October 25th "Tamil Nadu Girl!"

We woke up early for church Sunday morning. All the kids were wearing their nice Sunday outfits, and the girls all had flowers in their hair. Ramya braided Kelsey's hair and told her, "Now you look like real Tamil Nadu girl!" For us, that's the ultimate compliment :)

Church was very nice. I love the chapel, where the chaplain's voice echoes in the domed ceiling and the children sing and pray loudly and happily. The cows and walk by around us, as we gaze towards the mountains and feel the cool morning breeze. The kids were very excited to have the chaplain there. After church, it was a busy Sunday, full of Uno, chess and music playing. The songs "Jogi", "Right Round", "Jai ho" and "Gasolina" were played repeatedly. We did an English lesson with the elementary and 6th grade boys in the afternoon. We had them take turns reading a book, and then drawing and labeling pictures with important vocabulary words. Reading with little MK was pretty difficult, and it took a long time to get through only a few simple words. We're still making progress in sounding out words instead of guessing.
Some of the other boys can read well though, and little 7 year old Karthi can actually read quite a lot. After lunch, we listened to music and drew pictures with the girls. They love for us to cut out paper butterflies and flap them around. Mugambigai acted out a lovely little play with her two purple butterflies. "Hello, I am going to school." "Bye, bye."

At night, we continued our English lesson with the 10th and 11th standard girls, as they have too much homework during the week to do it then. We continued reading Snow White and writing out our play. Some girls are still uncomfortable with being creative and making up their own lines, but we encouraged them to not copy quotes from the book. These oldest girls also love to just sit around and talk with us, which is fun too :)

A lot of the kids here are sick, with colds and fevers. We're sick too :( It's hard when you're constantly surrounded by 33 kids with fevers! They try to keep the sick kids in separate rooms and have them eat away from the other children. Nevertheless, more people are getting sick everyday, just hope they recover soon! We've been giving out some medicines to help.