Nallai Pakkalam!

Back from another tour of painting duty. We’re chugging along nicely, and nearly painted a first coat in the entire dining area we’re working on this week. We also took along a suitcase full of our donations today, sorted and divided amongst the handful of sites we’re all working at these next few weeks. At St. Joseph’s, we brought clothes, diapers, soap, shampoo and hair ties and pins for the girls. The sisters were very thankful.

 As we did yesterday, Rick and I used one of our breaks to sneak down to the day care to say Hi to the children. Yesterday, they greeted us with total mayhem…screaming and jumping and clustering all around. The teachers were all very sweet, but we had a feeling we were interrupted the flow of their lunchtime to naptime, so we kept it short. One of the teachers, today, brought some of her children to visit us (they were around the ages of 3 to 6) after our lunch break and they sang us songs (”Teddy bear, Teddy bear turn around….”) and we went over the English words for eyes, mouth, teeth, etc.  They were a trip — so beautiful, so absolutely full of energy and excited for new company.

So as not to cause the same commotion as we’ve been causing, we’re planning to have 2 to 3 kids each during break tomorrow to play and sing with.

At the Southeast Asian Mission (SEAM) last night, I spent most of my time practicing conversational English with two teenaged girls, Sukanya, 14, and Rebecca, 18. They wanted nothing to do with the relay races the younger ones were enthralled with (kids games, the girls said). And they weren’t interested in the algebra lesson Ginny, a retired teacher, was giving the older boys. (The lesson was a sight to see, though. Ginny has such a knack with the kids. And I’ve never seen teens so excited, so eager to learn math — bouncing on their toes, reaching for the chalk board. It was really cool).

So amidst all that, I sat with Sukanya and Rebecca and did my best to strike up a steady flow of conversation about anything I could possibly think of. Sukanya told me that she wants to be a doctor when she grows up, and that her favorite subject in school is English. “Because I am good at it,” she says. When I ask what she knows about America, she thinks a moment, puts her hand to her chin, raises her eyes to sky and says, “Mmmmm.. Abaraham Lincoln! Good man!”

Rebecca tells me she has finished her basic schooling and is now in typing class.  She says she’s one of the fastest typers in the class and is confident she’ll pass her exam next month. She’d like to become a secretary, maybe for her sister, who is studying law.

“Sister!” Rebecca says to me. “Now we ask you!”

And so they ask where I’m from, what I do for work, what the stretchy band on my wrist is (when I use the hair tie to bunch my hair high into a bun, as I often do, they giggle as if to say, “Yeah, Dude. Bad hair choice.”)

“How old are you?” Rebeccas asks. I tell the girls to guess.

“Twenty-five,” she says. I raise my thumb up to indicate it’s higher than that, and her eyes widen. “Mmmmm….Twenty seven?” she asks, as if to say please, you’re not that old are you? Higher, I gesture. “Thirty?” I tell her yes, and the girls giggle.

“Sister, are you married?” Sukanya asks. I tell her no, and again they crumble into stunned giggles. They say in India, most girls are married by 21. “What about America?” Sukanya asks. I explain there is no real set age, a woman could get married at 21, 25, 30 or 40 — or maybe never at all. More giggles.

The girls are interrupted by a woman who works at SEAM to help prepare dinner, boiling over a pit fire outside.

And so we all wrap up the evening in the hall (used at night for the boys to sleep on the floor, on mats) playing sing-a-long games and Simon Says (can’t get enough of that Simon!) When we leave, it’s a chours of “Byyyyyeeeeee!”, and they run up to hug us and give us high-fives.

And we say to them, “Nallai Pakkalam!” (”See you tomorrow!”)