We had all the ladies in one group this morning. After we did the devotion portion of the morning, we presented the ladies with my contribution to the team: 87 rubber watches. Trisha had asked our team if we could find them and bring them with us because the ladies had seen these watches and loved them. The day before I left, I got one more donation for $100. Since I already had what I needed for the trip, I took that money to Rose's and bought as many of these rubber watches as they had. I blew through the $100 that way.
The ladies loved them! They got to pick the colors they wanted as we sat and gave them out. One thing we should have done: we should have set the watches before we handed them out. I didn't know it at the time, but all of us would be setting these watches from that moment that we handed them out till the literal moment we left.
After lunch, the boys reappeared at our table to ask Melvin to work on some more songs with them in the music room. At some point, Inder must have heard that I can sing (or he may have heard me singing while I was walking around. . . I do that a lot). He asked me to come back with them and sing. He handed me his umbrella and off we went. When I took a look at it, I noticed that had his name along with Balaji's and Sunil's on it. I was currently using an umbrella while 3 boys were walking around in the rain somewhere. It made me think that I was in the company of the most amazing young men on the face of the planet.
Once in the music room, we started practicing the songs the boys would be doing for the singing competition later on that day. We started with a Hindi song the boys had written. This was a great song! They had done a wonderful job with it. I had the phonetic Hindi spelled out on a little sheet of paper, but I had no idea what I was singing. I invented harmony parts and just sang along.
At one point, Inder wanted to practice his song: Give Thanks. We went out on the front porch of the music room and I sang it with him. We then started going through a huge song binder he had. This had over a hundred songs in it, and I found that I knew most of them. We do a lot of them in my own church. He kept playing and I kept singing: Offering, Clean Hands, Mighty to Save, and several old Delirious songs that I have loved for a long time. We sat out there for hours. I began to notice that he would start singing a song with me, but then would drop out halfway through. His explanation was that he liked to hear my singing, and he didn't want to tire out his voice before the solo competition.
After the rehearsal, we went back to the boys' housing and set up our team's contribution to the boys' half: a volleyball net. While Melvin started to teach the boys how to play, I opted not to humiliate myself. Playing soccer is one thing: I made them laugh. Playing volleyball is quite another: I didn't think the guys wanted to chase the ball when I would hit it over the buildings. Luckily for me, Santosh has also opted not to play and instead offered to give me a tour of his bunk house. At first, I turned him down due to the basic rules of youth ministry. I explained the concept of "boys are blue, girls are pink, no purple". He didn't really get it. However, one of the guys' overseers heard our conversation and offered to give me the tour. I now could accept Santosh's invitation.
The inside of the building was quite nice. It had colorful murals everywhere that the kids had painted. The bunks were double stacked in rooms on either side of the entryway. Every one of the guys had two square lockers to store all of their stuff. It was simple, but very clean considering this was the home of the boys that I had completely covered in mud the day before.
We headed back up toward the dining hall for the boys' teatime. It had started raining, but nobody had grabbed the umbrellas because it was only sprinkling. Santosh insisted that I stay on the porch while he ran back in to get his umbrella. It was a lucky thing he did too, because a few seconds later it was raining buckets. The rest of the boys ran through the rain while Santosh and I huddled under his umbrella, laughing and jumping in the puddles.
While at teatime, the guys were picking up my hair and playing with it again. Santosh told me he was jealous of my hair and that he wanted to cut it all off and stick it on his own head. I said, "No, not my hair!" I picked it up and stuck it against my head. Kartik standing behind me was no help: "Yeah, we'll cut it all off and stick it in an Ashagram museum. Other teams will come and they'll be like, 'what's that?' and we can tell them that it's Erin's hair."
Thanks Kartik. Thanks so very much.
After teatime, we all went on the soccer field again. I was stuck on the same team as last time, and they knew just where to put me: Defending the swampy half. In fact, in less than 3 minutes, I slid through another mud puddle and was completely muddy from toes to ponytail. My head was laying in the mud. To add insult to injury, the ball was nowhere near me at the time. I just fell. When the rest of the guys heard my team yelling, they all turned around to see me flat on my back for no apparent reason. I heard them laughing as I pulled my head out of the puddle. I pulled my ponytail over my shoulder and was met with a solid stick of mud. I was glad it wasn't braided, because I knew from experience that it would have taken approximately 30 minutes to unwind the mass of mud and hair just to get it out of the braid. And even then, it would have taken more conditioner I had with me to get the nasty snarls that would ensue. As it was, I already knew I would need to cut that ponytail holder out of my hair.
Over the course of the game, I managed to get myself even dirtier than the day before. That was probably because I kept wiping my hands off on the front of my clothes where it was still dry, and because I didn't have the rain to wash away the layers of mud between coatings. At one point, Sunil jokingly told me that I looked Indian because my skin was looking darker from all the mud. I rinsed some of the mud off my arm in a puddle to demonstrate the fact that I am in fact, Irish, and my skin was never going to get any darker. But there was a problem.
He was right. My skin was darker. But only in patches.
