Jemma on India...

Well we’ve just done a 6 hour car drive and are about to start our 7 hour flight to get ourselves off to Turkey. Here’s a summary of my thoughts while here in India. It has been a really awesome time here! Some of us love it so much that we don’t want to leave. The culture here is incredible, the colours are so vibrant. We went to the Taj Mahal on Tuesday (26th May), it was extravagantly beautiful...How much more wonderful it would have been when it was first built! We have been on Indian trains twice. They are an experience, but we enjoyed it. It was great to be able to see the Indian country side, and to see the people as they live their lives. To pass time (one train was 5 hours long) we told of our dream homes we got pretty extravagant towards the end, as ideas were borrowed from previous people. We have to wear these cool Indian clothes, they are really beautiful. Whoowee, the traffic is scary at times, its surprising there isn’t more accidents. As Loren said ‘road signs and lines are just suggestions’ how true that is. People drive their cars into oncoming traffic, possibly life threatening but hey, it’s India! We manage to fit about 8 adults in a rickshaw at one time, but we also had one other time where we had 4 adults along with 18 children in one tiny little rickshaw. We have spent the last week doing a summer program with children, there is normally about 50 or so that show up, on our last day we had 70! They truly are very fun to be around, they are just so joyful and excited all the time. They have given us all a gift of some kind, I myself have been given a little Elephant and a lot of paintings by the children and little pieces of jewelry. I only wish that we had been able to speak to the children ourselves, and not through a translator. I hope that we have been able to impart some love into their lives, they deserve it. Our hosts here have been incredible, they are very hospitable and fun to be around! Please keep us in your thoughts as we go on to our next location.