Thoughts on my two weeks in Kabul, Afghanistan

The faculty (including the volunteers) at Shanti Bhavan had a two-week vacation September 19th – October 3rd and I decided to spend my break volunteering at a music school in Kabul, Afghanistan. For those of you who don’t know this about me, I’ve been itching to go to Afghanistan for years. To state it simply, I’ve read book after book about the country and the conflicts there and have always felt inexplicably fascinated by it and drawn to it. And now that I’m back in India, I’m finding it hard to write about. I could write about what I did there each day, the people I met, the food I ate, the places I saw…but what I’m most interested in conveying to you is how it felt to be there. And that’s much more daunting of a task…and one that I’m not sure I’ll be able to succeed at. But I’ll try.

I have two favorite quotes that perfectly supplement my philosophy on life (if I’m old enough to have one already)…

“Comfort zones are most often expanded through discomfort.” - From a fortune cookie I got last year

“Nothing in life is to be feared – it is only to be understood.” - Marie Curie

In anticipation of what certain people (namely, my parents ☺) might retort to that second quote, let me just clarify why I think it applies to Afghanistan. Saying that there’s nothing to fear doesn’t mean that I think there are only wonderful people in Afghanistan and only good things happening. Clearly, that’s not the case. But instead of reacting with fear, I believe we should try to understand the whole situation and its various parts.

When most people think of Afghanistan, they think of extremists, oppressed women, AK-47s, IEDs, landmines, poppies, and dust. Am I right? Did I miss anything? While all of these are definitely a part of Afghanistan, the other side of the coin is hardly ever depicted in the news. When I remember my two-weeks’ time in Afghanistan, I think of roses, kites, and the way people greet each other – with the right hand over the heart…try it – you’ll instantly feel a genuine connection with who you're greeting.

I did not know what to expect from my trip to Afghanistan, but I could not have imagined a more amazing experience. From learning Dari to receiving a compliment from Hamid Karzai on my oboe playing…it all was way better than any dream I could have had. And yes, I got to play oboe for the president. More on that later. For now, I’m going to do my best to break down my experience into a few parts:

First: The People
The Afghan people I had the privilege of working with were some of the kindest, friendliest, and most gentle people while also being incredibly funny and quick-witted. And of the vast international community in Kabul, I’ll say this: you will never meet a boring person. Ever. Everyone you meet has a fascinating reason to be there, be they government workers, NGO workers, journalists, aid-workers, or music teachers!

Second: The Music School
Dr. Sarmast, the founder, has done an incredible job of creating this first-ever music school. I highly recommend you check out the website and read more about his project: www.afghanistannationalinstituteofmusic.org. In addition, I was collaborating with the organization Cultures in Harmony (www.culturesinharmony.org) which invited me to ANIM to observe the music students practicing and make recommendations on how to develop a better practice methodology. With this task at hand, I was able to work with students on a variety of instruments instead of the usual pianists I come across (being a pianist, myself). With the language barrier, I had to immediately learn the music-practicing-basics in Dari such as “good!”, “do that three times in a row”, “listen!”, “beautiful!”, “do that again from this measure”, and “This is very difficult.” And - of course - counting the beats in Dari: yak, du, se, char!

The music students at ANIM are dedicated, hard working, and always eager to learn. Ever respectful, my favorite time of day was walking into the guitar students’ practice room and seeing them stand, put their hand on their heart and say “Welcome, Teacher.” I’m not even a guitar teacher! But their respect for any type of teacher is astounding.

I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but one day I mentioned that I could play the oboe. Turns out, there were two oboes in the music closet and no one knew how to play them. One thing led to another, and I ended up playing oboe in the school orchestra, which in turn had the opportunity to play for President Karzai at a Literacy Day celebration. The oboe is a new instrument to the musical landscape of Afghanistan, and I had the honor of introducing it. The students around me in orchestra commented on how “sad” the instrument’s tone was and got our their cell phones to record me playing. They were enthralled at the oboe’s sound and its capacity for emotion. Mr. Shefta, the clarinet teacher at ANIM had arranged a beautiful and touching Afghan song for choir, piano, violin, cello, oboe, and tabla – and it was this arrangement that we played for the president, after the whole orchestra performed the National Anthem which was arranged by William Harvey, the American violin teacher at ANIM. After we performed, President Karzai came over to the orchestra and thanked us in Dari, and then he pointed at me and said in Dari “That girl played very well.” Then he said “very good” in English and went up on stage for his speech. True story.

