Supplies and buckwild little activists

Yesterday was a strange one. The morning wasn't very eventful cause Ruth and Alizarin woke up at 10!!! Man we have got to get back on track with our 7 am wake up calls cause right now we're slacking! We did a little bit of Hindi with the Yoga instructor Bharti and then headed off to Bharat Bhawan (the art/cultural center) where we had a brief meeting with a taciturn, little man who is the head of the graphic arts department. We paid 500 rupees and filled out a few forms and now we're set to make silkscreens with cool Indian artists whenever we want!

Our next mission: to get supplies for the sculpture we are making with the Children against Dow-Carbide and start to make the foundation for it. Only one of us can go with Vikas (a polite and handsome, or interesting as Roopa would say, ICJB worker) to buy what we need (which is a 4x4' plank of plywood, flour, a bendable metal screen, mad thick wire, yellow cloth, nails, red markers) so we nominated the healthiest among us. ALIZARIN! She just jumped on the back of Vikas' bike and was off! When Ruth and I met up with her later at ICJB headquarters she told us how she carried the plywood on the back of the bike and felt like all the Indians who we see every day carrying chairs, speakers, large quantities of babychildren, futons or 20 ft poles.

We started our work at ICJB around 1:30 (or DAYR in hindi) by molding the screen into a skirt shape, nailing it to the plywood, making a supportive structure inside out of spare wood and wire and then (to the kids' amusement when they showed up at 4) crumpling up tons of newspaper and filling the skirt up. We also had the kids write their ideas and feelings about the water contamination in red sharpie on a giant yellow cloth that we will drape on the sculpture as a sari in the later stages. By the end of the meeting we were so tired out by the kids who are very rambunctious and hyper and were constantly tugging us around and mocking our lack of hindi skills..

After an intense floor cleaning session (without the kids' help as they had just been herded out by our screams of 'FIR MELENGE!' meaning see you later and 'CHALO!' lets go).. We celebrated our work by treating Vikas to icecream at the snack store that we now know is the ultimate snack emporium of BHOPAL! If you happen to be stoppin' by just know there's no street name; tell your shaw driver snack zone across from hospital (and theres about a billion in Bhopal so your gonna have to specify Jawaharlal Nehru Hospital).

At home we had dinner with the giant family that Sambhavna's volunteer population has become. Let's count em--- Me, Alizarin, Ruth, Roman (the Austrian computer programmer who works for the Bhopal medical appeal), Javed (Kashmiri ICJB student coordinator), Maude, Roopa, Amiran (traveling freelance photojournalist ), Jimmy, Ashish, Sathyu, and Rachna...12 in ALLL! We also made a chart so that everyday 2 people will be responsible for doing a little (or a lot) extra cleanup.. this was prompted by an incident a few days ago when dal, rice and chapatis were left out and we found some chipmunks feasting like kings!