My Family Moves to India

I have a friend with five sons. I once asked her what life with five boys was like, and she replied that her life was the same with five boys as it was when she had no children: there were good days, and bad days.

India is also like that, only with masala (spice) added. There are good days and bad days. Here's a synopsis of my week thus far:

Sunday I taught music and Christianity to 70 children, most from various local orphanages and boarding schools. I got home entirely worn out and slept the day away, much to the exasperation of my husband.

Monday I took the kids to school, came home, and unpacked the last box. Only took me 8 months! I also cleaned off my desk, which resulted in a stack of to-do paperwork about 4 inches high. Life as an expatriate does NOT result in less paperwork.....our visa renewals are due, we had to renew L's passport, reimbursements, bills.....whew. I sense a rainy day of paper-pushing coming up.

Tuesday (today) I started Tamil lessons, and that was fascinating. I learned how to form yes/no questions, all about Tamil verbs (18), and that there are only 7 colors in the Tamil language. That last bit really surprised me, because the colors here are so intense and varied. There is not even a word for "brown" (the phrase used is "mud-colored"). Red, yellow, green, blue, black, white, and purple - that's all you get. They use adjectives to modify these strong hues into pink, light blue, etc.

Another really interesting thing about Tamil, to me, was how closely the grammatical rules follow Japanese. The verb at the end of the sentence is sooooo familiar. The short vowels are pronounced exactly like the Japanese vowels, although there are two dipthongs, which are not present in Japanese. As far as I know the alphabet has no relation to Japanese, but I like to think that the symbols are a little less strange to me because I have memorized the first two Japanese alphabets (Katakana and Hiragana). At least in Tamil the stroke order doesn't seem to matter.

Arul was so thrilled that I was learning Tamil that he promptly bombarded me with Tamil phrases such as "Right now let's go home", and "Go to your house and come back tomorrow". (Those are very rough translations.) I had to finally plead an overflowing brain to get him to stop.....methinks he would rather not converse in English all day.

After my Tamil lesson, I did my dreaded chore - taking the kitten (yes, another kitten) and the puppy to the vet. I don't enjoy this because Ginger (our dog) gets car sick and vomits the entire ride. She has to ride in the only pet crate we own. I had never ridden with Stella, the kitten, before, so I didn't realize how much she also loathes car rides. She yowled and tried to climb on my head the entire drive. Needless to say, they dislike the vet also. The entire ordeal was a surprise to me, because all of my other pets loved car rides and had no issues going to the vet. Perhaps because they always got a treat? At any rate, the surest way to catch our Rottie when she got loose was to open the car door - she would promptly come bounding over, hoping for a ride.

Ah well. Indian dog and cat, I guess.

At any rate, both now have some of their shots and we are doing the worming and defleaing medicines. I purchased my flea medication from the US as there is not much available here. Nothing for cats that I've been able to find, although I've seen some older dog brands (Frontline) in Bangalore and at my vet's. Fleas are not top priority here, but I can't stand them.

The kitten was a surprise - Arul brought it for J one day last week out of the blue. It happened to be in the middle of my mega Thanksgiving dinner cooking marathon, so I just gave it a look and asked Sudhakar to let it live with him for a couple of days. I didn't have time to de-flea and de-worm it before it came into the house, nor did I want it in the house and exposed to the feline distemper before I could get it inoculated. It's a cute cat - a small, 3-month-old female with calico spots. It likes humans and hasn't really moved from the driver's house. I'm hoping that the vaccination will take and it can safely come in the house next week. Fingers crossed.

And the house? Well, it continues to have breakdowns. In the last week the master bathroom's hot water heater has developed a leak, two AC units have broken down, and one more has started leaking into the sitting room. But, we have water and electric, so I'm not too stressed. Some day, I promise myself, I WILL have a house that works....but not in India.

Speaking of not in India - I note that there are violent riots in Paris today. I guess even in the most beautiful, civilized city in the world mobs rule. The grass is never greener.

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.

Hysterical as in funny or hysterical as in out of control? Today was an out-of-control day. It left me hysterical, and not in the laughing sense of the term.

I really had planned on blogging about some of the good things in life. Like how L is getting really good at whistling (he can whistle "Book of Mormon Stories", "Clementine", and "I Am a Child of God"); and J is doing so well in school. Unfortunately, all of those things have been driven out of my mind at the moment.

