singing with MC sisters

This morning it was pouring rain outside. I hit my snoozed button and some how it never came back on so by the time I checked it was 5:50am... and I was going to be late to mass. So i took my time this morning and made my way out towards mother house around 6:40. Corina still wasn't feeling up to par so she took another day off. She's looking a lot better and is able to get up and walk around more, from what I see.
I had a guitar bag that was full of medicine, hygene/grooming products, some clothes and sheets. The bag was packed full and barely zipped shut. This bag was things I've accumulated for donation, from friends, myself, and buying stuff on the streets that I thought some of the sites may need. I stepped outside into the rain and to my suprised it was ankle high water in some parts of the streets but I began to trud through.
I got to Mother house and told Sr. Karina I had some donation, she was excited to see the bag so packed but even more so, she was excited when I told her I'm donating the guitar bag also. There's numberous guitars all over the sites; at Mother house, 2 or 3 at Daya Dan, some at Kalighat, etc. What they really need is maintence things for the guitar, like new strings, picks, new bags. And so Sr. Karina was excited when I gave her a sturdy Yamaha bag that I bought in the states. Afterwards I had breakfast and headed to Daya dan.
At daya dan I arrived early and started making Mongol's lesson plan. I picked out a few words he learned when I worked with him last tuesday. It's so hard to give the children a good education, when all i get with them is an hour a day, monday through friday except for thursday because it's volunteer's day off! Saturday is art class. So in reality it's only 4 hours a week that the children are actually in class! I wish I can have more timie with them ... like 4 horus a day minimum. Well this wednesdsay we didn't have class because of independence day so I had to remember back to tuesday... and I started a new book with mongol. I choose out some words that we read on tuesday and made them into sentences with fill in the blanks. I also used those words and had him draw a line to word that was most similar in meaning to it. After that lesson we continued reading a few more pages, and than I read to him. By the time we finished an hour had already pass and Sr. Johana Fa wanted the children downstairs to have choir practice for Mother Teresa's Memorial mass in September. I joined Sister because there was no guitar player. Sister wanted me to help figure out some of the guitar chords for the music. We sang and I fumbled through chords trying to figure out the matching chords for the vocals, surpisingly I did fairly well and figured out all the songs that we sang today on the guitar and wrote them down for the guitarist in September... which as of now, we're still looking for one. After an hour of choir practice all the sisters, masis, and children left and one MC sister stayed back with me and helped me figure out the other songs. She had SUCH and amazing voice! It was so beautiful and pure! I loved hearing her sing in bangali and really wish I knew bangali to sing along. The songs were so beautiful and I was so excited that I was able to figure out the chords to the songs and ontop of that... it was just an BEAUTIFUL SONG!

When I finally finished figuring out as much as I could,in the amount of time Sister was able to be there and help me out befor her afternoon prayer/lunch/nap time, I went down to the first floor and continued painting what was left. It seems to me as if there's not much progress. I was hoping that I'd finish one of it by today but with corina sick yesterday and today it was a set back. Along with not having blue paint for the water and sky... it was a major problem. So until I find a store to go pick up some blue paint, I can't do much more with my ship scene. I finished painting everything that I could on my ship scene today... the people were all finished, the boats, and sails... I'm just waiting on the ocean water. So Today I started the other painting, the ones with animals playing in the water. I was tired and it was getting later in the day, the kids were waking up and the second shift of volunteers were coming in, so I painted as much as I could which meant I only finished painting two monkeys. The children and Masis stood staring, they really liked it.

Well in a couple of hours I'm headed up north to Darjeeling with Corina for the weekend. So I may not blog for a while but pray for our safe journey. PS... we're going to take the toy train up to Darjeeling, where Mother Teresa had her "Call within a call" and go to the Catholic church in darjeeling at 9am on Sunday! I'm excited! Plus, Darjeeling is just so beautiful anyways! It's amazing. Pray for our safe journey.