Another week

Meet Vasenth, my resident hellion. Please don’t let his good looks fool you. He has this amazing ability to find very interesting ways to manipulate me and is the class leader when it  comes to trouble making. He’s a very quick learner though and one of my best students, especially in creative writing and spelling. Joe has recently taught our second graders the Journey song Don’t Stop Believing, which Vasenth sings every moment of every day. I think my funniest moment was this week when he broke my chalk and lied to me about it. When I asked him if he did it, he innocently shook his head and said “No Miss!” I had seen him do it and was so mad that he would lie to me I kicked him out of class. He sat in the hall for a few minutes and then the waterworks started. When I went out to go talk to him he had big crocodile tears coming down and he just kept saying he was sorry again and again. Since this isn’t the first time he has done things like this, I was really tired to dealing with him so I told him that I was sending him to the principals office. So there I am, so mad at this kid my blood is boiling, and forcing him to the office. I thought he was going to faint. Luckily, he survived and still gives me hell in the classroom. Oh how I love the little children!

In all seriousness, I really do love them all. The second graders are slowly getting better and now that I’ve been there for a few weeks I have learned what they need help on. Figuring out HOW to help them is always a different story.

The founder of the school, Dr. Abraham George arrived on Monday afternoon. He is Indian but was raised in America after his mother, the first Indian women to receive a PhD, went to work for NASA. He worked in international finance for his career and during the 90s worked for the LDS church in charge of all their finances. He was often in Salt Lake for the Thursday meetings with the Presidency and was given a special tour of the Salt Lake Temple. He loves each of these children so much and is very committed to giving them everything he can. He allowed us volunteers to have a roundtable discussion with him about some of our questions on the school and his work. It was nice to finally be able to get some answers about his views on development and his long term goals of Shanti Bhavan.

Other than that it’s been a pretty slow week. I suddenly got really sick on Tuesday and probably slept for about 24 hours before I finally started to feel better. Dr. George hooked up satellite tv for us in our volunteer house but the only two channels we get are BBC and CNN. It really makes a huge difference though and makes us feel more connected to the world.