Travelogue

Where to begin?  Perhaps with our host Sam Singh who has taken such good care of us and shown us so many things in India we forget what happened the day before. 

He grew up in the house where we are staying, the descendent of a local prince. He went to the U.K. To study engineering and then on to the US with a job as a textile engineer for DuPont.  He worked there for 40 years, and I think I can remember him saying he moved 29 times

When he retired he decided to return to his home town and he started a school for girls in 2000. He believed you educate a girl, you educate a family. With 40 girls the first year, there are now 1100 girls with side projects like textile factory for their mothers, milk cooperatives, latrines, solar electricity, all for families who send their girls to the school. 

So he's taken us to each of these projects, after we spend the day teaching English.  We've gone to the monkey temple and a temple commemorating Lord Krishna's marriage. We've driven the city streets and back roads, checked out sugar cane production and cow patties. In this picture, we are on a sunset cruise on the Ganges. 

You may ask why?  Not really sure, other than he's genuinely touched people come all the way from the US to work with the girls. He's a great promoter of his dream and yesterday brought in a big donation from an Indian businessman. Today we participated in a fund-raising half marathon race (we walked). 

Teaching is not as easy as we thought even though it's a lot more gentle than fixing up schools. The girls are happy and enthusiastic. Very rewarding, but it's kind of hard to pop in and make a difference. Not sure it matters though since one of his primary goals is not just remove the girls from a difficult environment and let them enjoy themselves and dream of possibilities. 

Food is plentiful but very different. Living conditions are very comfortable but we wake up each morning to loud Hindi music blaring from the temple next door. 

We will be here until Thursday morning when we start the site-seeing portion of the trip. 

We hope you all are well. We hear we missed much snow in Pittsfield but we've managed to keep up with the man who everyone is laughing at here. If only it were funny.  So sad. 

So love from over here.