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.

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.

So sit back and grab a cuppa, or skip the post, if you're not in the mood for negativity.

Today was one of those days when the questions rattling around in my brain were: "Why did I have kids?"; "What was I thinking when I agreed to move?"; and most of all, "What did I do to deserve this?"

It's not actually India that is getting to me. It's the kids reaction to India.

Last week I unpacked their toys for them. Today, they said "thank you" by taking every SINGLE toy our of the closet and throwing them all over their room, including their dress-up clothes.

Guess who lost their toy privileges for 2 weeks. (OK, maybe just for one week while daddy is gone - they don't tell time too well yet.) Those locks on all the doors do come in handy.

So I spent the first half of the day putting away all of their toys - again. (yes, S made them help too, but truthfully, they're not that much help.)

The second half of the day, I was diligently plowing my way through my craft area - next on my list to unpack - when suddenly I heard all of this screaming. Not just one person screaming; several people screaming - my name. I went rushing downstairs to find that L had accomplished the inevitable: he had finally injured himself with his wild antics. Yep, a nice egg on his head, complete with plenty of bleeding. Naturally, he had bled all over several peices of clothing, a couple of towels, and even managed to put a bloody handprint on the wall before I arrived. No, it's not serious. It's merely a bump on the head accompanied by a scrape - not even a true cut - which bled copiously.

So we got him washed up, settled in front of the TV (which I made S hook up on an emergency basis, so the kids would stay inside and be clean and quiet for a while), and then about an hour later I realized that the wound had started bleeding again. No doubt he had been picking at it. Another shirt ruined, and now more drastic action had to be taken - a hair trim by mom around the wound (which made me feel faint), and a head compression bandage by dad. (If the internet cooperates and I can find the right cords, I'll post pictures. He looks like a black plague victim.)

So I'm really truly sick of blood. I've forbidden the kids to go outside again, because I can't stand anymore dirt, and S is off to his church calling, teaching institute. He's been out of action most of the day since he has to leave early tomorrow morning for the US. Business trips, I've found, require at least one day of packing (complete with aggravating questions like "Where is my passport?" and "Why are none of my shirts clean?" - well they weren't in the laundry, DUH!) and about a week to recover from the jet lag. Really, I wish that they would figure this in when they schedule them.

The sideshow to this circus was the gardener. While cleaning out the kid's bathroom - removing the stuffed animals which they had decided needed a bath - I glanced out the window and realized that he was STILL DIGGING the pit which I had ordered him to STOP digging earlier that day (after he had run into some sort of large cable). I had even gotten our driver out of his house to translate this order, so there could be no mistake.

But no, Muttu (the gardener) was still excavating. The pit was now about 3 feet deep. (NOW I knew where the kids got so dirty!) What on earth????!! I sent sir out to deal with it, afraid I might resort to physical violence to get my point made. The new story is, Muttu thought that I wanted him to bury the garbage there, so he was making the pit extra deep. Why he thought that is anyone's guess. I have been explicitly telling him to burn the garbage in the lane every day (another thing he's not doing), and I told him precisely how deep I wanted the garden trench to be for the lawn clippings. (The trench that he turned into a pit for garbage.) I think the man is on drugs, or maybe he's just mad at me. At any rate, I'd fire him except I didn't hire him (the landlord pays him).

Maybe I should tell him he's digging his own grave.

So, I am completely fed up with people who don't do what I say, when I say it, and children who make large messes, and most of all, boxes. Boxes half opened everywhere. Eeerrrrgh.

And underneath that, I hate it when S travels. It freaks L out and I have to deal with the RAD all over again. I don't feel scared to be here alone - yet - I just feel tired of dealing with everything alone, and I know that the RAD therapy will take it out of me even more. But, at least he is bringing a hefty lot of stuff that I've ordered back with him, thanks to a kind friend in Decatur who is housing it for me. So I can look forward to the fabric for my curtains, marble cleaner, and most happily of all, a pair of inside shoes so my feet don't continuously ache from the hard floors.

So. 'Nuff said. Kids get to go to bed early and I may go to a fancy furniture store after S returns for some retail therapy. Either that, or I'm going on a chocolate run, because I NEED CHOCOLATE and we are out.

Morning:

5 a.m. - hear alarm going off in kid's room. This is my alarm, but kids have absconded with it and apparently set it for early a.m.

6 a.m. - L asks, "Can I go outside to play?" He is fully dressed and rarin' to go. I say "NO", since yesterday when I said yes, he went and took a motorcycle ride down the lane with one of the guards. (After telling the guard that he had permission to do so - a half-truth if I ever heard one.)

6:30 a.m. - Give up and get out of bed. Hubby says "Gotta run! I'm late!" and is out the door. Day looks hot (no kidding! ) and condensation has already formed on the windows because of the AC.

7 a.m. - Getting kids ready for school. Breakfast, dressed, brush teeth, etc. Normal except that we now brush out teeth in the kitchen, and I have each child get a glass of water from the drinking water cooler to rinse their toothbrushes with. This is because J can't seem to remember to not use the tap water to rinse her toothbrush.

