Amida Volunteers Blog

The last month has been a blur of teaching, shopping, eating and sleeping! Classes are going well and its strange to think that for me, my teaching career in india is almost over. The time spent so far has enabled me to build up good relationships with my students and I will genuinely miss them on my return to the UK. Its been great to see the change in their English speaking and they have so much more confidence compared to when we first met them.

In the lead up to Christmas, we've been on a Christmas shopping mission and have probably single handedly kept India's economy afloat! Going Sari shopping in Delhi's Old Quarter, Chandni Chowk was a fab experience. The streets are so crammed with merchants, beggars, hawkers, cows, rickshaws and people throwing buckets of water out of their houses. It can be a bit of an artform dodging the frequent showers of dirty water thats cleaned floors, motorbikes and bodies! Yuk! Choosing a Sari is a delightful experience, one for the ladies. You sit on a white blanket on the floor while being presented with an array of beautiful and not so beautiful and then downright gaudy Saris while sipping on freshly brewed Chai. It was hard to leave the shop without buying up the whole place and I wish we in the Uk wore them more often. In the end we left with 2 each! One for Mansha's wedding in January and one for my cousin Alison's wedding in July.

Yesterday we had a school excursion taking some students to Delhi's attractions in a mini-van we hired. It was a lot of fun and it was nice that some of them don't always have the opportunity to see some of these sites. When nwe got home, a huge wedding procession was going on with 2 massive elephants leading it. We ran ahead to the market to buy some fruit for them and were invited to sit on them. Who would have thought our day would have ended with us on top of 2 huge elephants leading a wedding procession through the streets of Yamuna Vihar - crazy!

Our outreaches have been going well. The children have mastered numbers, colours, verbs and nouns and we have been introducing pronouns. As Vicki mentioned, the numbers have been increasing more and more each week, and 2 weeks ago we hit the 120 mark! Since then we have had to manage the numners more carefully as it can be a bit difficult to manage with the 3 of us and one Indian volunteer! Its all good though and the children are loving it!