal from the day before. I really enjoy mealtime together. It brings be back to my childhood where my family of 7 shared meals together. When there's this many people together, there are endless possibilities of where the conversation will turn. Maybe that's why I enjoy dinner parties.

Today was an extra special day at Assisi as it was Jasmine's 5th birthday. I was really excited to be able to spend a birthday with her. Jasmine was dressed in a special birthday outfit and she was the center of attention all day long (nothing new here :)). We picked up a delicious cake to share. After she blew out her candles she fed me my first bite of cake. yum yum. I gave Jasmine her birthday and Christmas gifts of a Jasmine Doll (from Aladdin), a Cabbage Patch Doll (something I always wanted as a child but never got) and a photo book that I made with pictures from my last trip. I was impressed that she wanted to look through the book and name the people in each picture before playing with her new dolls. The first thing she did with the Cabbage Patch Doll was redo her hair, which wasn't a surprise, as Jasmine's been doing my hair every chance she gets.

We started working on a paper mache project with the kids. They loved getting their hands in the glue and glue ended up everywhere. Jasmine helped me wash up. She took my hand and scrubbed it with soap, scrubbed my hand with a brush, rubbed my hand against their concrete washboard and rinsed it out. She went through this routine twice on each hand to assure that they were clean enough. This might have been the highlight of my day.

Jasmine's a fantastic helper, always eager to help clean up without being asked. I think she actually enjoys cleaning.

On the walk over to SEAM I ran into one of the children who is no longer staying there, Monie. It was great to reconnect with him and I was happy to see that he was doing well.

Our big project at SEAM is to do an inventory of all of the children's clothing and belongings. The boys were getting haircuts, so we focused on the girls today. Each girl had all of their belongings in a box (which I help build last year) under their bed. The girls were excited to show us their clothing and it was our job was to make sure that it still fit and was in good enough condition to wear. Cloths were either accounted for and kept, discarded, or if in good enough condition, placed into a pile for someone else to wear. Ammu, one of the youngest girls had two adult sized nightgowns that she insisted on keeping and I couldn't argue.

We were also checking for underwear, combs, hair accessories, toothbrushes, and soap. The girls were lucky to have 2 or 3 pairs of underwear and their toothbrushes where often buried under heaps of clothing which makes me think they don't get much use. Our next project is teaching them personal hygiene.

One common frustration that the volunteers have is not knowing the children's names. It means the world for the kids for us to know them by name. They are constantly running up to us asking, "my name is??" Many of the kids look alike and their names are not common to us, so I decided to do something about this. I took pictures of all kids yesterday and had them printed out and put up two poster boards in the guest house of the 36 kids with their names written beneath their picture. I also made a sticker coding system to mark which ones are brother and sister. I'm really pleased with how it turned out.