The First Month

The following is an attempt to recap my first month in India, thus it may be short on specific details.

After arriving in Delhi on August 31st, we quickly left the heat and chaos of the city taking an overnight train to the city in Kathgodam, which is located in the northern province of Uttaranchal. After leaving the train we drove, on the most narrow and twisty roads I have ever seen from Kathgodam to Kausani, a small beautiful town high in the Himalayan foothills. We spent five days in Kausani at an incredibly beautiful hotel, where we had a short orientation, got to know our two instructors, Christina and Genevieve, and began Hindi lessons with our first teacher Binit. We spent most of our time, however, reading, relaxing, practicing yoga and , in my case, recovering from illness, on the deck of the hotel, which looked out on the real, snow capped Himalayas many miles away,
After Kausani we moved deeper into the foothills to the small, isolated, and very rural Kanda Valley. We stayed in Kanda for a little over weeks at an "NGO" (it was essentially a family who rented out rooms in their house to foreigners who want to come volunteer in India) called ROSE or Rural Organization for Social Enhancement. Most days in Kanda consisted of waking up early for a breakfast of chapati (basically tortillas) and sabji (cooked vegetables) , doing manual labor all morning at one of the work sites, lunch ( a mix of daal (lentils) and rice), reading on the porch or roof, Hindi lessons, dinner (the same as breakfast and dinner) and then sleep. While the work sometimes changed from day to day, our main project was to demolish the broken roof and wall of a house and then to rebuild the walls and roof of the house making it slightly bigger in the process. The days of work were quite difficult, but I learned a ton including how to build a wall with mud and stones and how to design a cement roof, got to use lots of awesome tools, and had fun playing with the children who lived in the house and surrounding area.
On our time off from work we would either relax on the roof, which had a incredible view of the surrounding valley, do our laundry on the floor of the outdoor shower, and do the mile long hike up the valley and into town to buy snacks and supplies and to call home from one of the stores in the town.
After about two weeks we finished work on the house and then a few days later made the long drive from Kanda back to Kathgodam, where we caught the overnight train back to Delhi. This time we stopped in Delhi for a few days and explored a little bit of the city. During these two days we went shopping for new Indian clothes in the Karol Bagh market and in the fancy stores of Connaught Place, went for a walking through the slums near the new railway station and learned about the life of street children, visited the India Gate ( a huge British War Memorial) and the Birla House (where Gandhi spent his final days and was assassinated) and ate huge meals savoring the vast variety of flavors that we had missed while we were in the mountains. After two days, we left Delhi and took another train, the longest one yet, to Varanasi, my new home and the city I will begin writing about soon.