Just finished week three in India! It’s strange, in some ways I feel like I’ve been here 3 months instead of 3 weeks. Other times, I remember what it was like to be here for 5 weeks last summer and I can’t believe 3 weeks have already passed.

This past week was packed. The younger grades came back from break – it was so great to see all their little faces and hear lots of “Hi, miss Allegra!” They are SO cute. One child, Tulasi, is in second grade – she and I always played together during their recess time and when she saw me this time, her eyes got so big and she ran right up to me and I gave her a huge hug. None of the kids can believe that I’m here for a whole year. They all ask me “Miss, how long are you going to stay for?” and when I say “a whole year!” they do a little gasp and smile. One little fourth grade girl came up to me and asked “Miss!!!! Do you want to hear some exciting news??? I’m going to take piano lessons!!!” She was SO excited.

I also began teaching piano lessons on Monday and Tuesday. So far I can only teach two days a week because my administrative work is so much. Hopefully our work load will lighten as the academic year gets off the ground. It’s always stressful to roll out a new year.

I gave Pushpa a piano lesson one night – Pushpa was one of the girls that graduated and has since gone off to Bangalore to college. She learned a couple of the piano pieces I brought last summer and really wanted to play them for me. When we finally found a time to have a piano lesson, the power went out – as it so often does in rural India. It was pitch black and Pushpa kept playing. We finished an hour lesson completely in the dark – neither one of us commented on it at all. THAT’S just one example of how amazing these kids are.





It’s been rough taking cold “showers” from a bucket. We call them “bucket showers” as we literally just fill up a bucket with water and use a smaller container to pour the water over ourselves. We only get hot water when there’s enough sunshine to heat the water (we use solar panels on campus). Since it’s monsoon season, we’ve had a lot of cloudy and partially-cloudy days. Other tough moments are having to see a really gross beehive every day as I walk through campus. I can do spiders, snakes, scorpions - but a bunch of little bees all gathered together somehow in a perfect circle? THAT grosses me out. Oh, and the giant ant hills – this anthill pictured here is taller than I am.

In other news, I trained my first volunteer! Maura, the current Volunteer Coordinator who has been here since January has been training me on how to orient the new volunteers. It’s been so much fun working with her. She’s an awesome girl who is a drama therapist with a background working with abused children. Truly a cool girl. We get along really well and have the same work ethic.

Maura and I took a rickshaw into the nearest town, Hosur, to run a few errands. We needed to make photocopies of some training documents we give to new volunteers. Every trip outside of the Shanti Bhavan compound reminds me of why I’m here. As soon as you leave the school you see the “real” India. Hosur is dirty, dusty, and crammed with people and garbage. The smells, the dust stinging your eyes, and the beggars that come up to you holding their babies…that is the reality of India. When we went to go make photocopies, we walked into a dingy hallway where a barefoot woman in a dirty sari stands all day making photocopies for people on a huge, archaic copier… on the rickshaw ride home to Shanti Bhavan, I was thinking about my piano teaching. Sometimes it feels terribly useless to teach piano. These students need science teachers, math teachers, English teachers – if they do not do well on their exams, they do not get into college, and their lives drastically change. They inevitably have to go out and live in “real” India – not Shanti Bhavan. But after seeing the woman making photocopies in Hosur, I realized – when else would these children get to take 30 minutes out of their day to work with another pianist to learn a Bach piece? Chopin? Beethoven?