N.I.S.H.A

Last night was wonderful. Early in the evening Caitlin was thinking a lot of home and of course I kind of got home sick too, missing love ones from home. So we went onto the roof of Hotel Maria and just talked, and it began to lightly rain! It felt amazing! Being here you never feel clean but when the rain comes... it feels so great! You don't feel sticky and your room is cooler! Caitlin and I were both talking... and something we truly need in our room is some glad plug in because it STINKS! that or a small fan because our room is hotter than outside and it sucks when we come home and walk into a warmer room! Anyways, Caitlin and I read the Sunday's reading again last night for some prayer time we did on the roof since we didn't understand it when it was said in Bangali at Nabo Jibon yesterday. The gospel reading spoke so directly towards us that day. It was about the good samaritans! Before reading, we said a prayer asking for God to direct us on our mission and truly the gospel yesterday reminded us why we were there. We also read 2 chapters out of The Immitation of Christ that really related to our situation and did the litany of Humility. It was a wonderful prayer session that we did on the roof of Hotel Maria and I really believe that we'll have more to come.
Afterwards, I went over to Hotel Paragon and introduced Caitlin to some friends and invited some people out to have dinner with us, and a group of 4 others came along and we sat in jojo's and talked about the craziness of kolkata. Which made Caitlin and I feel not so alone with feeling lost or homesick sometimes. Which I believe was reassuring for Caitlin to hear, that other volunteers felt stressed on the streets here or sad about their love ones. I'm excited because Brianna comes in two days and I'm sure Caitlin can relay how she felt the first week towards Brianna better than i can since now It's my fourth week or so. Which actually blows my mind. I really don't even know how long I've been here. It still feels like the first week but when I think of home it feels like it's been months since i've been here. So I try to look at things from just the schedule of the day and what I encounter during the day.
Later that night we went to my friend Ace's hotel room at the Paragon. Ace has been here in Kolkata for a year and a half. He cooks his own meal every day and works morning and afternoon shifts. He's pretty impressive. Anyways, he has a laptop with movies on it and so Caitlin and I bought some Vanilla Ice cream and pepsi and made floats and watched "the Mask!" it was wonderful and so nice to relax! It started to rain heavily and lightening lit up the night periodically.

Today we woke up and went to Fresh and Juicy for breakfast. We've been pretty bad about making it to Mother House the past few days and it's our goal to do it tomorrow morning for mass and breakfast. But we got our usual for breakfast at Fresh and Juicy; and they made my sandwich wrong again! There was tomatoes in it! I think they're thinking I'm asking for the toasted cheese egg sandwhich, while the grilled egg cheese sandwhich is what we always mean... which tastes sooo much better! But whatever! When I arrived at Daya Dan I was walked into the classroom and started making my lesson plan for Nisha. Today, I was working with Nisha and she was more than I expected. She was extremely hard to work with but i managed. I drew out circles and wrote in them the names of colors with the specific color of the name. Say for instances I would write with a red crayon "RED" in a circle, and she was suppose to try to match the color and fill in the circle with the correct color. Usually before the previous teachers just made a mark with the color but i figured she can't read yet so writing it in with the color is just the same as making the mark but maybe she would be come familiar with how the word looks like and starts matching the colors according to how she remembers the names of the color. It's really hopefully thinking but she does this almost everyday... you'd figure after a month or so she'll start remember how the word looks like. So that's the goal! Well, Nisha didn't want to do anything today. She just had her head down on the table and every now and than would get up and try to find something else to do in the class, sometimes I would try to apply some study to whatever she wanted to do but she just didn't want to do something for any longer than a minute so i kept to my lesson plan. She would pick out certain crayons thinking it matches the color of what I wrote and she would make a mark next to the color and see if it would match and would pick up a different crayon and try to do it again until it matched. It was quite clever but she's improving on matching colors pretty well.

