Pasta in a Slum?

 So there are these crazy birds who live in the tree outside our window and they just love to be as loud as possible early in the morning. After waking up because of the interesting squawking we headed to Ram Nagar to teach English again. We teach in a room smaller than the size of a regular freshman dorm room using a blackboard and broken pieces of chalk. Although there’s a fan in the room it still feels like a sauna in there. Despite these conditions, it’s been so enjoyable to teach and spend time with the kids! We tried to teach the entire class in English so that they would become familiar with the language, but they just had so much trouble understanding our accents that we switched back to teaching through Marathi.

Afterwards we grabbed lunch (I had wada pav again, no surprises there!) and headed to the Sewa Sahayog office to get some work done. The rest of the YFS interns are coming next week and we planned the schedule for their orientation.  The intense planning session got me super pumped to meet everyone in a few days :) Then we went to an area where various projects are just getting started and the abhyasikas are not as established. We went with a local Sewa Sahayog volunteer and it was interesting to see how new volunteers/teachers are created from the slums. It’s one thing for an outsider to come into an area and teach the kids, but it’s much more effective when the teacher lives in the slum itself because the people feel a stronger connection with the teacher.

As we were walking on the small stone pathways between the houses in the vasti in the evening, for some reason I smelled marinara sauce. Yummm :) Obviously, no one was making pasta there so the only explanation I could come up with is that I’m clearly missing home! A big shout out to everyone back home, I miss ya’ll :) 

The kids at Ram Nagar.