Third: Kabul Itself
On the days off from school – Fridays – the founder of the music school was so kind to show us (myself and the foreign faculty members) around Kabul. What we were able to see still boggles my mind. From smelling the roses in Babur Gardens to witnessing the war scars on Darul Aman Palace – a palace completely destroyed by war and still standing, from driving up one of the mountains which frame Kabul, to walking around the side streets of the musician’s neighborhood…we were SO lucky. One of my favorite experiences was walking around the top of a particular hill whose name escapes me – a hill with two scars remaining from Kabul’s tortured past. One scar is a set of deserted tanks that was used in the civil war in the 1990s. From the hills surrounding Kabul, the mujahedin would fire at each other, destroying the city and killing tens of thousands of people in the crossfire. The second scar is an empty Olympic-sized swimming pool originally built by the soviets. The Taliban, I have read, used to throw blindfolded criminal-offenders off the diving boards to the concrete below. Despite these scars and what they remind us of – or more appropriately – in spite of these scars and what they remind us of - this hill has now been turned into a public park by USAID. We arrived there right as the sun was beginning to make its descent through the dusty sky into a beautiful sunset. Families were out with their children, kids were flying kites, and friends were sitting together enjoying the peaceful view from the hill. It was a striking moment when I truly felt how resilient Afghanistan is and how much hope it really has. And while there’s a lot in Afghanistan to be “afraid” of, we have so much more to understand.

I need to end this blog post, as a long week of teaching at Shanti Bhavan lies ahead of me. So while I don’t have any brilliant way of tying my thoughts together, I’ll conclude by saying that if you encourage yourself to expand your comfort zones every day and exchange fear for a studious heart, you never know when you might end up playing oboe for the president of Afghanistan.

Validation and Gratification

This afternoon (Friday), after a long week of teaching – I wasn’t sure I had the energy to go back to the school building and teach an extra piano lesson to Saritha, one of my 11th graders who needed a make-up lesson. My headache almost convinced me to cancel and take what I would refer to as a ‘well-deserved’ nap.

I thought about Saritha’s last lesson. We had worked for one solid hour on just three measures of music. It was a lesson that would have made me cry, had I been in her shoes….and I HAVE been in her shoes. Any musician can recall at least one lesson where their frustration at the page of music and at themselves brought them to tears. I would say it’s a rite of passage for any student. Saritha hadn’t cried, although her brow was perpetually wrinkled as the metronome kept clicking and we kept trying over and over and over. As her teacher, I felt two conflicting feelings. First, I wanted to ease her pain and move on to an easier section…why, I asked myself, does she come to my piano lessons after all – to express her feelings and reduce stress through music? Or to hold herself to perfection’s standards and want to pull her hair out in the process? But secondly, my eyes were nearly tearing up themselves as I realized what I was experiencing – in front of me sat a student who didn’t want to move on to an easier section. She had gotten to that stage of being a pianist where you no longer wish you were NOT practicing and instead out and playing with your friends….you knew the value of a hard practice session. You knew that the music you were working on was worth it. You knew that even if you wanted to cry, you’d get through it.

