Well, another week gone by. A little love, a little joy, a
little Jesus, all wrapped up into one big blur of a week. I can’t believe this
has been my life for the past two and a half months. A fourth of my year will
have been spent in India.
On Tuesday, we went to a friend’s house for the first time.
She’s nineteen, I work in the preschool with her every day, and she’s also in
the afternoon classes. I love her to pieces and she’s become a good friend
while here. We followed her through the slum, dodging the murky water flowing
down the middle of the narrow street, hanging on to random kids’ hands that
have clung onto us one by one throughout the walk. We round a corner and head
down a few houses before we get to hers. Her seventeen year old sister is
sitting in the doorway and she gets up to greet us as we slip off our sandals
and duck inside the dark, concrete slab into their house.
Theirs is a little bigger and more organized than most we
had been in, but when I say a little bigger I mean maybe two or three feet
wider. But hey, two or three feet in the Indian slum can make a world of a
difference as far as living space goes! We know her and her sister pretty well
by this point so we don’t have to worry about the awkward conversations that
take place when we do most house visits. We plop right down on the floor and
turn our attention toward their TV. A Bollywood music video is blaring from the
screen. She mentions something about it being from a new movie and then asks us
if we want chai. We say no thanks, but I tell her every day how much I love the
chai that she makes so she knows that my no means yes. She leaves us to watch
the music videos with her sister as she makes some.
We laughed and laughed at the randomness of the music videos
and the strange commercials in between. She came back in and gave us chai then
plopped back down to watch the next video that was coming on. We’ve brushed up
on a little Bollywood drama since we’ve been here so we talked about the new
movie Shah Ruhkahn is in and how Prinyanka punched a girl when she was in tenth
grade. This means nothing to you but it’s all the rage in Bollywood! After
about half an hour of music videos, we said bye and headed for the bus before
it got too late. More kids clung to us on the way out.
So why did I write about this? Kinda random, just girls
hanging out, laughing at celebrities and rocking out with terrible dancing to
the new releases. Well that’s why I liked it so much! I’m halfway across the
world in a house the size of my bedroom with two girls close to my age who wear
salwars every day and speak broken English….. and we’re watching music videos.
People are the same everywhere. We’re all people.
