November 4th, Rainy day at Bethania

Today was a rainy day at Bethania. Though it still was probably in the high 70's, we felt cold here and all the kids had on big sweaters and hats! We're really used to the heat by now. After morning prayer and breakfast, we went to ride on the school bus to drop the kids off at their three schools. The older girls excitedly pointed to their teachers to show as they got off, it's so nice to see how much they admire their teachers and love school. We had to make a stop at the hospital after we dropped the rest of the kids off, as little Mugambigai now has a fever and had to get an injection and some tablets. Thankfully most of the other kids have already recovered from being sick.

We started to do field work when we returned, but didn't get much done before the rain started to fall hard again. So we abandoned our stone collecting to help in the kitchen instead. We, along with the two other volunteers here, carried bucket after bucket of water from the huge water storage containers to the kitchen. With rain falling on us, we hoisted the big matkas, our water jugs, on our hips and tried not to slip and fall on the wet rocks or spill as we walked over. The bus driver was concerned, 'slippery sister!' But luckily everyone was fine.

When the kids came home at 5 we had tea as it poured outside, and we then brought out some nail polish and music. We danced, took pictures, and mixed crazy colors of nail polish. Thankfully, we'd bought more nail polish in Madurai! The girls loved the dark deep red for all their toes and fingers. Antony and Mani chose a more masculine blue and green polish for their nails :) They proudly took pictures of their colorful nails. Little Karthi painted each finger a different color- pink, green, blue, silver... We also looked over to see him making designs all over his left palm. Good thing that's not his eating hand at least! Nandhini also decided to make some nice Indian flower designs on the top of my feet with the blue paint too.

After some drawing, chess playing, and admiring the girls' Christmas dance practice, we did and English lesson with the elementary and 6th grade girls. It was a remarkably successful lesson, and we learned about singular and plural, using names of body parts. The kids get 'is' and 'are' mixed up a lot, so we went over, 'one finger IS brown. Five fingers ARE brown.' We learned from Patti school, that everyone loves to make sentences about colors. 'The eye is blue.' 'The eyes are brown.' 'One toe is red.' 'Five toes are pink.' We had all the girls write sentences. Nagehwari is so smart she caught on quickly and was very enthusiastic. She's a lot of fun to teach because she really wants to learn. We did some fun little body part puzzles too. They were ones we had brought from America, so had a picture of a blonde and blue eyed baby on there that the kids found funny. It took a little while to convince them that "the hair is yellow!" and the eyes blue, as they just wanted to say the eyes and hair are black.

After a nice dinner with the German girls from Kodai, we hung out with the older girls up stairs and admired their charts they are drawing for school. Since it's been raining so much recently all the halls are filled with moths and these huge flying beetles. We're not big fans of these. But all the girls just sit around, cheerfully completing homework, drawing or talking. All their clothes are hanging to dry in the inside hall to avoid getting soaked. Today when all the kids were drawing, little Antony drew us a picture of the iPod speakers. It was super cute. They love that music so much.

It's crazy how much it has cooled off! Taking our cold bucket shower today reminded us vaguely of being frozen cold in Kodai! Okay, it's no where near that cold, its just weird to not be hot anymore!