November 10

We woke up at 6.30 to spend time with the kids before they had to leave for their exams. We sprayed all the girls with "scent, sister!" and passed out pencils to every kid. It's sad how they don't have enough school supplies, and keep using pencils even when they're just two centimeters long. We decorated each pencil with stickers, and have them all an eraser too. They were so happy about it, and they're glad to have new supplies to use for their exams. Hopefully it will give them good luck for their English exam today!

After the kids left we did kitchen work, peeling onions and cracking coconuts to make chutney. While we were working though all of a sudden we heard a big thud and smoke and dust flew out of the kitchen door. We went inside to see the clay stove had literally fallen out of the wall. It is built into the wall, made out of brick, clay and gravel. The clay is formed to hold giant pots of boiling water where they build fires beneath. The clay structure pretty much had collapsed, and the ground was covered in dirt, ants, brick, rock and burning wood. No one seemed that concerned. There were some unhappy looks, but also laughs. Not too much shock or anger. Soon after we all went back to peeling onions for a little while. When the men came to help, W
We quickly went to work picking up the hot bricks and carrying them outside. We dumped the gravel on the ground outside the kitchen while GP and ST scooped up the hot gravel and piles of dirt into the metal bowls and hit the wall to make more stones collapse onto the floor. We carried water to put out the remaining fire and cool the ashes. We carried bucket after bucket of dirt until it was all scooped up.

Since it's exam week, the boys walked home from school and arrived just as we were finishing lunch. Eishwari had given us a beautiful strand of purple flowers that she tied together herself with string to wear in our hair- it was so nice! The boys came home and did their washing. Muruganadam walked around with the big hose, spraying water, and saying "I am fire patrol!" It was so funny. Pandi gave us flowers to wear in our hair, and Sethu threw a fistful of petals into the air and all into our hair. The boys are so sweet, and love doing nice things for us. It's funny how some of them keep a tough appearance, like Chella Pandi, but inside are so happy to get love and attention from us and do cute little things to make us happy. We let them play chess and then rested until the rest of the kids came home.

At tea we helped to serve everyone the delicious sweet rice with coconut, and passed out chocolate. Muga pretended to be a monkey and to steal all of our chocolate. She is so expressive, laughs a lot and makes the funniest faces, we love her! We still have a lot of presents and candy to give out before we leave. Time has gone by so fast. There seems to be so much left to do here, and we're not ready to leave yet at all. We're organizing now the gifts that we will leave with every kid when we leave. We are going to write a card for each kid and have lots of toys and presents to give as going away presents.

After tea we spent some time over by the boys dorm. It feels like we haven't seen them as much lately, so it was good to have time with them. It's hard because whenever we walk outside of our room, the girls are right there in the hall, asking us for games, music, to help them study or something. They don't like it too much when we tell them that it's the boys' turn for Uno or see us taking the music over to the other dorm. It's too hard to tell them that we can't help them study when they need us to explain something or go over English with them! Its was still raining on and off all afternoon, and it's not fun having to get soaked to go see the boys!

We did some drawing, chess playing, and email reading and writing with the boys until prayer. They're all writing really sweet letters and drawing cute pictures in our journals for us. They all tell us to not forget them- it's so sad, and also would be impossible for us! We went over finding our "native place" on a map with MK for a while. He was convinced for a while that we are from Japan. All the kids also had Christmas dance practices, which are so cute! Then we helped the kids with studying. It was really hard to focus on really helping one group of girls, while other kids were coming up and asking for help the whole time. Kelsey taught Rani, M+M, and Veni math. They were so surprised that math was the same in America as in India. They really are learning all the same math concepts as we do in America, just with smaller numbers usually because none of the kids have calculators. It makes it so much harder for them to learn more difficult theories when they don't have a calculator to help them, and have to us the fraction 22/7 for pi. The problems that they had to do were similar to what we'd studied, but it seemed like a lot of girls were missing the basic concepts behind the problem solving. These 8th grade girls have memorized formulas to find the area and length of an arch of a circle, but when I went over the formula to show them how it was derived, they had no idea. Some didn't even know that there are 360 degrees in a circle. They can solve the problem with their memorized formula, it just seems like they'd have no idea how to apply it or what it actually means! Meanwhile, Ramya decided that Paige was the one who needed math help. This was a very accurate observation. She taught Paige a math lesson and gave her homework, instructing Kelsey to not help her. Paige thinks that Ramya should be a teacher, as she explained things very well, and Paige finally understood some math!

The kids have recently realized that all the pens and supplies that we had brought from America will be up for grabs when we leave. This fact has made them all very happy :) we have huge lists of who gets what when we leave- including perfume, gell pens, pens, plastic cup gum containers, creams, and lip glosses. The empty clothes spray "scent!" bottle has already been claimed. We just want to give them all of our stuff, we feel like we don't need all these possessions we came here with, stuff that would mean so much for the kids to have, when they own so little.

It has been so busy here with all the studying, and tomorrow Kelsey has an alarm set for 4.30 set by Dhana Packiam and Muthumari and has been told to go wake the girls up then!