So thinking about where we left off in our last lesson, I decided that my nap could wait and I headed to the school building. Saritha is the definition of soft-spoken. Her voice is soft, her smile is gentle, and she reserves most of her words for before and after lesson – though even then, I rarely get more than a shy smile and a nearly inaudible “Thanks, Allegra” on her way out. So you can imagine my surprise when I walked in the music room and Saritha said “I got it.” She already had the metronome on and was poised to play those same three bars we had toiled over. And there it was – she had it perfectly. I was ecstatic for her, and started to say something about how amazed I was and she quietly interrupted me and began to tell me about how she had worked again on this passage alone in her practice time and it was from this very passage that she first “learned to concentrate.” She told me how her mind wanders a lot naturally, and having to work on this piece of music taught her how to truly focus. Then she went on to tell me about how she applied her newly found concentration skills in her Economics class. She said she prepared so well for her quiz and she’s pretty sure she’ll get a perfect score. I was speechless. Not only was I so proud of her and shared in her joy as a fellow pianist, but I let myself have a quiet moment of validation and gratification in my heart of hearts. THIS is it. THIS is why I’m halfway across the world trying to teach piano in rural India. I always fight my nagging question – “How is teaching piano going to REALLY help these children from destitute circumstances succeed in school and in life?” and Saritha is my answer.

Apparently, it’s possible for an afternoon to get EVEN BETTER than that. After our piano lesson which lasted an hour and 15 minutes (they’re usually 30 mins) – my other piano students came into the music room for our weekly Theory Class which is another name for My-Favorite-Class-of-All-Time. Today, I had planned, we would talk about Dominant Seventh chords. For those of you non-music readers out there – these chords are awesome. I STILL remember when I first learned about them. They’re chords whose whole purpose in life is to make music satisfying to listen to. They are built of harmonies that in their very nature lead us to yearn for other harmonies. Tension and release. It’s all about tension and release – dissonance to consonance. So we all worked at the chalkboard, learning which notes in the dominant seventh chord are the notes that cause us to wish for a resolution. Then we went to the keyboard to pick out a few dominant sevenths and figure out which chords they resolve to. Kumar got to the piano bench and I had Shashi pick a key. He picked E-flat major. So we recapped – we’re going to figure out what dominant seventh chord leads to E-flat major. We counted up the scale to B-flat (the dominant of E-flat) and then built a seventh chord on B-flat. Then the class picked out the two notes that together form a dissonance that leads us to yearn for resolution – the leading tone and the fourth. Kumar played his B-flat dominant seventh chord loudly and clearly and was all set to resolve it to the E-flat chord when he accidently played the wrong chord instead. The whole class erupted in a mixture of laughter and pleading – the PERFECT reaction to a dominant seventh chord that isn’t properly resolved. Desperately yearning for the right chord, I saw a jumble of hands poking at Kumar’s hand trying to help him find the correct chord. When he found it, we all let out a sigh of relief.

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about – you can imagine my anxiety over this lesson plan. Are they going to understand the whole “dominant” and “seventh” thing? And the “leading tone” and “fourth” that have to “resolve” to the “tonic”? They did!!! So much so, that when I had Shashi bring out a piece he’s being working on with me (Solfieggetto, by C.P.E Bach) – to play a section that is a whole line of dominant sevenths resolving to other dominant sevenths resolving to still more dominant sevenths (leading the listener to expect resolution but never receiving it until the very end of the string of dominant sevenths) - Nikhil laughed and said “what a sly fellow” (referring to how clever it was of the composer to keep writing dominant sevenths and make the listener hold out for the resolution.)

Again, I ask myself – how am I so lucky to be the piano teacher here? What more could I possibly ask for?

Saritha stayed after class to clarify a question she had about dominant sevenths. I explained it to her and then showed her my favorite thing about a dominant seventh chord – when it resolves to a chord you don’t expect it to: the minor sixth chord. It’s one of the most beautiful chord progressions out there and when I played it for her, her face lit up. Then she said in her quiet, sweet voice: “Music is so cool.”

Gratefulness

Sometimes I think of my life these past few months in India – REALLY think about it. Two months have already passed, and I already feel a little frantic that as each day ends, I am one day closer to leaving. How did that happen?? Here I was, expecting to make it through “a year in India” one day at a time – mosquitos, bucket showers, gigantic spiders and all. But as I’ve adjusted to those aforementioned amenities, I have instead realized that I might actually be one of the luckiest people alive.

