trip to kerala (part two)

The next day, we woke up early and took a rickshaw around the countryside.

Kaley and I sat on the back of the rickshaw with our feet dangling as we rode!

Immediately, I noticed how much cleaner this area of Tamil Nadu was compared to where I'm living. The terrain was green and the lakes were clean, with lillipads and lotus flowers floating all over. We also stumbled upon rice fields and got a close up look at the rice before it is harvested.

(This reminded me of The Notebook for some reason...nevertheless, beautiful)

Then we headed back to the orphanage and Caroline, Jasdeep, Mary Ellen and I got a tour of the grounds. It was really interesting for me to see another orphanage and compare and contrast it with the one I've been in. Though this one has only 50 kids in comparison to the 130 at mine, the children there live in little cottages and each cottage is assigned a house mother, who cooks and acts as a true mother figure for the children. After the tour, the kids played on the playground, Kaley made friendship bracelets with some of the kids and Rob set up a drum set made of buckets and pots for the kids to play on.

Rob and his make shift drum set

Nuggets having way too much fun jammin'

Later on in the afternoon, we met Sister Gisla, a nun from Germany who has been in India for 10 years now, employing and helping battered women. Sister Gisla, along with these women, make the most incredible bags, aprons, quilts etc and the profits made from these items goes to the salaries of the battered women that Sister Gisla has taken in. It was inspiring and incredible to hear her story as she told it to us with a big smile and a contagious positive attitude.

Here we all are with our "Sister Gisla" bags! We LOVED them (and they're reversible).

The evening ended with an incredible inauguartion of the playground. The children danced and sang and Jasdeep led the girls in her famous rendition of Jai Ho. We enjoyed snacks and tea with some of the locals and the kids and then headed inside to pack up and have dinner (where I consumed an unhealthy amount of parota, but it was just toooo good).

Joy doing the honors...

Little boys getting downnn

Jasdeep and the girls performing Jai Ho

"Blessing" the little tree to go in the center of the playground

Planting the tree.