My Family Moves to India

Well, we have had such a busy time of it with my sister visiting that I haven't had a lot of energy left to blog! I thought I would do a quick catch-up for people who want to know the latest and greatest.

E arrived home last week....full of sass and energy, as always. In the manner of youth she recovered quickly from jet lag, and has already picked out her next love interest here. She had a good visit home, and now her focus is once again on graduating from AISC and getting accepted into a US college.

A new family with our company arrived in Chennai on the same day as E, and we are excited to have them here! Welcome!

School starts tomorrow for the kids. (Whew!) The break has been a good one since A has been visiting, but I'm ready for the routine to start again. It will be nice to have some quieter time with my sister.

J has been growing a fairy garden, making a book (it's getting quite long and involved!), playing with Raeshma, and doing a lot of swimming. L has been swimming, biking, running, swimming....you get the picture. He has decided that black is a "soldier's color" and so wants to wear nothing but his black jeans (often caked with mud up the back, when he has been biking through the puddles). The other day he put two entire sets of clothes on - pants and T-shirts - so he would "look bigger". Ah, boys.

We decided to get rid of two of the guards, as we just had too many people around. The guards don't do anything anyway except open the gate and keep L from leaving the compound. S made the call in the morning and by afternoon, the two we designated were gone. That's the fastest anything has ever happened in India!! We're betting that the guard company sent them to the new family who moved here, since we know that they are always short of guards (on purpose).

We're going to Thailand at the end of the month and meeting up with S's mother and stepfather, as well as sister and brother-in-law, and then his mother and stepfather will join us in Chennai for a week. After that we have a week in Coonnoor (hill station) scheduled when the heat strikes, and then after school ends in June we are planning to visit my family. Lots of travel to put together.

I spent Saturday night "worshipping the porcelein God", as Bill Cosby puts it, and am still resting up, although I feel much better. Poor A has it now. We had planned on gardening today but I think we will take it easy instead.

Speaking of gardening, with A here my interest in re-doing the hodgepodge affair that I've got in the back yard has regenerated. We spent Saturday at various nurseries - plants are SO CHEAP here! Now we have some nice specimens to put on the various patios and the rooftop terrace. Next we tackle the vegetable garden and the mish-mash of plantings in the yard. More on that to come...

The list of broken things around the house is once again growing - currently on it is the washer (mildew smell ); dryer (shocking people ); Airtel card (I'm borrowing S's); and one of the landlines (yeah, we just got one fixed and the other goes down.... ). Still no high-speed cable line out here for the internet - even though we are going on 9 months of promises ("10 days, Madame" is their favorite time frame). Yeah right. So I have lots of phone calls to make - better get started on some.

J's puppy is named Ginger. She's a small, brown, short-haired mutt, a carbon copy of millions of other street dogs. They all are pretty much the same - short hair, curled-up tail, medium size. They look remarkably like Basenjis without the wrinkled forehead. I don't think that they groom themselves or yodel, as Basenjis do, but they are very quiet dogs. You don't hear them barking very often at all.

What Ginger lacks in pedigree she more than makes up for in personality. She is a friendly, loveable dog that some friends found abandoned and covered with ticks around the age of 1 month. They cleaned her up and fed her, but couldn't keep her. So now she is ours. Sadly, because of my allergies, she has to live outside - but she's sleeping with the driver's family and has three guards to keep her company all night, so she's not exactly lonely. Of course, J is also spending every second she can with her.

It seems that Tamils like dogs. Everyone on the property was universally thrilled to see her. They all also informed me that she needed milk, rice, and no air conditioning. (They are convinced that the AC in the house killed the cats.)

E is off on a 3-day Young Single Adult conference in another city. She is having a blast. It is good to hear that she is so happy and is making some friends. She has finished a couple of applications to colleges in the US, and we're hoping for an early decision. She's finding school here challenging but a lot of students find the AISC curriculum more difficult than they expected (including J).

L continues to challenge all the rules and test our love for him. I revisited some of the RAD literature this week and found myself refreshed and able to cope better. I also rejoined my on-line support groups. Still, it's difficult to know what to do with him.

I also am taking a trip. I found a chiropractor in Bangalore, which was the final impetuous for me to take my long-wished-for weekend away. Well, it's actually only 24 hours - but hey, baby steps, right? Not as good as a weekend with my sisters, but I'm excited!

Today we had our first, and only, primary program practice. The program is next week. Generally you work the entire year on it, but hey, this is India; two week's notice ought to be enough, right? Thankfully, the two orphanages that church members run must teach hymns incessantly, because the older children (who are mainly from these orphanages) know most of the songs. So I threw a program together, directly from the outline, and off we went. My husband acted as "primary bouncer", asking gawping onlookers to leave us in peace (everything in India must be done accompanied by a crowd of uneccessary onlookers) and keeping the two wildest boys controlled. Somewhat. Of course one of those boys is our son. Next week, he is soley in charge of those two boys. Poor S.