How was I chosen by the universe to be where I am? Why is it ME who gets to work with these amazing children and be with them every day? I was under the impression that I was coming here to teach, yet I’ll be lucky if I teach half as much as I’m learning.

Let me start with my piano students. Every week, we have a group lesson for the advanced piano students. In this group, we learn music theory together, do some listening activities, etc. – I have nine students in this group between 8th grade and 11th grade. When I think of those ages in the USA, I don’t imagine a class where students smile constantly, support eachother, encourage eachother, and dance to my music on their way out of class. With these same students, I have a “major scales challenge” – I’ve made a chart that is hung on the wall with each of the students’ names. For every major scale, they have 9 different metronome marking goals (for speed). For example, if they can play a D Major scale three times in a row with the metronome on at 80, they can put a sticker up on the chart. Again, when I think of this age group in the USA, I don’t think of them getting excited about scales, much less about stickers. And I especially don’t imagine the children being happy for their peers getting stickers before them. But here at Shanti Bhavan, I walk a proud student into the music room to award them a sticker for the chart, and the other piano students smile broadly and say “You’re getting a sticker???” and watch, beaming, as the other student places their sticker on the chart. In our group lesson this week, I had one of the students – Kumar – perform the piece he had just finished learning, “Barcarolle” by Bernard Shaak (my teacher from childhood). The rest of the class sat on the steps in the assembly hall to listen to Kumar perform. Afterwards, I asked each student to comment on the performance – something positive and something that he could improve on. Each audience member, so articulate as usual, was able to give praise AND constructive criticism. After a round of comments, I turned to Kumar and asked him how he had felt performing. I was worried for a split second that Kumar might be feeling a little fragile, as these students are not accustomed to performing and being critiqued. But Kumar was beaming – as usual – and said “I felt awesome.”

One last story – a really funny one - from this week that I will leave you with is a story about the sweet children in 7th grade. This past week I taught 7th grade literature, grammar, and creative writing. Being in the rural setting where we are, talk of animals always comes up somehow. They were mentioning something about a rat being in one of the classrooms, and I got really excited and told them how much I love rats and that I had had two pet rats back at home. They thought that was funny, and we moved on with our lesson. Later that day, after classes had finished, I was back in my room at the volunteer house and I heard little voices yelling my name from outside. I came out of the volunteer house and all of the 7th grade boys were so excited and laughing – they had been out on the field and had caught a baby mouse. They brought it to me in a little sack they had found as a gift.

Thinking about the children of Shanti Bhavan, and my year with them - the one world that truly gives voice to the warmth in my heart is “gratefulness.” I cannot think of a better word.

Trip to Delhi and Agra

I just returned from my first "vacation" here in India. I'm back in Bangalore now at our favorite coffee shop Matteo which has wireless internet. Shreya left this morning on her flight back home to Dubai, and my sister and a few other volunteers from Shanti Bhavan will be arriving here this evening. So I'm spending the day alone in Bangalore which feels surprisingly relaxing.

So now I can reflect on our trip to Delhi and somehow describe it in words. This will be a challenge. I'd like to pick one word to describe India, but I have too many to choose from. The closest I can come is the word "excessive." But not with the negative connotation we naturally assume with that word. It's not a negative thing - it's invigorating.

All of your senses are engaged here, whether you like it or not:

Your eyes are overwhelmed by the brilliant colors everywhere around you - bright orange saris decorated with sequins, women with huge gold earrings and nose rings, bright purple turbans, houses that are painted neon pink and yellow, trucks on the highways with painted designs covering every inch...

Your sense of smell is assaulted by the sour smell of garbage...the exhaust from rickshaws, buses, cars...the raw smell of livestock - cows roaming the streets, donkeys, goats, and buffalo...then your nose is delighted by the scent of jasmine flowers sold on the streets, dropped into your hands at temples, and decorating women's hair. My favorite smell, though, is rose. Rivaling the popularity of jasmine, rose water, rose soap, and rose petals are found everywhere.


