This is a typical day for me:
We start with staff and interns at 8:30 with devo's, singing and prayer time, and we each take turns doing devos. We then start the work day from 9am to 6pm. Our office is a house in which my room is located in the back. The house is located at the highest point of the city and gets very cold in these winter months! We start what is called a bucaree (like a wood stove) to keep us warm during the day. We go down to the shed each morning and get wood and pincones to keep it going. Usually on my way to the wood shed, I step in poo along the way... just a typical day. Then I often burn my hand on the stove while trying to get the fire started... just a typical day. haha! All the work is totally worth it, and the warmth is nice! I often wear my winter coat and gloves as I sit by my computer and work. :)
My room, is the girls dorm (which I have all to myself, since I'm the only single girl) and it's located in the back of the office. The men stay in another building about a 15 minute walk up the mountain to our office. It's been nice to be able to just walk down the steps from my loft and go to work. So a typical workday for me is getting up at 6am, going for a run on the trails in the beautiful mountains, as the sun rises over the mountains (It's a great way to start my day and wake up and enjoy Gd's beauty.) We can only shower no more than every other day. A "shower" for us, is what you would call a bucket bath. Many interns go for a week without showering, but I prefer to take mine as much as I can. ha! Then I get ready for work. The work atmosphere is like working in any other architecture office, except we have several visitors, many interruptions, and breaks for chi time. We have an Indian cook who cooks for us everyday except on the weekends. She is soo sweet, I feel really spoiled sometimes, because she knows I don't like chi, so she will make me some garrum dude (hot donkey milk) with sugar and bring it out to me while I'm working. I love donkey milk! (And I think I'm the only one that does here) It smells really bad, but I love it! YUM! haha! So, we have weekends "off", from the office work. On weekends we have gone and volunteered at different schools, villages, and peoples homes to share the good news! Several amazing opportunities! I wrote about some of them in previous blogs.
Anyways, right now in the office, there are two projects that us interns are working on. One is a children's school for m1ss1onary kids, and the other, which I am working on, is guest houses and seminar hall for a chrch in North East India. We are designing a whole campus for the chrch. We have been working on it from the very beginning of my time here and our plan is to publish next week! My team consists of one civil engineer intern and one architecture staff member. I have been working on the architectural plans, elevations, renderings, etc. and it's been such a great experience! It's so cool to think that I can do what I absolutely love, while also serving and doing it for the Lrd! It's fun because there is also a family that lives here and they have three little blonde kids, who are so cute! So every once in a while, while working, the kids come in and "help" us with our work. And on our lunch break we sometimes go outside with the kids and play baseball. Great fun! A typical meal for us consists of rice, doll, subsee (vegtables), chapoti's (like pita bread). and panee (water). To be honest, I am actually getting quite tired of it, but despite the dislike, I still eat it, and I think now when I go back home I won't complain about food again! haha! We have also eaten some pretty sketchy food and have eaten in some pretty sketchy places, and amazingly I have only gotten really sick twice from the food! The crazy thing is that the longer I have lived here, the more I am like, "Oh well" and you just expect that you probably will get sick, and that you just get over it!. ha! In fact the other day some of us interns were making oatmeal, despite the bad smell we continued to eat our oatmeal, but we wondered what the smell was from and soon found out there was poo on the brown sugar bag that we had been using. Despite our findings, we still continued to eat the oatmeal and enjoy it too! haha! Oh man, there are so many other great stories like this. Despite all the smells and the cleanliness, I love India, and I can't believe my time is almost up. I really don't want to leave! It really has been an amazing time and I can't believe we only have two more weeks! eeeks!
This weekend is filled with good bye parties and the following weekend as well, while we wrap up our project during the week. Just this past friday night after work, we had a party at an Indian family's house; the wife taught us Indian dance and prior to the party, went with us to get Sari's (indian dress) to dress up for the party. It was fun!
...Two weeks! It's really exciting to think I'll be home in two weeks, but I'm also very very sad to leave such an amazing place with all these amazing families and people that I have formed great relationships with. I really don't want it to end!
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