With love from E&A: Everyday Life

I thought I'd give you a taste of my daily life here.

This is our house :)

We live on the top floor

This is our bathroom.

Yes, nine girls share this.

It's so efficient- you can do your business and shower at the same time.

The shower has one pressure and one temperature- all. the. time.

This is our room.

We squished in together to get a piece of the air conditioning.

I have to say...that cot (mine is the turquoise one) is not what you would call comfortable to sleep on.

Then again, sleeping without air conditioning is SO much worse.

There are no washers and dryers.

We do our laundry outside on the porch.

Basically my clothes never feel 100% clean...

Also, when I bring my clothes in from drying they smell like smoke.

This is why:

Trash is burnt along the sides of the roads- for lack of anything else to do with it apparently.

I think you can understand why my clothes never feel very clean and it also seems like we are camping half of the time

Now for food.

THIS

is one of the best meals I have ever eaten in my entire life!

Why am I eating a quesadilla with lots of peppers, pico de gallo, and cilantro while in India you ask?

Well a wonderful woman in our branch comes in to cook for us every night.

Sister Alice is very open to new ideas- so we taught her how to make these with the traditional Indian chapatti (the tortilla thing)

The result was pure heaven

This is the corner stand near our house.

This poor guy has the job of chopping onions- all day every day.

That pile gets twice as big as this and somehow they manage to use them all.

Indian food is EXTREMELY flavorful and spicy.

These are just scenes along the roadside.

Most of the roadsides look very similar to this

To get around we travel in these fun little taxi's

They're called autos-

It seems the overall goal is to get as many people as possible in these things...

Here we are (Lexie, me, and Sean) a comfortable three....but we have seen as many as 13 in one of these things

Apparently they don't pay attention to the signs...

Some drivers have friends they cart around too.

So funny story:

In the mornings we go running to a sports complex.

This morning, instead of running around the track there or doing abs...I decided to try playing basketball.

Ok we all know I'm not good at basketball, but it looked fun so I scooted in to join about 15 Indians just shooting 4 or 5 balls around until they started the game.

I was the only girl- and I was STARK white compared the rest of them.

They did NOT talk to me and only a few of them would pass me the ball.

Funny thing is- I was making just as many baskets as they were!

Apparently they really aren't that good...and they were REALLY freaked out about a white girl playing with them.

When the game started...they conveniently didn't put me on a team and I went to another part or the complex....

Hopefully by the end of the summer I can conquer the gender issues...and maybe get better at basketball too :)

We have been spending quite a few hours in the past few days researching the need for prothetic limbs in India for an organization called 2 ft.

Part of our research took us to Ghandi Hospital.

It's a government hospital for people below the poverty line- in India- that's A LOT of people.

We actually visited the hospital twice

And I realized that my concept of cleanliness was on a completely different plane than theirs.

People literally oozing blood were sitting outside the emergency room.

Inside the ER wasn't much better- there were no separators or different rooms for patients. People were strewn about everywhere all with different ailments and many bleeding.

I can kinda understand more now how disease spreads so easily here.

People just stood around outside...I'm not entirely sure why- but I think it's simply because they had nowhere else to go.

Nurses

Where we were headed...

The orthopedics dept.

This ward was slightly more organized than the ER but not any more clean unfortunately...

The government supplements the hospital's program to make the prosthetics to give to people for free

Hospitals like these feet to make the prosthetics with because they are washable and bare so people can still go in the temples (other prothetic feet have to have shoes on them...)

They're from Jaipur Foot -an organization that specializes in making them.