7:30 a.m. - Maid shows up early to go to doctor after we drop kids off at school. Tries to help get kids ready for school, but they don't like having their cheeks pinched and won't sit on her lap to have their shoes put on, so no go.

Driver shows up.

8:00 a.m. - Out the door with water bottles, snacks for school, maid, and oh yeah, kids. Greet guards. Learn new guard's name: an easy one - Kuppasamy. Whew. Thank goodness it's reasonably short.

8:30 a.m. - Drop L off at school. J refuses to go (again).

9:00 a.m. - At the clinic. Despite my calling yesterday and confirming that we could change the appointment to the next morning, there is confusion as to why we are there. Finally get it through that we are to see a different doctor. The receptionists at this clinic have done this to me twice now - they seem not to understand enough English to do more than say "yes" over the phone. Mental note: do not try and call again. Better to go in person.

Wait. J is bored, which is good, maybe she will decide to go to school!

Read "The Hindu", which our landlord owns, and discover that the monsoon is expected early this year. Text a friend, who is waiting fruitlessly for her washer to show up. Call the carpenter, who gives many reasons why he did not bring the estimate and drawings for our new bookshelves out last week. These include death of an employee, heat, and forgetfulness. He promises that someone will come out today.

Crowded but not hot, thank goodness. This is a really nice clinic, very new, with very good doctors, all western trained.

10:00 a.m. - See doctor. Find out that maid did not provide all the samples needed to check for parasites. Find out that Hep and HIV tests were not included in the screening package (this one is my fault, should have read the fine print). Find out that maid gets headaches and has a kidney stone and is anemic. Hmmm. Not sure where to go with those. Kind of like opening Pandora's Box. Find out that she already saw a dr. during the first appointment, which I thought was just for lab work.

At least the dr. speaks Tamil and so can explain everything to maid.

Maid says she has been tested 3X for HIV and is negative, but cannot provide proof.

Decide that I can't afford to be a softie on this one and ask dr. to write order for HIV & Hep test, and tell maid that she must bring in samples for parasite tests.

This is all to ensure that she can cook for us. I am getting desperate for a cook, but not desperate enough to want to go through any illnesses over it. My maid lives in a grass shack - literally - so pretty sure that she has been exposed to plenty of things.

10:40 a.m. Done for today at the clinic. Consternation on my driver's part because I told the security guards that they could not let the painters into the house while everyone was gone, and did not tell him. Security guards, or painters, not sure whom, have been calling him about this. The painters are employed by his brother-in-law, which makes it sticky. Tell driver that "sir" has decreed that there shall be no strangers in the house while maid and/or I am gone. (Which is true.)

Pass several buses and men gesticulating on the side of the main road, near our house. Driver says "shooting". Moment of panic as I wonder, can they possibly be having some sort of bird hunt??? No, it is a MOVIE shooting - they are filming a dance scene. Tell driver never to say "shooting" to an American unless he means guns.

11:15 a.m. Home. Make J go to room to spend the rest of the school day. Talk to painters (well, gesture at painters is more accurate). Driver has not had time to take his breakfast (he gets up at 5 a.m. to get to our house on time), so he has chocolate cake out of the fridge. (Cake was for the painters but not sure it made it to them.)

11:45 a.m. Leave to pick L up at school.

12:15 p.m. L has stapled his finger, right through the nail, either on purpose or accidentally, who knows. Nurse took care of it. Thank goodness. L spends entire time driving home telling me how the stapler bit him and left it's teeth in his finger. Ugh.

Talk to driver about the snake that he found in his bathroom (outdoor toilet) yesterday. Driver and maid agree that snake is very poisonous but don't know the name in English, only Tamil. Snake is gone - taken to the herpetology park.

L climbs on roof of van while I am fixing lunch with maid. Get L down.

Driver and maid both ask me if the homemade bread that I left on the counter is "waste". Try not to be offended, which would be easier if they hadn't already asked me - Sunday - what was rising in the bread pan. Tell them no, it's lunch. ha ha.

Tell driver he can go to lunch; he says he will go after 2 p.m. Tell him that we need to move the landlord's furniture before the sea container comes, and we will try to do it today.

Afternoon:

110 F again.

1 p.m. Feed kids lunch. Teach maid to make PB&J. Check on painters, who have gotten little done. They claim they will be finished "tomorrow". Uh huh. That's what they said the last three days in a row.

Catch maid rinsing, not washing, dishes and tell her that is unacceptable. She must use dish detergent, clean wash rage, and then let them dry before she puts them away.

Secretary calls and asks if I will meet with another expatriate couple who might move here. Too funny. I have no idea what I'm doing, feel close to tears regularly, not sure I really can cope at all, have only been here 6 weeks, and they want my "input". This may be a mistake, but I say yes.

Lay down with L for much-needed nap.

4 p.m. Wow, long nap. Gotta have it in this heat.

Check e-mail. Nice to see e-mail from family and friends; really perks me up.

