No Official Plan

My one week countdown began August 8 after YFS ended. It felt so weird to only have tasks like shopping on my to-do-list. Which was such a change from the busy 3 months I just had. This was the first time my India trip had gone until August so I got to see 2 festivals in India!

The first one I got to celebrate is Raksha Bandhan where the sister ties a string to symbolize the bond between brothers and sisters. So I got to tie rakhis to my cousins and eat good food. The second festival I got to see is Janmashtami. One part of it is dahi handi where people form a huge human tower and a little kid is all the way at the top and breaks open a pot of dahi.

The rest of my week consisted of shopping on Laxmi Road 3 days, eating awesome food (like gulab jamun, missal pav, pav bhaji, bakarwadi), visiting people, and spending time with friends and family. It was so nice to have a week to relax despite the long list of little tasks that I had to get done before I left.

I also used most of this week to get ready to go back home. So in 7 days I repacked 4 times. Making 3 months of stuff plus all my newly bought clothes and food fit was no easy tasks. I had to buy another suitcase :)

This entire week was filled with so many emotions. It was fun going around Pune and spending time with family and friends. But then having to say bye to people and the city was so difficult. I know that I’ll end up coming back to India but still so hard to leave my motherland. Goodbye Summer 2012, I’ll never forget you! :)

VSSV

I’ll pick up right where I left off in the last post, because my trip is literally planned out so that I end YFS at 11:59 p.m. on July 20 and go into VSSV mode at 12:00 a.m. July 21. After some frantic packing we left to catch our bus to Hubli at 1:30 a.m. The bus decides to come an hour late and we finally left at 2:30 a.m. Thankfully Shrish Dada was with us or I don’t even know what Rhucha and I would have done at that late hour roaming around Swargate.

I fell asleep right away after getting on that bus so I could try and make up for the lack of sleep I’ve had for the past week. As we neared Hubli, there was another delay on our way to VSSV. There was a major accident on the road and we waited an hour in the middle of the road. But then our amazing host family who we had never met drove 30 kilometers, picked us up, fed us lots of yummy food from Karnataka, and let us sleep until we had to leave for the varg.

After all this we made it to VSSV expecting a campsite like we have back in the States. But instead we were welcomed into a huge marriage hall with music, flowers, and lots of smiles. I immediately felt like I was at home. The next 15 days were very exhausting but I learned so much. The coolest part was definitely meeting so many people from different countries. IT was interesting to learn about what life is like in 7 other countries (UK, Kenya, Trinidad, Mauritius, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and India) and how they blend in their Hindu traditions with the country they live in.

The varg ended the morning of August 6 and everyone packed up their stuff and headed their separate ways. There were a couple of us with bus tickets in the night so we slowly watched the hall become empty as we said goodbye to our new friends. By the afternoon it just started to get really sad being in that empty place so we walked out to the closest place with shops. Our eating adventures began with veg puffs and Limca. But then I went on to accomplish one of my goals for this trip: eating pani puri from a roadside vendor. After a lot of hesitation and anxiety we each ate 2 pani puris. Probably one of the riskiest things I’ve done this summer, but also one of the most fun memories. Our eating frenzy ended with the yummiest paan I’ve had (probably because it was also from a roadside stall). After all this we caught our bus in the night which came an hour late of course and arrived 1.5 hours late in Pune.

I just barely made it through the rest of the day with the weird incomplete sleep I got on the bus. In the afternoon we headed to our last visit to the Sewa Sahayog office and were reunited with our fellow YFS interns from Bangalore! It was so great to see the after such a long time and hear about all their stories from this summer. After our project presentation s in the evening, YFS 2012 officially ended :( 

Mixed Feelings

I was super busy for the last month of my India trip so I’m really sorry that I couldn’t give updates on time. But here’s what I had written but never got the time to post from July 8-20!

When I started YFS, 10 weeks seemed like such a long time. But they flew by crazy fast. These past 2 weeks have been so busy and fun and stressful and sad and unforgettable all at the same time. We’ve spent the past couple days going around to different vastis and said goodbye to all the karyakartas and kids from the abhyasikas that we had met and worked with. One of the funniest and most memorable stories was during the last week when we visited a vasti we ate far too much for dinner and had to get back to the hostel on time. There were 5 of us and 2 motorcycles. So I got to be sandwiched in between Rhucha and Bapu Dada (the coordinator of Samutkarsha). One of the most memorable and bonding motorcycle rides I’ve had this summer!

Along with this fun in the last 2 weeks of YFS the thing that was keeping me insanely busy was my project! I ended up working on designing a program which connects corporate volunteers with vastis every week for 40 minutes to teach science. They will use a handbook that I’ve designed based on the 7^th-10^th grade school syllabus, which guides them through an effective science lesson. The 40 minutes starts off with the volunteer clearing up all the basic science concepts for that day’s topics through discussion and interactive learning. After this, the student’s will apply this knowledge through a hands-on experiment which uses materials that are found in slums so that kids can see how science is all around them. The last section is an interactive discussion on science in everyday life based on inquiry-based learning.