I scrubbed at the patches a little, but realized that scrubbing muddy patches with muddy water was not a solution. I didn't really know what was going on, but I was happy that my skin looked darker. Being almost transparent like I am, you are happy for whatever you can get.
After the game ended, I walked back to the girls' housing. I came onto the compound and was met by a bunch of gasping and giggling girls. They had seen me dirty the day before, but the rain had cleaned me up some. Now I was just an absolute mess.
The girls ran to get buckets full of water. They then ran back to the courtyard where I was standing and started dumping and splashing the water all over me in a vain attempt to get some of the mud off. I got a bucket and scrubbed my arms and legs while they dumped bucket after bucket over my head. I found this completely hilarious, and so did the rest of the girls a safe distance away on the balconies.
Once I got in the building I jumped right in the shower. All the muddy clothes went into the laundry bucket with a huge amount of laundry soap. Once I started to get myself clean, I took a closer look at those mysterious patches.
It seemed that the mud was staining me, but it was only staining the places where I had dry skin. There were two lines of orange running down my forearms. My elbows and knees were orange. My face and neck had patches. There was a big patch across my lower back. The tops of my feet and places around my ankles were a nice shade of burnt sienna.
I looked like a very bad self-tanning accident.
When I got out of the shower, Casey and Jill told me to go back in because I looked like I still had mud on me. This was bad. I explained to them that I was, in fact, clean, and that my skin was stained. They didn't believe me at first, but the patches didn't wash off in the sink when I tried again. They found it absolutely hilarious. I was going to be late for the solo competition, so I pulled on some of the nicer Indian clothing I had purchased earlier in the week and just went, stains and all. I grabbed another white flower off the tree on my way out the door.
All the boys that were in the music room that afternoon went up first. They sang a few songs that Melvin had been teaching them along with their Hindi song.
Then they got to the competition. They had judges like American (or Indian) Idol, minus Simon Cowell that would encourage the kids after they sang. It was pretty cool. Inder got up and did a great job with his song. Then Balaji got up and sang a song he wrote about his family. This was especially impactful for us, as we knew Balaji's story.
Balaji told us that he didn't really know where he was from. He boarded a train to Mumbai when he was 4. He has had no contact with his family, and he doesn't even know if they're alive. He wrote the song about missing his family and as a prayer for them. I wanted to run up there and give him a hug.
At one point, the judges asked if there was anybody else who wanted to sing. Melvin next to me yelled for Sunil to get up there and sing. The girls behind me all started giggling and cheering. Apparently, he had a fanclub. I was thinking, "Dear Jesus, he sings?"
At dinner, some of the small boys stole my camera. I saw them running around taking pictures of everything and thought that I would have some really interesting ones when I got it back. As it turns out, a third of the pictures they took were of me in my Indian outfit.
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| Check out my arm. That's not the light, that's what the mud did to my skin, but only in patches. |
The rest of them were of them taking pictures with the older boys and putting their hands behind the older boys' heads.
At one point, Alok grabbed my wrist and gently picked my arm up. I knew what he was looking at. He got a napkin off the table and poured some water on it. I tried to tell him it wasn't going to come off, but he was scrubbing anyway. After a few seconds of this, he just cracked up. "What happened!? You're not still dirty!" he yelled. "I told you! The mud stained my skin!" I yelled. Inder standing next to him said, "Oh, so you're more Indian now! Your skin is getting darker! Now you have to stay here."
After dinner, Sunil sat down next to me at the table and started asking me a few questions about my life. He asked me when I came to God and when I felt a calling on my life. When he determined that I had never done any real wandering from the Lord, he stared at the ground for a second. I could sense something shifting around in him, like he was deciding whether or not to say something. I waited for a moment for him to sort it out. Eventually he met my gaze again. He said that his family kicked him out of their house when he was young because he wasn't going to school and he didn't have a job. He left his village and went to Mumbai. Once he got there, he found that the street like was really rough and hard. He got beat up a lot. I was thinking,"who in the world would beat up Sunil? I mean, really?" That was hard for me to picture. I didn't know it at the time, but that was not Sunil's biggest problem out there.
At that moment, Trisha behind me yelled that it was time for our team to go to bed. For the first time in our conversation, Sunil broke eye contact with me to glare at her over my shoulder. His shoulders slumped forward and he sighed in irritation. I hadn't realized it, but I had just been talking to Sunil for an hour and a half. I had no idea what went on around me or even where my camera was. I had only vaguely been aware of the fact that there were still people running around me while I was sitting at the table. When I realized I didn't have my camera and started looking for it, without asking what I needed, Sunil jumped up and tracked down the smaller boy that still had it. I thought "Dear Jesus, can he read my mind, too?" He ran back to me and handed me both my bag and my camera. I was wondering how exactly he could anticipate the needs of someone else that well. I gave him a hug and told him that I really wanted to hear the rest of the story, and that I would sit with him tomorrow night and hear the rest.
I didn't know it, but I was about to be even more amazed by this young man and the awesome power of God in his life.
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