4:30 p.m. Give kids permission to play outside, or in the pool, with the driver's kids.

5 p.m. Maid goes home, after presenting me with some of sir's shirts, ironed. Going to need to re-train her in ironing. Again.

S texts me to say he has a dinner meeting which he forgot about, but will come home early and then go back to the city. OK.

6 p.m. Decorator/curtain rod lady shows up. whew. We need curtains so bad! She was supposed to come a few days ago but didn't. Thankfully, she and I seem to be on the same page as to what kinds of curtains the house needs. She measures and goes off; supposed to get me an estimate.

Check on painters again. The master bedroom's closets are almost done. Maybee.....we can move into that room someday.

S is swimming with kids. They are having a blast.

Evening:

6:30 p.m. Quick download about the day with hubby. He is concerned about my driver's honesty. I don't want to fire the driver until we have proof that he is being dishonest, but neither do I want a driver who is not trustworthy. So hard to tell. We don't speak the language and nothing is priced, you have to haggle. Being white there is no chance of getting anything at the normal rate; you always pay the "white tax". So how are we supposed to check and see if he is bringing the correct change home?

No word about sea crate either; it was supposed to come tomorrow.

Decide to wait and see how the driver takes his brother-in-law being fired as our painter.

Go out to tell drive that he can go home. He is washing the car. He washes the car every day; it's very nice. Reminds me, though, that the car is currently much cleaner than the house.

No carpenters. Didn't get the furniture moved either.

7 p.m. Hubby leaves for meeting. Feed kids, feeling like I'm in a fishbowl as I prepare dinner in front of the guards. (Dinner being spaghetti for the 3rd day in a row. It's all the kids want and it's easy to fix.) Wish, again, that the painting was done and the kitchen curtains up.

J runs outside with pictures of Indian snakes and asks driver what kind of snake he found in his bathroom. It was a common krait, one of the deadliest of all Indian snakes, and one of the most common in Tamil Nadu.

8 p.m. Kids bathed; I lay down with them to put them to sleep. (They are sharing a large bed until our beds come.)

8:30 p.m. Hubby calls and says that shipment is arriving "late" tomorrow night; do we want it unloaded immediately or not? I don't think they can even manoever a truck down the narrow lane we live on, which is currently partially blocked by large piles of sand and other construction material, in the dark. There are no street lights. We decide that shipment should be unloaded Thurs or Fri, even Saturday, but not in the middle of the night.

E-mail the expatriate support service our company provides about J's refusal to go to school. Can they provide counseling? We shall see.

10 p.m. Hubby calls and is on his way home. It is a long drive so it will be awhile. Decide to try conference call to the counseling service, since it is daytime in the U.S. They have some good suggestions, and offer face-to-face counseling, if needed.

11 p.m. Bed. Finally.

Actually, 36 hours from our move-in time, it's more like a flood. From me. Yep, can't stop crying today.

You see, after my two-hour effort to get a shower (never mind a hot shower - I never bothered to turn on the hot water heater - wasn't sure what calamity might occur if it didn't have water in it. Besides, if I wanted to get hot and wet, I could just go stand outside.), I went to bed.

Mistake.

At 1:40 a.m, to be precise, our doorbell rang.

My husband mumbled something unprintable, but I assured him that as incompetent as the guards might be at actually guarding anything, they were certainly not stupid enough to ring sir and madame's doorbell in the middle of the night if the matter weren't important.

It was. It was important. It was our screwy, crazy, poor RADish (Reactive Attachment Disorder) son, who had gone downstairs, opened a window, and climbed through the bars to be with his friends, the guards.

He's doing what is called "daddy shopping". In other words, he's afraid that S will abandon him, so he's searching for another father figure. The guards fit the bill since they all play with him and generally do whatever he wishes.

So, after a firm lecture from daddy and mommy (the real ones), I spent the rest of the night lying next to him, to help reassure him. (Daddy was a bit too p.o.'d to do the job properly.) Poor L couldn't sleep at all. He stayed in bed - by force - but kept popping up to check the window to see what the guards were doing. Finally, I gave him some Benadryl to help him sleep.

So we got a few hours sleep before Rajamanakkam rang the doorbell again to inform us that the caretaker had left, for good (expected, but still, I really didn't want to know that early).

The last straw was when I couldn't find the right key to lock our valuables up before we left for church. (I am now up to over 64 keys, with the caretaker's and another ring that I found in a drawer added in). I tried to organize the keys last week but apparently, was suffering from the heat or something, because the one labelled "master bedroom closet" didn't work.

I had a breakdown. A good, old-fashioned crying jag. And Shawn kindly took the children to church. God bless him.

As has been my past experience, the tears stopped coming so fast if I kept busy. So I got three more of the most disgusting closets cleaned.

Meanwhile, our guards go over to the pump room and prop the switch open every few hours. I notice that they stand nervously outside the pumphouse watching the time as they do so. Smart men. We will call the landlord and get it fixed. I hope.

Let's hope for smoother sailing tomorrow.