Diwali break and magic streets

The holy festival time of Diwali, the festival of Lights, is upon India. For Indians it means decorations, cleaning of houses, new dresses, gathering of families, eating lots of good food, firering crackers and fireworks and of course religious ceremonies praying to the god Lakshma and others. For Sanna, Airiin and I it means vacation and a nice needed break! We are currently in Udaipur south of Rajasthan, a city 4 hours away from our town Bali in a bumby but beautiful and hilly bus ride. Udaipur is known as the City of Lakes, because it is surrounding a huge lake with a big palace in the middle of the lake. And indeed this is beautiful place. It is a city with all its traffic, chaos, cows walking around in the narrow streets, auto rickshaws blowing their horns to get passed the crowded streets, but it is much nicer and more atmospheric than Delhi. There are many small temples and religious symbols around the city and many of the houses are painted in light blue or pink colours. There are wall paintings of colourful elephants and the Hindu gods on every street corner. All the roofs are flat and we eat our food in a roof-top restaurant every evening with a view over the lake and the the lights of the houses and palace. We can hear the bells from religious ceremonies and small lights of candles are floating in the water in small boats made of leaves.
In the days we stroll down the narrow streets and look at all the colourful clothes such as Rajastani skirts, sarees and fabrics for anything you'd like. They sell bags in many colours, leather bound books with handmade paper, sculpturs and paintings of elephants and the gods, and many other small items from a lost world. Many handicraft shops are producing their goods right there on the street with machines that one can only find in the museums at home.
When we walk down the streets, men are calling for our attention from all sides to show us how wonderful their specific goods are. At times the comments are just intimidating, such as a man that yelled after Airiin, "Which country is suffering without you...". No comment, haha!
I am feeling very alive here and enjoy every moment till the bursting point. We are staying here untill Friday, but right now, none of us are too up for leaving, so perhaps we will extent our stay. But it also feels good to know that we have a place almost like home to return to and happy children to give a hug.
Thanks so much for the comments I have gotten, it means a lot to me! :)
Happy Diwali to everyone who honour me by reading my blog.

I'm still fully alive!

It has been a long time since I have updated my blog, and I don’t know if people just got tired of always seeing the same entries, but now I finally got a spare moment to sit down and talk about the development from the beginning to now.
Airiin, Sanna and I have now been at the Fabindia School for around a month. It feels like a big relief to have overcome the very tough new beginning and everything does feel a bit easier now. We are more accustomed to the way the school is being run, the different teachers and we are slowly getting to know the children and their needs.
Despite of this, I am still a bit insecure about some of the things I am expected to run and I will need some more time before everything is a mere routine.
I have been doing some creative writing with my 6th class, which they seemed to enjoy very much and it has been fun for me to correct their stories. In my 4th class I have established a pen pal relationship to my own brother’s class in Denmark. He is in 5th grade, but their level of English is about the same. So I made the children in my class write small letters to the Danish kids, took pictures of all of the Indian students and sent the whole thing off to Denmark. Now I hope that my brother’s class will be just as excited about replying the letters as the children in my class were to write them.
I was supposed to start a school choir last week, but because I have been ill quite a lot, I had to postpone it until next week. I am well again now after taking Indian medicine, which almost knocked me down being much stronger than the Danish medicine is. I hope it will work out with the choir and the girls seem very interested. There is already a small choir, which sings a small song at the morning assembly, but the principal ma’am, as the female principal is always referred to, is not very happy with it. One of the days this week, she simply stopped the whole choir in the middle of the song in front of everyone and complained about their English pronunciation. She made them re-sing the song three times, before she accepted and afterwards she told me to teach them how to utter the words properly. The poor girls looked very ashamed and unhappy, so hopefully I will be able to cheer them up with some nice songs.
We have all become very happy with the children in the children’s hostel, where we go every night for a couple of hours. These children are really shining and smiley and it feels good to start to know them better and on a personal level. It always makes me happy to spend time with them and at times, I have some very interesting conversations about the Indian society, the caste system and arranged marriages. It is common here that a wife and a husband will meet each other for the first time at their own marriage. Love marriages are something you see on TV.
In this week, there was a festival to celebrate the death of a Hindi god. Every evening people met and danced to honor the god. We participated two nights, Friday and Saturday. In a decorated area outside, the people danced around a little alter in circles, all having the same steps and dancing to very loud Hindi music songs. Sanna and I attempted to dance along with them, but we both felt very awkward, because the steps were very hard to pick up for us and we as Westerns are not use to just dance like that. Both the women and children were very excited about us trying to dance and they hardly accepted it, when we insisted to take a break. A woman invited us to come to her house and she would teach us the steps, she said.
One of the culture differences that we are dealing with every day is the one of interfering in other people’s lives. Indians is a very friendly people and I have many times been impressed by their openness and willingness to help a stranger as myself. But in the same time, the three of us sometimes do not feel that we have any private life, because all the adults around us are constantly requesting to hear what we have been doing, where we are going, what we are going to do and so on. They come into our house self-invited frequently and this can sometimes be a bit too overwhelming. But it is simply a culture difference and in the end, it is only because they are genuine interested in us and how can they know when they cross our invisible line, which is so subtle? We just try to be polite, but still hold back when we need some time off, which is definitely necessary for all of us.
It is still way too hot for three Nordics like me, Sanna and Airiin. Every day is above 30 C and it is hard to gather energy for a long school day in this heat. But we clinch to the hope that it will cool off soon…
I still miss Denmark a lot, but it is not any longer because I am not happy about this place and that makes a big difference. When we hear from former volunteers, they tell us that they miss India a lot still and that they wish they could go back. I can already feel now that it will be hard to leave in the end, mainly because of the children, but we still have a lot of time to learn, see, hear and feel the Indian culture.