so much has happened...

Okey dokey, well I feel like so much has happened lately! Yesterday was my first day at field placement. I have decided to go to a Senior Citizen Recreation Center on my Fridays and Saturdays. We had gone to a lot of various placement options but many didn’t really interest me too much or if they did, they didn’t look like they had that much that I’d be able to do for 2 days every week. So I went with Joselyn on Thursday to visit and there are a few MSW students training there on Thursdays, Fridays, & Saturdays. So I thought that they’d have enough work or things to do and it would be interesting. So Friday morning I showed up at 10:00 ready to go. It’s nice because it’s just about a 15 minute walk away so I never have to pay for transportation and I get a nice walk in too. At 10:15 on M, W & F, a yoga instructor comes in and they have yoga for 30 min. I watched this week but next week I’m joining in : ) Then I watched them play this board game, cademon?? You have 4 players and you sit around a square piece of plywood. In each coroner there is a small hole cut out. There are 9 white checker looking pieces and 9 black ones. There is one red one and a larger, thinner white one. Painted on the board, there is a circle in the middle and then 1 row along each side. You use the white thin piece to flick other pieces into the holes. White pieces are 5, black are 10 and the red one is 25 pts if you call a piece and it goes in after the red one. It’s actually a fun game, but I need a lot more practice before I’m any good. So then the elderly people all left and all the people who work there had a meeting. Half was in English but they switched back to Kannada a lot so I didn’t catch everything. They were getting things ready for the Republic Day celebration on Tuesday. Lunch came next and then I went on a walk with a sister that works at the place with me. She took me to one of the older ladies house who comes to the rec center. Indians feel that they must give you something if you go to their house and more times than not it’s food. So she gave us fresh mango juice-mmmmm! I was told that she is trying to get a pension from the gov’t right now. Once you are over 60 I think you can apply for a pension. This pension will give her 400 Rs/month. That’s not very much at all. That’s about $10 depending on the exchange rate, roughly. She has been trying to get it for years now but she can’t. One of the reasons is that if you have a son you must get the son to write a letter saying why he won’t/can’t support his mother. And if she has more than one son, all sons must write a letter. Her son lives in a city somewhere farther away and doesn’t have the money to support her and his family but I don’t know the rest of the story. It’s crazy though hearing all that stuff about the pension. If you have a daughter, it doesn’t matter, but if you have a son, it gets much more complicated since the son or sons, are supposed to support their older parents. Then I got to visit 2 schools to deliver letters inviting them for some competition thing where the children bring their grandparents to school I think and they have competitions? I didn’t really follow but the competitions are at the end of February so I’ll find out then.
Next thing on the agenda was visiting a home for the Destitutes and Orphans. It is run by sisters and they have a little over 400 people living in their facilities. They help a wide range of people. The people apply to get in and/or they are brought in by someone else like the police, a preacher or a teacher. They have children from 6-14 and then many mentally and physically disabled people of all ages and many elderly people who are sick. Everyone lives there and is fed 3 meals a day plus 2 tea/coffee breaks, has a bed to sleep on and gets the care they need as best as the sisters can give it. I don’t want you to think that this is all India is. In fact, please don’t think that about anything I have written as I have only seen Mangalore and everywhere is so different. This place was a real eye-opener for me. I saw elderly who were confined to their beds because of one thing or another. I saw a man who was a paraplegic and just laid in bed basically waiting for food to fed to him, his body to be washed and the next day to come. That was heart breaking to see. The room had 3 beds, one window and a few dressers. That’s it. Then the sister led us past a man feeding another man. Now the man doing the feeding was paralyzed from the waist down but he figured that since was at the place he would help another man out. The man being fed was 22 years old. He is only a little bit older than me but he looked like a weak, fragile boy who was about 5 years old. He is so small and delicate and it was soooo hard to see. The sister told us he is deaf, blind, mute and can’t taste anything either. Thankfully the man is helping him out and the sisters took him in. Many of these people would not survive out on the streets. We then went to see another wing and we saw many people with exceptionalities. It was soo sad to hear the sister talk about some of these people’s stories because most of them were rejected by their families. Sometimes they had very minor, in comparision to some, disorders or mental problems and yet their families didn’t want to help them anymore and so now this is their home. The children are brought in by police if they are street kids and sometimes their families bring them in. Some are orphans because they lost both parents, some lost only one parent but the one parent can’t afford them and some have both parents who they might see on holidays only but they can’t take care of them and give them all they need to survive. They go to school on the grounds and then at 14, about 7th grade, they go to another school where the same branch of sisters teach. I think I am going to be doing some field work here on Mondays after my one class ends at 11. I don’t know what I will do but it will be interesting and quite the experience I have a feeling. I just left the place in such shock. It filled me with conflicting emotions and it was tough to see and think about.
Thankfully though, I had some wonderful news shortly after that when I got home. I log on to check my email and what do I see?! I HAVE 2 NEW SISTERS!!! They are from Ethiopia and are sisters…and now are my sisters : ) We have been waiting for this for so long and now it’s official! It was the best news ever!!!
It’s Saturday afternoon and I just got back from field placement again. I didn’t do much today though. I played that board game for about 2 hours and then I went home. There is a bus strike today and so we couldn’t go anywhere so we just stayed in and played with one older man who had come to the center. For yoga, about 10 elderly people show up and then they do home visits to other ones who can’t make it to the center. We were supposed to go to a hospice to visit today and get more exposure but because of the bus strike, I sit here at home blogging to you all.
Next weekend we are going on our first excursion to Kerala. Shanthi’s family is from there and so we will be staying with them. We are taking a train on Friday and then we’ll be there until Monday when we take a train back to Mangalore. I will only miss one class on Monday so that’s good. Classes are going pretty good. I have 2 papers due on Thursday. That was slightly frustrating because she had told us they were due last Thursday and so we did them-2 papers each 3 pages and were ready to turn them in when she told us in class that she wanted to talk to us afterwards. So we meet her and she shows us an example of what she wants us to write. Hahaha so we need to have a table of contents, a title page, a bibliography page and we have to break up the paper into sections. So atleast we can use most of the information we had but still. Oh well.
I am still on my quest to find the best chocolate here. I found a pack with 9 cookies in it for 5 Rs. And I found these cookies called Hide-n-Seek, and they are chocolate chip and they have chocolate chip with mint. They are my favorite right now with the other ones as the best bang for my rupee : ) Alrighty, I love and miss you all! Send me updates of your lives!!

p.s. sorry this was so long!!