Friday we have our volunteer meetings before prathna. Somehow I wasn't feeling up to going, but I trucked on, get ready, and left. Sure enough when I get there, I see the volunteer coordinator and he looks at me and goes, oh shoot, I knew I forgot something. And I was like hmm, let me guess, volunteer meeting is canceled today?! He's like yeah, and I remembered to call everyone except for you. I'm sitting here thinking well how special of me. So I asked why it was canceled and he said because most of the volunteers were working on the construction of the new anganwadi (pre-school) building since it opens in 3 days and there is a lot left to do so I canceled the meeting. Then I was thinking well, this might not be so bad. So I asked if he could take me with him to the site so I could help. I figured it was a win-win...this way he didn't feel guilty for forgetting me either ;)
There they are making the walls out of plastic bottles. So plastic bottles have been filled with sand, compacted sand, and then the caps super-glued on. Then using cement the bottles will be put on their sides and used to build the wall. It looks really cool and is a very good example of recycling for the kids! So when I got there some bottles were left to be filled with sand but the main work was super-gluing the caps onto the bottles. But I was warned that if you get any of the superglue on your hands, you have to rip it off right away, which will also take some skin off and burn like heck. I responded well is there any other task for me to help with because anything with that strict of a warning, the first thing I will do is superglue my fingers together ;) So then they had me put the superglued bottles in piles next to where they will be used. Man, was it tiring! These bottles were heavy, and there were obstacles everywhere. But I did it, and it was fun to be useful and see all of the work the volunteers are doing to get things ready there! I did manage to get superglue on my hands, some had dribbled down apparently onto the bottle. I decided to let it crust and dry and let it fall off naturally...which actually turned out to work well! I only helped for a couple of hours, but when I went home I crashed! It was really tiring to do manual work especially in the sun! But it was a lot of fun and really cool to see all of the kids in the area trying to sneak a peek at what we were doing - you can tell the community is excited to have this being built!
The World Cup was on Saturday - India v Sri Lanka. This was again a zoo. The streets were literally dead, kids had the flag painted on their faces... Everyone was watching the game. In the second half when India was up to bat, every time they made a run, a single run, everyone would run out of their houses and cheer, even do fireworks. By the end things were out of control - they were using plates and spoons to make "music", half of them weren't even watching the game, just yelling when other people were yelling around the block! I don't like cricket, at all, but even I got interested towards the end. When India won, man was it chaos. The celebrations started way before we actually won, but once it was official, there were fireworks like it was Diwali or Independence Day, everyone was out on the street cheering, making noise. Then everyone got on their bikes or walked to the big intersections, and there I hear everyone just made more noise and cheered, stood up on moving bikes etc. I did not go to see or partake in the chaos, but I hear it was crazy. I swear it felt like we had just won a war or something! But it was great to see everyone united and celebrating something with so differences between young, old, men, women, rich, poor. That's true patriotism!!!
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