Work and play--it's a balanced day.

By some ungodly force, we slept through the call to prayer this morning. Instead, Dede and I woke to Ruth’s sniffles and labored breathing. We sat and digitally vegged out for a couple of hours before doing anything else. Dede typed like mad on the blog while Ruth got her ipoop fix and I took care of a bunch of e-mail obligations. I got the funniest e-mail from Ruth’s dad—he asked me to change her blog picture because it looked like a celebrity’s mug shot. Ruth chortled as she looked for her own copy of the e-mail, but got upset when she realized that she didn’t get one. Burn on the second favorite daughter! Check it by tomorrow, Mr. Eddy.

We showered, went to the canteen for a breakfast similar to yesterday’s (the mashed rice dish is called poha--thanks, Pragya), except with veg samosas instead of pakura. Every time you eat at the canteen, you have to sign your name in a notebook. Before today, we’ve had no clue as to how to work this ridiculous system, but this morning it was explained to us that each person who regularly eats at the canteen has her own page in the notebook and that you write the date, price, and signature for each meal you receive. Minus one confusion due to language barrier.

While we were sitting at the table, an older woman with the most beautiful contours of lines stitched into her face sat down and began speaking to us in Hindi. She couldn't say anything more than the numbers one, two, three in English, but we talked to her for about an hour. We began communication in the usual way. She asks where we're from, how old we are, how long we'll be in Bhopal, and we ask her if she lives in Qazi camp and if she works at the clinic. She probably has no idea waht we're saying, but she begins relating her ailments to us and talking about the gas disaster. Her words are steady but her gestures become more and more emphatic as she recalls this incident that robbed her of so much. She points to her knee and her abdomen, indicating some sort of ongoing discomfort that cannot be cured by yoga because of her joints. When she begins to describe what she lost that night, she has to wipe her eyes with her headscarf. We all could have used one for how passionate and painful this woman's speech was, despite our inability to understand more than half of her spoken words. She calmed down when another woman came to sit for breakfast as well, and the conversation turned to ayurvedic care at the clinic. When we stood to say good-bye, she took our hands and bowed our heads to her shoulder with her outstretched palm and kissed our cheeks. This was by far one of the most moving experiences I've had since our arrival at the clinic, and one of the most inspiring. We have to learn more Hindi.

We weeded a path in the garden for awhile, undeterred despite the ravenous chitti lal (red ants) that were so small you couldn't feel until they'd already bitten you, which left a stinging burn that seemed to last exponentially based on how many bites you got. Everything in the garden seemed to be of use. Even the weeds we were pulling up, one woman told us, were used for their roots to cure diarrhea. When another gardener heard Ruth sniffling, he walked over to some bushes and pulled off a few leaves. He told her to make tea with them and that it would cure her cold. We'll update you later on the tea's effectiveness.

We lunched (chappatis, dal, bhindi, rice, and chai), went through more newspaper clippings in the library after being rejected from yoga because our abdominals were too full, and chatted it up with Shehnaz (we're going to meet her family on Saturday!) for awhile after the clinic closed. We took another techno-break in our room then headed out to find some kites to fly. Last night we sat in the volunteer tower when the 5 pm call to prayer was announced. It seemed like as soon as that call went off, all of the kids' kites went up. I'm sure we saw at least forty little black diamonds gliding through the sky in trained circles. We decided that we had to be at it by the next day, and so we were. We mentioned our plan to Roopa and she told us that she always and collects kites in Sambhavna that local kids lose when their strings break to give to the cook's sons, Aashish and Jimmy. Now we had a source.

We went downstairs and Ruth monkeyed up a tree to retrieve the first kite, I stuck two huge branches out of a bathroom window on the upstairs story to harness the second, and Ruth shimmied up another tree that most definitely could not have supported her weight without Dede and I providing human buttresses to get the third. These kites are made out of wrappers, sticks, and string, but proved to be respectably durable once we patched them up with some masking tape. We attempted and failed to fly them off of our balcony, but some kids accross the street saw us from their roof and ushered us over. When we got there, we realized that we had been duped and that they couldn't actually fly kites. The daughter is 21 and teaches as well as studies physical therapy and translates Hindi to English, and the son is 15, is in the tenth standard, and plays criquette. We made a date with her for tomorrow to visit one of the biggest mosques in Asia, which happens to be in Bhopal.

We got back to the clinic then entertained Aashish and Jimmy with my digital camera for awhile before getting dressed for dinner. We went out with Roopa, Dr. Jay, and Maude to a fancy restaurant where we were plain too loud. We got to know so much about them and how things were for them growing up in regions from Berlin to Maharastra (the state from which Dr. Jay's mom won the Best Mother Award). Ever day I am more and more grateful to be in such a diverse and intreaguing place as Sambhavna. Every person we meet, every task we undertake, every view we see seems to enrich our lives far beyond the experience prior to it. And it's just our third day!