I also drew shapes and had her copy the shapes I drew, and that was a bit challenging. She kept drawing triangles when I had her draw squares and than would draw squares when I drew triangles and periodically she would just draw circles. She has the whole circle thing down. So I tried helping her understand squares and triangle a different way, I counted as I drew the two, each stroke of each side had a number.... sqaures had 4 sides so I was able to count to 4 before the lines are connected and triangle 3 sides before the lines are connected. She would count with me and than try to do it herself. Somehow she was able to count to 4 and yet have 3 sides for a triangle. It was quite humorous but in the end it worked out somehow. Maybe, she'll be better at it tomorrow. I made shapes that were half finished and had dotted lines that finished the shape, that she had to follow and fill in. Nisha was pretty sloppy with it at first but I kept on tell her "you have to be careful, slow down" and her shapes became more identifiable. I did dotted lines that spelt Nisha and she had to draw along the dotted lines and write out her name. Than I drew lines so she can copy her name and she began to write letters randomly that she used in writing her name. No specific order, just a whole bunch of "AAAAA" and then "E,N,H,I,S," So i wrote at the top of the page, once again her name and told her to copy it and she did a wonderful at copy it once. So i applauded and gave her praise which made her very happy. I showed it off to the other teachers which also made her feel very happy and proud with herself and so i asked her to do it again and she wrote for me 4 more times her name N.I.S.H.A perfectly! It really made me happy. I was finished with my lessons that day so I gave her a color book to color in. She loves coloring and colors in the line pretty well but when I had her match the colors to the name that was in the correct color she drew way outside of the circle. So I decided I her next lesson plan, for sometime this week. I drew a picture of a house in a sharpie, which looks like one of her pictures in a coloring book, and colored parts of the picture with certain colors. Her task for this lesson plan when we do it will be finding matching colors and coloring in the picture. I think she'll enjoy that more than just filling in a circle with the matching color, because she surely didn't spend time trying to fill in the circle neatly but did perfectly fine coloring in the coloring book. So we'll see what happens.
Music class today was amazing like always. It's just so beautiful to see all the kids singing and dancing. Some of the kids sing what they can, and even if it's not real words and just "da, da, da" to a melody it's still very encouraging for them when everyone claps and they feel confident and special. It's amazing. I love music class as stressful as it may be with kids running around everywhere. I always leave Daya Dan and have children songs stuck in my head for the rest of the day. Caitlin usually comes down from upstairs for music class also and I think we both agree that the songs are addictive, and we can never get it out of our heads for the rest of the day. This little light of mine was a song I introduced at Daya Dan which the kids love now. There's also songs like Jesus loves the little children, God's love is so wonderful, Rise and shine and give God the glory glory, Father Abraham, .... the list is truly endless! I love the children so much!
When music class was over I came back upstairs and helped feed Adreanna. She's an orphan that struggle with some severe deformity, it's extremely hard to get her body to fit into her stroller because her body no longer straightens out. She doesn't have mobility of her arms, leg, and barely any in her head. Feeding her wasn't hard but it took a lot of patiences before i could continue feeding so she can fully sallow her food. She began to a cough and was coughing out her food which was a minor obstacle and towards the end she was crying. But she finished her meal! So i was happy. I brought her back to her crib and came back out to help who ever was in the main gathering space. I came over to little Piya that Caitlin was working with and helped feed Piya. She wasn't eating today so I tried feeding her for a bit but she'd just cry and spit out her food. So I took her food back to The Massis and Sisters and exchanged it for some Juicy so she can get some nutrients at least. She drank only half of her juice cup and began spitting the rest out, but it was something at least.
We headed back to Sudder and had lunch at Blue Sky, Caitlin had some Toast and Honey which she's getting addicted to now... sweet tooth. And i had some american chopsuey, it was great! Well, i'm getting excited for Brianna to get in. I think we both are. The more the marrier! Pray for us and pray for Brianna's flight. She is flying out on tuesday and I think it's her first time on a plane... but i'm not sure. Anyways, God bless! Take care!



Oh by the way, Caitlin created an amazing photo buckets and she posted some of my pictures since I've been here on the site. You really ought to check it out! the address is

http://s192.photobucket.com/albums/z53/cait0013/Kolkata%202007/