Speaking of everything in India being an (unecessary) group effort, I wish that I had video of my guards and I planting a couple of pot plants last night. I enjoy gardening very much and so was hoping that I could convince them to let me do it myself, but apparently Madame with her hands dirty is just too much. Plus two of them are former farmers/gardeners, so of course they had a non-stop argument (well it sounds like they are arguing, but I have discovered that one of the features of Tamil is that you must talk loudly over each other and repeat yourself at least six times, so it really wasn't an argument. Just normal communication.) One insisted that the dirt that I bought (remember we live on the beach, so I wanted something more nourishing than sand) was too rich and needed mixing with some sand. The other didn't like the way that they were putting the plants in the pot.

I couldn't help it. At one point I started imitating them, flapping my hands around and saying "ile! ile!" ("No! No!") repeatedly. They took the ribbing well; we had a good laugh. Seriously, when they get going, it resembles a three ring turkey circus.

So at long last the pots were finished, and despite their efforts, I DID get my hands dirty. ha ha. But I noticed that no one bothered to water the poor things, as I instructed. Ah well. Guess that's something that I can do.

J also bought a little plant, and we bought a small rose bush for her friend R. Plants are tremendously cheap here. Amazing. I'm very excited to see how they do.

L....well, books could be written about L. He demonstrated to me last night how he uses he mini-tramp to catapault between the marble benches that line our driveway. Hmmm....no wonder his shins are covered with bruises! Last week he got into major trouble because he started the van and tried to drive off. Major, major trouble. This was after the experimenting with fire incident. sigh.

Meanwhile, he continues to do moderately well at school. He made a hilarious picture the other day, which I will try to post sometime this week.

J is happy, although she didn't want to go to our first ever Indian wedding this last week. My driver's brother got married. It was sheer chaos. 800 people were there. Only 200 would fit in the wedding hall, so they had the ceremony 4 times over, and fed folks in shifts. The ceremony itself was unintelligible, but did involve yellow string and garlands. It was a Christian Tamil marriage, so the Bible was also involved. Oh, and someone sang a Christmas hymn at the end. We sat and smiled and dripped sweat and had our pictures taken like we were celebrities. Then we congratulated the bride and groom (more pictures) and went down to eat. My considerate driver had ordered pizza and pop especially for us - which of course my picky children wouldn't touch, as it was spicy pizza - but we guzzled down the biryanhi with the best of them. (Except J, who wouldn't touch even the bananas. But that's J.) We brought our own water and stuck with the cooked foods, and amazingly, we were NOT SICK the next day! (Except for L, who of course ignored his mother's instructions not to drink the local water. Being L, all he got was a short stomachache.)

If it hadn't been a two-hour drive through traffic and extremely hot, we might have taken some pictures. But as it was, photography was too much effort.

E was our cultural guide during the event. She wore a beautiful blue sari and looked wonderful, although I heard later that the maids (who helped her dress) thought it too plain and wanted to laon her one of their silk ones.

E finished volleyball this week, on a disappointed note, as she doesn't qualify to play in the international tournaments because she is over 18. So her coach quit playing her in the local games too. She has decided not to do soccer, and is going to concentrate on her SAT studying and homework. The big news is that she DID get her tourist visa to return home to GA and see her family over Christmas. She is one happy girl.

S works. Work, work, work, work, work...........what can I say?

And I run around and have fun, although I am a bit stressed by the house these days. Two major things have broken in the last week (leaky window and an electrical breaker). Plus, we are still not unpacked! I can't believe how long it takes to get that done when you face constant home maintenance issues! Our food shipment came last week, which added 13 boxes to the unpacking, and our emergency kit got left on the roof (blog about "Tsunami Warning" coming up) and rained on, so it had to be unpacked, dried, and re-packed. (One of those times that you really appreciate having maids, even if they can't do the dishes properly. ) I just finished re-packing the emergency kit tonight. Three steps forward, two steps backward. Ah well.

Also I have had a relief driver, and let me tell you, only another expatriate woman in India would understand the stress and hassle that involves. If Arul, my regular guy, had been here, L NEVER would have had access to the car keys!!

But Arul comes back tomorrow, and Sir has declared that He Shall Have a Raise. (Sir is tired of me having the come-aparts about the relief drivers. One of them even tried the old commission trick on me, driving me to a store instead to the school to pick L up.) Lucky Arul. That ought to make up for all of the repairs that are stacked up for him to take care of.

The wonderful news is that two new American families have moved in, and I am so enjoying their company. A just got here with her 4 kids, and P has been here a few weeks - P works with me in primary, and thanks to here, the children have a shot at singing decently! I'm so excited to have them here.

I've also started to treat myself to a weekly massage. I'm having back pain - I need a chiropractic adjustment badly - but there are no chiropractors here. So I figure the next best thing is a massage. It's amazing how good it makes me feel, mentally as well as physically. After 33 sessions of baring my breast to a handsome radiology tech, lying perfectly still while they poured nuclear poison into it, it's sooooooo nice to have something done that isn't going to bring me more pain. Cancer really does change your perspective. It's erased a lot of my negative body image feelings, as well as some of my modesty. I'm just happy to be alive, and not in constand pain.

1. Biryanhi Party II, or, the Mitchell's wild weekend party house ;
2. J's classical Tamil dance class, which has a long Tamil name that I am too tired to look up ;
3. Our new foster daughter, E., and How We Became Psuedo-parents of a High School Senior Literally Overnight .