So let me just vent.

Today is Sunday and we were all excited to go to our new ward building. It's a rented building, but much larger than the old rented building (which if you remember, we got kicked out of when the owners - Muslims - figured out we were Christians. Not sure why they didn't realize that, oh, years ago when they put up the "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints" sign.) I was soooo excited not to have to sit 2 to a seat during sacrament, and to have classrooms! Little did I know.

I did know it was going to be an interesting day because I got about 4 phone calls from different ward leaders throughout Saturday, some coherent and some not. One wanted to tell me that there was a keyboard in the primary room. (Good news) Another told me that I was going to teach 2 hours of music (which is what I've been doing, since there was no classroom space in the old building). And a couple wanted to know if we could come and help clean the new building, which we could not, primarily because S is in Russia for the week and that leaves me doing the single parent thing. Since the building couldn't be cleaned until 2 p.m., is an hour away, and we had plans at 3 p.m., we couldn't help.

We got our chance when we walked in the door at 9:30 this morning though. It seems that between 6 a.m. (when the bishop's family left, after cleaning all night) and 9 a.m. (when people started to come), the water tank holding the baptismal font water burst. It burst because yesterday when they put the water into it, they poured it into the tank before the concrete had set correctly. Science set in and eventually there was hundreds of gallons of water mixed with concrete all over the building.

This was a very, very disheartening sight.

However, our branch president is not one to be daunted. He did not cancel church. While his wife played prelude music, many of the members used peices of cardboard, dustpans, and teeny-tiny Indian whisk brooms to move the water out. The Relief Society president and other people pitched in to try and dry the floors, mainly because tile floors are so terribly slippery when wet. And the kids ran around and had a blast, except for L who diligently helped the elders scoop water and concrete (and ruined his white shirt in the bargain, but what's a mother to say at such a time?)

After about 30 minutes the sacrament room was dry enough to begin services. Arul and I skipped out and bless that man, he knew of a huge department store open on Sundays just down the road. We purchased towels. 50 of them. I know these people thought I was nutters; I was basically hollering "fast! fast!" and jogging down the aisles, trying to get back before I had to teach Primary. (The "fast" was so that they would let me do the entire Indian purchasing routine - it involves at least 6 men, waiting at 2 counters, and 4 floors - in a timely manner.)

But the feeling went both ways - it was some sort of Hindu festival - I won't even begin to try to describe what was going on in the street, except to say that it involved men with steel cages over their upper torsos. To honor the Hindu deity, the store was absolutely foggy with incense, plus they were sprinkling butter and something red (please, not blood!) all over the floor. So I thought they were crazy too.

We parted our separate insane ways, and I got back to the church, where I distributed towels to all who would help, so that we could get the classroom floors dry enough to use them. By that time, there was only about an hour of church left, so we had our usual giant group of kids packed into one room, singing songs. Thank goodness for the other American members who recently moved in; she had an actual lesson prepared, and that went well.

L, of course, was the only one of 45 children who refused to sit down and listen. I have put his fate during church entirely into his father's hands, as if S cannot control him, I will have to ask to serve in a different capacity. L running around is just too distracting to everyone - he turns off the lights, plays with the keyboard, and on and on.

And of course the AC wasn't working in the primary room, so I dehyrdrated myself again. sigh.

I know someday this is going to be funny, but it just doesn't seem that way today. I was really worried that the water was contaminated with sewage, before they assured me that it was from the baptismal font. I'm worried about the drinking water too; it's some off-brand and there is a lot of news about disreputable water companies causing e coli outbreaks. (That's why I dehydrated - I couldn't bring myself to risk the water there, even though it is bottled.) Plus, of course, the heat gets to me, so no AC is really a downer. Having a keyboard is a plus, but I don't play, so I've got to get someone who can play. The primary president is nice but Indian women seem incapable of standing up and leading (how did they get a woman president?) Or maybe they just don't care if the kids run in and out of the room continuously. I don't know. Major cultural differences are going on, and I don't understand them.

So, next week S will be back. He can deal with L. I will try and cope. We will bring our own bottled water and maybe the kids will even hang on to their bottles. sigh.

