TRAVELING...

I’m am back “home”! I was gone for a week and a half on my project trip to Meghalaya, and now I’m back at Oaklands in Mussoorie …it feels like home. So I wanna tell you about my trip! Wow, it was the best experience ever!
The night before I left, the interns and staff all celebrated my birthday, they made momos for dinner, actually we all helped make them! YUM! All of us crammed in the kitchen and stuffed these dough bread things with meat and vegs. They also made me a chocolate cake! And all the interns got together and got me gifts, so sweet! I was so surprised! It was the best birthday ever in India! (…later I found out, what Indians traditionally do on their birthdays is that the birthday person is suppose to treat everyone else. Haha! It was nice they did an American birthday for me! ;)
…So we (four of us, 2 interns, one volunteer and a project leader…with me being the only girl!) left on Thursday…and didn’t get to our destination until SUNDAY! Wow, it was a mixture of Taxi rides to trains, from trains to rickshaws, from rickshaws to trains, from trains to sumos, from sumos to other sumos. (sumos are these big SUV like cars that can handle any kind of road in India, great for traveling the mt. roads) haha!
So I spent 23.5 hours of my birthday on the train! Haha!
My journal entry:
“It’s Saturday, and we’ve been on the train forever! We were supposed to be off by now, but the train is 9 hours behind! We were only supposed to be on for 29 hours, but we will be on for 38 hours! Crazy huh! I spent my whole birthday on the train, except for the first half hour of it. Haha! I spent the majority of my birthday sleeping, watching a few movies on someone’s ipod and playing cards to pass the time. We played cards with some men in our cabin. They didn’t know how to speak English, so our project leader had to translate as we played. Fun!”
We then took a sumo from the train. We had some interesting things happen along the way, we stopped at a gas station and tons of people started swarming our car… they wanted to ride on top. Then along the way I had to go to the bathroom, now let me remind you… I was the only girl on this trip…so not so easy for me! :D Luckily I never had to go in the bushes.. but I got to use some pretty interesting squatty potties. Haha. We stopped for dinner… but the place looked kinda shady… and none of us wanted to get sick the beginning of the trip… so we all bought chips and more chips. Great healthy dinner. Haha! It was getting really late, and our driver was falling asleep so at 10ish he stopped and got chi alongside the road…and then along the way he kept sticking his head out the window to wake up, and he was eating something…some kind of nut/drug to keep him away. Haha.
When we got to our first place of rest at like midnight, the family fed us and kept calling me sister. “Sister, would you like more food.” “Sister you sleep here.” Haha! Later on they started calling me sister Katherine. I felt like I was in a nunnery.

They were so hospitable! I soon found out that the whole Meghalaya culture was like that! Everywhere we went they were treating us so well.
So we woke up early the next morning and went to chrch. One thing from chrch that stands out to me was: there was a tithe box on the front steps before you entered the chrch… and around the box people were putting these bags… I asked our leader what it was, and he said it was their tithe… they were bringing 10% of their crop (rice). WOW! That was amazing too me.. I had never even heard of anyone doing a tithe other than money, except from the bibl. Wow! That was very neat! These people were very giving!
The following day, we headed out to our project site, which was going be another day drive in a sumo. It was awesome, because there was like 9 macho Meghalaya men, (4 of my project members)…and me… one small girl… but these men were soooo nice. They looked really scary but were super nice. I felt like I had 9 body guards. (Later on, I found out my mom had been prying for my safety and prying for Gd’s m1ghty warr1ors to surround me!) They were all from the chrch we were working with. I felt very safe and protected. We listened to slow contemporary Christ1an music. It was so funny to see all these macho men put in a cd of contemporary christ1an worship music like Rebecca st. James, Jackie Velasquez…. With the bass up. Haha! They made sure to find the good squatty potties for me too along the way and paid for my bathroom toll. Haha. And it was really cool, because these men stopped along the way so we could see some fun sights and eat some unique food. It was great! pretty much every 15 minutes we stopped. What should have been like a 3 hour trip ended up being way longer. The man that was driving kept asking if I was doing okay. (I guess the local women here usually get sick riding in the cars on the windy roads, because they aren’t use to it.) They drive really fast and the roads are really narrow… if you make one mistake, your falling down the mountain! Eeks! But I figured if Gd got me this far, if he was gunna take me now, I was ready! :D
Our first meal at the house was different. All the women that were serving us, stood around watching us eat. We ate first, and then everyone else could eat after we were finished. And if we didn’t eat everything on our plate, they got really offended and if we finished one thing, they would add more to your plate, it was stressful. Haha! I was so full by the end of the trip! I realized you need to eat really slow so they don’t refill your plate, but not too slow so that they don’t get offended thinking your struggling trying to eat their food. Haha. We went to bed that night pretty late and prepared to wake up at 6:30am the following morning to start our work! Yeah!
(I have more to talk about of coarse… but this is getting pretty long… Another blog of the “good stuff” about the trip is in process… :D)