My Family Moves to India

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.

Yes, the food shipment came!

This made all of the Mitchell's happy. In fact everyone is happy about the food now : the staff have their tea, and we have our precious American foods.

The staff celebrated by making a pot of tea, which Arul pronounced "good".

We celebrated by having Spiderman Kraft Macaroni-N-Cheese and Mandarin oranges for dinner. (Well that was the kids; parents haven't had dinner yet).

Of course in typical India fashion, there was no advance warning about the food shipment arriving. It pulled up just as our little meet-n-greet swim party was breaking up, which amounted to a great deal of chaos. But, it was such a nice ending to what started out as a crummy day! First the company of E and C - comparing food shops, which ones have wormless broccoli and which ones have decent cheese, let alone meat; and of course comparing funny (and not so funny) little incidents. And then the food truck arrived! Maybe life will settle into more a normal groove now that we can have the occasional Mexican dish.

During our little chat there were about 10 kids swimming in the pool. It was wonderful to see them having such a great time. This house was built for entertaining; it feels so natural to do so here.

The crummy part was that I woke up in pain at the cancer site again. Really, it takes so long to heal from radiation. Jan 2nd was my last treatment, and I still have occasional days of swelling, pain, and heat. (The breast runs a fever.) The skin will never be the same, but I am resigned to that; at least the skin damage doesn't hurt any more, and it's not a publicly viewable area . They do say 6 months to a year to heal completely....so I keep hanging on to that. Truthfully, it is much better than it was. It's just a slow process.

So I was pretty grouchy when I dropped a (sobbing) J off and tried to go to L's teacher appreciation party. But we got through it and even made it to the grocery store for the tea. (This is the advantage of a good driver, ladies - he hangs on to the overstimulated 5 year old while you run in and buy some food.) The funny part is that I was so tired, and doped up for the pain, that I accidentally texted S's driver instead of S himself - something along the lines of "Rough day. Where R U?" (I wasn't sure if S was at the plant, 2 hours away, or in his city offices.) This set off a long chain reaction of messages - including a reply to me from Sudhakar saying that he was with Sir at the plant - and phone calls (I guess the driver even phoned his wife to see if I was OK. ) They both had a good laugh about it on their way home.

Ah well. At least I can provide some comic relief.

I'm really liking my cheesy NASA take-off theme.

No, we're not aborting the move. But it does look like the house deal is in the tank. Without going into too many details - and risking slander charges, ha ha - let's just say that I'd give it a 50/50 chance of going through.

Which, today, seems like it may not be such a bad thing, despite the wasted money, energy, and time spent looking for houses in February. If we get there with no house, then we'll look again. As of today, several nice, big apartments in complexes with pools have come on the market. There are also a couple of big new homes out where we were looking. None of ads mention running water or electricity, but hey, we'll deal with that when we look at them.

Yesterday, though, was my day for a supernova meltdown. I overdid it on Wednesday sorting the garage, and was tired and very sore (you'd be amazed how many muscles there are connected to your breast. So I was grouchy. And when the e-mail came in about the house "issues", I had a "discussion" with my husband and we moved the pack date back a week. It may not even affect when our container gets to Chennai, but it gives me the luxury of having the time and energy to sort all the interior of the house. That way, we won't get there with the ice skates and kitchen trash packed in our shipment.

After about 14 hours of sleep I feel better.

So as of today, we leave IL around the 10th. The packers come the 5th. And L has the 5th, 8th, and 9th off of school. Hmmmmmm.....how much you wanna bet he gets packed too?

For another look at how househunting in Chennai works, check out this blog.
http://www.scottcarneyonline.com/blog/2007/02/abandon-all-hope-ye-who-enter-chennai.html

I especially like the parallel with Dante's inferno that the author draws.

Stay tuned,

T