Meanwhile, the cooking gas at our house has a leak so we can't use the stove. I see a big eating-out bill on its way......

OK. Time to quit whining, and take the kids to dinner. Kudos to you if you lasted this long!

What a day! Here's a summary:

1. We saw our first elephant. Granted, it was riding in the back of a truck which was stuck in a traffic jam, but it was an [I]elephant! I can't wait to see some more when we visit Thekkady in January with Karen, my mother-in-law.

2. I taught my first primary music lesson. (Primary is our church's children's class.) I was pretty nervous since I know nothing about music, and also because in the past the class looked more like a free-for-all than a class, but it went well. Everyone paid attention (well, there were a couple of little boys....including my own....but oh well.) and I was just so happy that they listened! Our congregation is hoping to move into a larger building soon, which will make it much easier on everyone, as the currently we are packed in like sardines - and the AC is out, which makes it miserable.

3. We saw our first beggar using an injured child as bait. This lady brought this little girl up to our car with her head all swathed in bandages with a big bloody spot in the middle of them. I was doubtful of the legitimacy of the child's injury, since she also had black eyeliner on to emphasize her trauma - I chose to believe that the "blood" was also makeup. I hope. Begging is a mafia racket here, and if you give, you are supporting the racket. You are also completely mobbed in seconds. They will hurt children, even maim them permanently, to get gain. It's sickening. I was glad that the children dismissed the injury as a "boo boo" and didn't question why or what.

4. Best of all, we found some kitties. Yesterday we had stopped at a little shop called the "Lovely Pet Shop" only to find out that it only sells pet food. There is also an on-site vet, so I asked him where to find a kitten. He gave the standard Indian answer - "I'll deliver one, Madame, for a fee". (Not in so many words, but that's the system.) However, I had the sense to ask the girl sitting next to him - who was holding a kitten - where she got hers, and she said "from the Blue Cross". I had forgotten that there is an animal rescue society here in India called the Blue Cross.

So, since S had church training all day, the kids and I ventured off into the city to find this place. I was a bit nervous about what we would find - I've heard some horror stories - but actually it was huge, and very clean. They had every kind of animal imaginable - we saw three donkeys, three horses and a foal, two calves, goats, rabbits, birds, a large herd of pigs, and even some guinea pigs! I couldn't believe it - animals starving and roaming the streets, but get picked up by the Blue Cross, and you have enough food to eat and shelter to boot! (Of course you do have to pay to have the Blue Cross pick up an animal - quite a lot, I've heard.)

Anyway, when we called for directions, the gentleman we got on the phone said that they had hundreds of kittens. I thought his English was misleading. I was wrong. They literally had at least a hundred kittens. They had a huge enclosure, the size of a small house, entirely full of kittens. Kittens of every color. Yes, they were skinny - some were downright emaciated - but none were dead. That was a good sign, I thought. And, there was food available to them. Another good sign.

So we walked in the enclosure and picked out our kittens. Originally, J said she wanted a grey one, but she changed her mind and picked out an orange and white one. I picked out an all-white one (yes I know it's probably deaf). We were only going to get two, but at the last minute, I picked a calico one up that was really weak and skeletal - and it purred. My heart was smitten - I just couldn't leave it there. So L got a kitten too. Ha ha.

We brought them home in a canvas bag, cleaned them up, and put them in a small hallway alcove with the necessities. I fed the weakest one with an eye dropper; the other two ate on their own, and the white one even started playing with J before she went to bed. A good sign. I don't know if the one will live, but we tried.

Names? Well, that's a funny one. Originally we named them Edelweiss (mine); Marigold (J's); and Hot Rod Guy (guess). By the end of the day, J and I had "switched" cats because she liked the white one more; so the names became "Snow Princess"; "Marmalade"; and still, "Hot Rod Guy". We'll fix Hot Rod Guy's name if he lives.

Oh yeah. We meant to get all females but Hot Rod Guy turned out to be a male. Oh well.

Did I mention they were free? I guess with hundreds of kittens you don't dare ask for money.....we did pay a small "donation", though. We also tipped the woman who put them in the basket for us, mostly because she wouldn't leave until we did. You gotta make a living somehow.

If I get to a high-speed internet cafe this week, I'll post pictures.