I am now living with my host family! They are amazing, and I immediately felt happier once they picked us up. Their house is small but as they say, “small house, big heart,” and boy is it true. I am living with another girl in the program, and we get along great. We have a host mother and father, whom we call aunty and uncle (a general term of endearment), a sister, Nandini, who turned 18 yesterday (we had “big party time” with great food and hanging out) and a brother, Surej, 11. They are all so loving and friendly and I felt comfortable from the very beginning. The small house and close family makes for a communal, open living situation, which I am down with. For example, the sink in which we brush our teeth is in the middle of the kitchen, and to get to the living room, where aunty and uncle sleep, we walk through the kids’ bedroom. We spend very little time in our room alone and a lot of time out in the house with the family. Our mother is a housewife (an amazing cook!) and is very sweet and patient. I caused the power to shut-off for 20 minutes by plugging in my computer (which I will not be doing anymore) but nobody minded and Aunty reassured me, giving me a gentle face-push when I offered to pay for the electrician.
Our father has a clothes manufacturing company that operates in the basement of the building. It consists of ten men at sewing machines making beautiful jeweled dresses to ship to the U.S. I told him to call me Izzy since Isabel is a bit long, so now he calls “E-Z!” often, like if he needs me to see something important happening on the news, or wants to talk about how sad it is that Michael Jackson died. He sings along to all the Bollywood songs that play as music videos on TV. He was SO HAPPY about the books my roommate and I brought of our home cities. He nodded his head and made happy noises while seeing the mountains and fields of Washington, and anytime a picture of snow came up, he got very excited. He told us we were just like daughters to him. Very sweet.
Our sister is beautiful and mature. She is in her first year of university (but lives at home) studying business and has no hesitations about hanging out with us—walking into our room, sitting down on a bed and chatting. She already feels like sister and it’s been fun comparing and contrasting teenage things in India and America, seeing what music she and her friends like.
Surej is obsessed with cricket and basketball and is currently in the middle of several large exams so he has been studying and whining a lot. He is shier than Nandini but still has fun hanging out with us. Yesterday I quizzed him on his science. Uncle’s brother lives in the apartment upstairs from ours and two other girls from the program are living with him and his family. They have another brother who lives down the street who is hosting a boy from the program. Again, it all feels very close and family-oriented. About half the kids on the program live in our same neighborhood, Lajpat Nagar, which has a giant outdoor market, many small parks, and big, more western stores (Levi’s, or a favorite hangout spot, Café Coffee Day).
We had our first official day of class yesterday and it went fine. Everyday we will have Hindi class for three hours (with Chai breaks), then our Arts and Culture seminar, which is lectures and reading discussions. About once a week we will have practica—we had to choose between yoga, tabla drumming, sitar lessons, cooking, pottery, bollywood dancing, and heritage walks. I chose cooking and yoga. Yoga is in the mornings on the roof-top where we eat lunch and cooking is at the teachers house.
Sometimes silly things happen here. For example, there have been monkeys tearing up the benches on the roof of the program center. To deal with this problem, the staff has hired a monkey-wala. A Monkey-wala is a man who brings a larger monkey everyday to hang out on the roof in order to scare away the other monkeys.
Most days it rains very hard for a short period of time. It is nice when it rains at night because it makes the morning cooler. Today it rained in the evening, just as it got dark. It was very comforting to hear the dripping and see streetlights reflected in the puddles. I have not been too homesick, but I do miss everyone and wish you could all be here with me.
***UPDATE: since I wrote this a few days ago a GIANT RAIN STORM has come. It has been pouring for two days straight with some breaks of light showers. Yesterday it took us 2 hours (normally it takes 30 minutes by rickshaw) to get to school. Since it was pouring and there were giant puddles on the road, most rickshaws weren’t running, so we tried calling cabs, but no one would come, until we finally got an old Ambassador car taxi. It was cozy and fun inside UNTIL IT BROKE DOWN. Three times. In the middle of lakes on the road. We finally got dropped off three blocks from our program center and waded through a foot of water. It was certainly a ridiculous adventure, but I had a pretty good time.