Your ears are overwhelmed by the incessant honking on the streets and highways - instead of turn signals, cars honk to signal their intentions. Trucks and buses have the most interesting yet obnoxious horns I've ever heard - usually three or four different notes played in some sequence as opposed to just one tone. When cars are backing up, instead of the beeping we're used to with trucks in the USA, they instead play a melody. Your ears are still overwhelmed by the constant music coming from all corners. Everything from car radios to a lone man on his bike singing a Bollywood song to himself.

Your sense of taste is perhaps the happiest of the senses here. Though it takes a little getting used to. I never thought I'd see a day where a plate of onions is served with breakfast - and I happily add them to my plate. Raw onions?? But they're SO good. Spice for breakfast, spice for lunch, spice for dinner.

Lastly, the sense of touch. In Delhi there is 85% humidity. You step outside and your clothes stick to you. Something lightly tickles your skin and it's either a drop of sweat rolling down your skin or a fly crawling on you. I guess it could be a variety of other insects, but I won't go there. Then there are the itchy mosquito bites - can't forget those. But then there's my favorite sense of touch which is what you feel with the bottoms of your feet. You must take off your shoes in India more times than you can count - temples, mosques, people's houses, etc. But by far, my favorite time I took off my shoes was at the Bangla Sahib Gurudwara in Delhi. We took off our shoes and then there was a shallow canal of sorts that was at the base of the stairway leading up to the Gurudwara. We all had to walk through the water to cleanse our feet before climbing the stairs. I've written about this feeling before in earlier blog posts - but there's something about being barefoot with everyone else that instantly grounds you and connects you to those around you.

It's been a while since I was in elementary school studying the five sense, but where do emotions come? Sense of "touch" there? Like homesickness, loneliness, happiness, gratefulness...? In the interest of not being "excessive", I'll save that for another blog post.

Being a piano teacher in rural India, I constantly battle the nagging thought that piano lessons are, well…I can never find the exact word for it – but something along the lines of “not really necessary or useful.”

The odds the children of Shanti Bhavan face are enormous. They come from extremely poor, disadvantaged families – and in India, the words “poor” and “disadvantaged” take on entirely new meanings when you truly start to see the effects of the caste system. These children are the first in their families to make it through high school. They do not have any academic role models: no father who is a lawyer, no mother who is a doctor, no one pushing them to go to college and follow in the prestigious footsteps set before them. Instead, they are blazing a trail. And they must walk this trail with the weight of the poverty of their entire family resting on their shoulders. They do not go home after school to parents who ask “What did you learn in school today?” or “How did you do on that math test?” They live here, amongst each other, with only themselves, their teachers, the volunteers, and their “aunties” (residential staff) to guide them – personalized attention and support is never a guarantee. If they do not succeed at Shanti Bhavan, if they were go to back home – they would face the realties of manual labor, factory work, early marriage…

So given these circumstances – where they come from and what they are trying to achieve, it is literally IMPERATIVE that they do well in their classes and successfully pass the entrance examinations for college. They need to learn math, physics, chemistry, biology, English, writing, Hindi, Tamil, economics, civics, history…the list of needs goes on. But where on that list does “learning how to play an E-harmonic-minor scale” fit? Does playing a Bach Sarabande REALLY help?

This is my existential dilemma. Is my year’s purpose really to equip these students to fight against the odds with…piano?

Inevitably, I return to my own experience to begin to answer that question. Music has never paid my rent or bought me food. But was it useless to me? What has it given me? Besides the obvious: work ethic, patience, artistic sensibilities, “culture” – it has also given me who I am. Quite literally. Sometimes I forget how much music is a part of me – but subconsciously, it’s always there. I felt this my first week at Shanti Bhavan when I walked to the cafeteria for lunch one day. My jet lag was waning, I had begun to settle in, and get used to life here. As I was eating, the music that had been playing on the CD player in the cafeteria switched suddenly to a Mozart piano sonata. It was like someone I knew and loved had walked through the door. It was the first time I had listened to classical music since leaving Colorado and starting my life over here – and without even realizing what was happening, my eyes completely teared up. The purity and depth, the meaning, the memories… If in the middle of rural India, an American girl can instantly feel at home through a few clear notes of Mozart, the implications of music must run deep in the veins.

