Well here it is, your final installment of Phil's adventures in India. I fly home early on the morning of next sunday 24th June and get into heathrow just after 7 that evening so it's really very close now!
I'm really wondering where the last six months have gone. When I arrived it felt like i'd never leave but now it's come to an end all too quickly and I find myself hating the idea of leaving!
The last few weeks at the Love Care Center have been amazing. We've been teaching lessons again and I'm back with first standard. We're really trying to nail the numbers one to ten but as I'm not a trained teacher and their attention span is never more than 20minutes, it is a little bit of as challenge. We also had a great day last friday when it was one of the volunteers birthday. We scrapped lessons for the day and had a huge party with balloons and cake. We played musical statues, pass-the-parcel, apple bobbing and flour bobbing which was so so so much fun. It was crazy to find out that most of the kids had never played pass-the-parcel thinking that almost all kids in the UK have played it before they can walk!
Last week was also a little scary as we ended up with one of our kids, one from my class in fact, in intensive care with a very nasty case of malaria (that's right, despite what many people say, you DO get malaria here). He'd been ill for days and we'd taken him to the hospital when he had a temperature of 40.3 degrees and they said he was aenemic and had tonsilitis but nothing about malaria. When he hadn't got better after three days, Sofia demanded he had some test done and then they finally found it was malaria.
Luckily, if you have the money, Indian healthcare is some of the best in the world, so after a couple of days in hospital and 15,000 rupees of medical bills (the same as sending 30 children to a gouvernment school for a year) he is much much better and will be fine.
So now I'm heading into my final week and a little annoyingly, the LCC is moving site this week to be closer to the land that they've been donated andeventually hope to live on, so it'll be a crazy time full of pack andunpacking and generally being disorganised, a bit of a shame as i'll just be wanting to see the kids as much as possible, but it's the right time for the move so i just have to accept it. So I have in fact started my packing today and it's a weird feeling at the house with the volunteers as so many of us are leaving soon.
I really feel i should think of something deep and meaningful to finish off my time here but i can't think of much so i'll just list a few things i've learned:
1. You can learn to sleep anywhere: even if the bed is solid, the room is ridiculously hot and the fan rattles like crazy your bed becomes the most comfy place in the world.
2. Cauliflowers fluffy is an amazing song whether sung at church in england or in a tiny room in india with a load of orphans who don't know what half the vegetables are.
3. Mosquitos and flies are equally annoying: yes mosquitos may bite and make you itch for days but you can never catch flies, no matter how fast you move, they always get away. Mosquitos don't.
4. Kids have infinite amounts of love and will give it to you whether you ask for it or not.
5. India in itself is an oxymoron. There's no way it should work yet it does, the best way i've found to describe it is ordered chaos. Also, despite the things that annoying me like crazy, I love India so so much and leaving will be very tough.
So there it is, the end of my six months. True, there are a few things that haven't gone so well, and it's a shame it took me so long to settle but the children I've met, the people I've worked with and the life I've been able to lead have all made it an amazing experience.
It will be a sad goodbye but getting to come home and seeing everyone and being able to go on and on about india, well for as long as people will let me, is very exciting.
However, i've been to india but not even seen the Taj Mahal or visited the Ganges so something tells me that sometime, I might just have to pop back...
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