November 5th

Today was another rainy day at Bethania! We woke up early to have tea with the kids at a bit after 7. Its so cool and peaceful in the morning, with all the kids doing their chores- sweeping, washing, pumping water. Prayer was at 8, the kids mentioned "Paige sister, Kelsey sister" in the prayer again, just wish we could understand Tamil and know what they're saying about us! Joseph told us later that Sathya was praying that when we leave, we come back. It's going to be so hard to say goodbye to all these children.

We said bye to the two volunteers from Kodai today, they were nice and we'll miss them! They were very sweet with the kids. We spent the morning peeling lots and lots of onions and helping with kitchen work. After lunch we spent sometime with the two little girls home sick. Mugambigai still had a fever, and Muthulakshmi had a bad ant bite in her ear that she had to go to the hospital for. We gave them some candy, joked around and took pictures with them. Hopefully didn't catch anymore germs! They told us about going to the hospital and showed us photos of their family. They had blood tests and injections.

The afternoon was quite eventful. Just as we were starting to take our rest, we were told to go help in the kitchen. Both kitchen ladies, ST the bus driver, Joseph and Anushiya were all out in front of the kitchen making chapati. We sat on the ground with them, rolling small balls of the chapati batter, using chapati presses and rolling pins to flatten them out to a thin pancake shape. We floured all of the raw chapatis and laid them, pile after pile on newspaper. All of the rolling, flattening and flouring took quite a while. We made more than 150 chapatis in total! We then brought over the stacked layers of chapati on newspaper to the big fire pit, using coconut shells as fuel. A huge black slab was on top, about a sqaure meter, where all of the chapati were being cooked. The kids were very excited about the chapati. Mani and Satish each ate '9 chapatis sister!'

In the afternoon, after the kids came home and had tea, we played games. Even in the mud, we played football (with the ever deflating football we bought in Madurai that was punctured) and cricket with the tennis balls we'd brought. Muruganadam said, "You are bringing football, all the boys very, very happy sister!" It didn't seem to matter that the ball was almost flat, the boys kicked it through the puddles and mud anyway and loved it! I played some cricket with little MK and Suganya, it was nice to see a girl playing sports with the boys! So far, only the boys ever played cricket. We played some chess games with the girls, M+M, Rani and Sathya. Chess knowledge is definitely improving here at Bethania.

After evening prayer, we did some English studying with the 8th and 9th grade girls. Today's lessons was actually really good and a lot of the girls seemed to be really understanding. They don't get a lot, if any, one on one interaction with teachers at school to clarify things at school. We taught comparative and superlative, using fun examples like the height, ages, favorite foods and favorite colours of all of the girls. Veni, who often times really struggles in our English lessons, was doing quite well with one on one attention. She needs a lot of attention, but when I was working with her, she started to really understand. They had fun comparing us. 'Kelsey is slower than Paige.' 'Paige is slower than Kelsey.' 'Paige is the oldest girl.' They also practiced talking about these charts all the kids are making for school tomorrow. There is some sort of inspection, where officials come to see how well the children are doing, which all the kids seem nervous for. Without their teacher in the room, they have to present charts about all of their subjects- Tamil, English, Maths, etc, and answer questions in English.