So there it is. If my piano lessons can provide that touchstone in the hearts of my students here…if I can help them cultivate their own self-discovery, self-acceptance, and self-confidence…then I won’t just be teaching piano lessons – I will be making a real difference.

And 5-6-7-8: Performance Time at Shanti Bhavan!

It’s now July (is it really, already??) and my sister Summer is here! She’ll be here teaching at Shanti Bhavan for six weeks. She brought a ¾-size cello to donate to the school to go with the regular-sized cello she donated last summer. However, that original cello was a near disaster. When I first arrived in June, Summer had me email her an update on that cello…when I found it in the music room, there were no strings on it, the bridge was nowhere to be found, and when I picked it up to see if the sound post was still standing (on the inside of the cello), I heard something rattling around – the sound post was most definitely NOT still in place. So Summer met with a luthier in New York City who gave her a lesson in re-setting a sound post in a cello and loaned her the tools to use.

The day after she arrived here in India, we brought the cello into our room, laid it out on a table and basically did some major surgery on it. I held the flashlight through one of the F-holes while she stuck the “sound post grabber” in through the other F-hole – it took a couple of tries to get the sound post standing again, but in about 30 minutes, the cello was playable! The sound post and bridge were back in place, new strings were strung up and tuned. Pretty crazy.

The crazier thing was that we had no idea that within a few days that cello would be a part of a concert in celebration of “School Day” – the anniversary of the founding of Shanti Bhavan. Concerts at Shanti Bhavan usually come together within an afternoon. It usually freaks out most of the Western volunteers who are used to planning, organization, and preparation time – but like I said before, one of the greatest lessons India has taught me so far is to just let go.

By show time, Summer was ready to play a prelude from one of the Bach cello suites, I would be playing a Chopin piece, we’d both be playing “The Swan” from Carnival of the Animals, and all of the volunteers (over a dozen!) danced a Bhangra – successfully choreographed and taught in under one hour by one of our really awesome volunteers Sabala who has been doing Indian dance for a number of years. It was SO much fun to learn an Indian dance and put it together as a group. Shanti Bhavan is known for making all of its volunteers somehow participate in these performances – and just about every volunteer who’s come through the door here has at some point learned and performed an Indian dance (complete with Indian attire). It’s just part of the program here!

Some volunteers – especially the professional musicians and/or actors – are at first pretty nervous to have to perform under these circumstances. Nothing is ideal for performing – the instruments are in rough shape, the lighting can fail at any moment when the power goes out, loud and exotic bird calls interrupting your concentration….you name it. One tends, at first, to try to make the usual excuses “Oh no, I can’t perform - I haven’t practiced in weeks” or “I don’t have anything ready to perform” or “I don’t dance”– but you quickly learn that here at Shanti Bhavan, everything is about love and support. Everyone is accepted here – no excuses. Everyone wants the happiness of listening to you play, watching you dance, hearing you sing, etc. – judgment never crosses their minds as it seems all “performances” are not performances but simply celebrations.

A Few Lessons in Hate, Love, and Self-Discovery

I've realized in India there are days when I HATE it and days when I LOVE it. This past weekend’s trip to Mysore included two such days.

A group of seven of us went by car to Mysore for the weekend (about a four hour drive from Shanti Bhavan). Some stomach bug must have been going around, so three from our group fell dangerously sick. I was one of the lucky healthy few, but it was scary to see just how sick the three other volunteers got. They were vomiting, feverish, and one of them actually fainted, hit her head, and it started bleeding. Not good! After taking care of the sick volunteers and getting them resting in our squalid hotel rooms (Recommendation #1: never go super-budget in India)..the other three volunteers and I went out to explore Mysore for a few hours. Finding your way around the streets of Indian cities whether alone or in a group can be daunting and disappointing. On the days when you hate India, you are overwhelmed by how incredibly dirty, smelly, pushy, gratingly loud, rough, depressing, hopeless and unrelenting it feels. The amount of trash, number of people, number of cars, bikes, carts, rusty buses, motorcycles, the number of stray, starving, suffering animals…sometimes you just want to close your eyes, ears, nose and take a break even for a few minutes – but you can’t. You are in the middle of it all and thousands of miles from home.

