Rising Star. The Beginning of the Best Summer...EVER

Hello everyone,

So here I am. In the volunteer Hostel at Rising Star Outreach Campus. I am staying in the Banana Room. Check it out:

My bed is the one in the bottom right corner.

And then the rest of the room. 

But the best part of our Hostel is the showers....

Thats right, Indian Bucket Showers. fill the big bucket up, and use a little one to get the water all over.

But if that isnt good enough for you...just wait for the toilets. This is why you do squats when you work out. to prep for the "Rocket Launcher"

3....2....1....and SQUAT. HAHA

OK....now after giving you the grand tour of the bathroom and bedroom, we do still have the luxuries of a kitchen. 

TADA....we now have 3 fridges, microwave, toaster, stove, table, 2 cleaning faucets, 1 drinking faucet, a washer, and a dryer. woo hoo.. the high life. lol. but seriously. its awesome. 

I have gotten some comments about what I have been doing here in India. So here is the dirt. The first day of school was monday. The Principal is in America dealing with Visa problems, and not all teachers were here on monday. So the school was understaffed. Since Monday to today, I have been the assistant to the temporary principal. Thank you Sgt Parker Davis from ANA, for training me to be a good assistant and the bookstore at ANA for dealing with crowds and hot tiny work places. LOL. So here is the Breakdown for what i did each day so far.

Monday

AprilMam (for people in authority they say there name and then mam or sir at the end of it. But i am just uncle to the kids) had me do supplies checkout and inventory for each teacher and each class. It was very confusing because no one really knew what we had, what they were called and the teachers knew what they wanted, and what they called it. So after about 10 minutes of working in an area of no organization and no prep, i got the hang of it and got things moving along. 

After supply checkout and inventory, AprilMam had me substitute a class...(YIKES...i can barely get people my age to listen to me....how am i going to get a bunch of 6th standard children too...) So what do i do? Play Hangman with the words being diferent animals. The students know english pretty well. But have problems with their A's N's M's L's and some others. They say yAy, yeN, yeM, and yeLl. so we worked on that.

After the class, it was lunch. i went and ate with the children and had a great time...can i just say forks are overrated. it is so much easier to each rice and curry vegetable sauce stuff with your hand.... :D yum yum yum here is a picture of a boy in my family eating, I think his name is Vegnash.

After lunch I went back to doing inventory. I got back to the hostel around 6pm and ate dinner at 630. We ate dinner on the rooftop of the hostel and ate off of Banana Leafs. We do this every night. i love it. And at dinner we go around and everyone says a High and a Low that they had that day.

For me, My High was getting all the teachers the right books and keeping a detailed record. 

My low was realizing i left my other pair of jeans and both shorts at the hotel in Chennai. (dont worry, I am getting them back today)

Then after that it was off to bed.

Tuesday was exactly the same other than the fact that i helped a new teacher (volunteer teacher from Utah, USA) get situated and ready for teaching. the hard thing about tuesday was that teachers wanted more books, or exchanged the ones that they had to different ones. it got really confusing and found out the way i was suppose to record everything was the wrong way. So, yay for restart and learning how to deal with the Language barrier. 

For tuesday, even though i didnt make it to dinner, my highs and lows were:

High: I remembered 6 names in my family.(the families here at RSO(Rising Star Outreach) are groups of kids ranging from 4 years old to 15 i think, might not be exact. For those of you familiar with ANA or military, It is like a company)

Low:I had to redo all the inventory.

ok, i am out of time. Tomorrow, i will catch you up 100% and stay up to date. Sorry for the delay but we just dont have a lot of time to be online. i have many pictures to share with you. So...Talk to you tomorrow.