But then another day comes and you see the other side of the coin. Our next day in Mysore was one of those days. I hope I can adequately describe this day and its brilliance. All healthy again (amazingly), we got an early start and took our car up Chamundi Hill which is a sacred hill outside Mysore. There are two temples on top of the hill that we were going to visit. When we reached the top of the hill, we had amazing views of Mysore and the surrounding country. And the closer we got towards the temples, we started seeing countless monkeys and their babies. I just about died seeing them because they were SO cute. When we got to the main temple, everyone has to take their shoes off. It's become one of my favorite parts about India because when you first see the hundreds of people, the very American thoughts of "someone's going to steal my shoes" and "my feet are going to be disgustingly dirty after this" pop into your head. But the best lesson India has taught me is to let go. Just let go. It’s a simple demonstration of that very profound lesson, but it’s true - I've never lost my shoes and I've learned to actually love the feeling of walking around India barefoot. There's something so human, natural, and right about getting your feet dirty in India. And there's a deep spiritual energy felt from the bottom of your bare feet through the rest of your body as you walk through a holy temple. Your feet are dirty, yes - but finally alive and sharing the feel of the cool, smooth stones with the rest of humanity.

There are two temples, as I said, at the top of Chamundi Hill. Most people stand in a massive line to see the big, main temple. There was a really nice old man who offered to be our tour guide (for the equivalent of about $2) and he took us to the smaller temple at the back, which is close to 2,000 years old. Apparently they only decorate it one day every year, and the day we were there happened to be the special day. The universe here in India does it’s best to make up for the days where you hate India. ☺ So at the temple this day, they were celebrating the marriage of the god Shiva to Parvathi. Our guide gave us kumkum powder to sprinkle on the stone idols as an offering. The old temple was so quiet and peaceful - definitely one of my favorite places in India so far. And behind the stone idols grows a beautiful "holy tree”.

While we were making the offerings, a monkey came up to see if we had any food. When our guide shoed it away, it got mad, stole the palm-frond decorations that were laying on the stones and ran away. I didn't mean to, but I laughed SO hard. The monkey totally jacked all the decorations from the temple. Hilarious.

As we left the old temple, my friend Shreya and I bought a small bracelet which the priest blessed for us - it's a simple string bracelet with one rudraksh bead on it. Here's what my friend's book says about the rudraksh bead: "The word rudraksh literally means the eyes of Rudra, lord Shiva. Once when Shiva opened his eyes after a long deep meditation his tears of joy and peace fell on the earth and took the shape of the fruit of the rudraksh tree which grows wild in the Himalayas. The berries drop off, the green fruit skin dries up and the seeds harden into the rudraskh beads." So they represent Shiva's tears.

After the old temple, we walked a thousand steps down the hill to see Nandi, Shiva's bull statue. More monkeys, beautiful views of Mysore, and more spirituality.

As we all drove home, my favorite time of day in rural India was approaching – dusk and sunset. Randomly, for the first time yet this trip, I decided to pull out my iPod and listen to my favorite music. Usually I let the Indian music that spins out of every car radio be my soundtrack…but not this time. I’d call it a rare form of homesickness, perhaps, though I didn’t necessarily feel sad or nostalgic. Instead, I was watching my new environment pass by out the window while listening to the music that always reminds me of who I truly am. It felt as if I was both Old Allegra and New Allegra all at the same time…I thought about all of the people I love – my friends, my family, the many people who make up the fabric of my life....and instead of sadness, I felt for the first time that where I am is exactly where I am supposed to be right now. This year is a gift to me, and one month has already past. My heart filled up, my courage sparked, and I turned up my music.