Saturday in the Children's Home

 It's Saturday morning in Dharwad, India, and time to leave our guest house and go play with the children. We're wearing our new Indian clothes for the first time, though we doubt anyone will mistake us for Indian women!

Here's what we see as we look back at the guest house

And here's the street view directly outside the gate

Along the way we throw away our trash at the neighborhood trash disposal

Our fresh orange and banana peels are met with enthusiasm

The girls are just coming home from their Saturday morning school--
just a half day on Saturdays

Lara and Emily pose with the elementary school girls
in front of the gate to the children's home

The girls immediately start their Saturday washing

Laundry hanging to dry in the breezeway

Always time to play

The kitchen preparing lunch

 

Our lunch: rice, lentil sauce (dahl), and vegetables (today it's green beans)

 

Delicious!

The dining hall

Chandrakala, Sushmita, Ina, and Jyothi

Our Home

We were out of town for three days at a Christian youth camp, "roughing it" without possibilities to connect to the Internet. Now that we can post again we thought we'd give you a glimpse into our rooms and our immediate surroundings so you can see what we see each day.

Our guest house and the headquarters of Caring Hands Ministries. Our rooms are on the upper left and below is a free health clinic and the new boys' home.

Our bedroom

The kitchen where we make our breakfast

Our drinking water

Our bathroom with the bucket shower in the corner

  

Looking down from our front door

Several families of black-faced monkeys live in the trees outside our rooms. We've been instructed to keep our doors latched so the monkeys don't come in and wreak havoc.

Arrival

Sarita, Lara, and Ina

After 36 hours in airplanes and airports, an 18-hour layover in Bangalore, and then a 10-hour bus ride through the night, we finally arrived at Joyful Children's Home on Saturday, June 23. We settled into our rooms and took cold bucket showers before falling into our beds for a few hours of rest. Even the busy street outside with its incessantly honking horns, lowing oxen, rooting pigs, shouting children, and chattering monkeys didn't keep us awake.

Kristen with a few of the girls.

 And then in the evening, we met the children—fifty beautiful girls with sparkly dark eyes and dancing feet, ranging in age from three to eighteen or nineteen. It's an aptly named home because the joy seems to permeate everywhere and everyone.

We arrived with another mother and her 16-year-old daughter from Ohio, Mandy and Emily, and each of us always has hands to hold and names to learn, games to play and songs to sing.

Emily and the girls during snack time: roasted peanuts and raw sugar.

More to come later as we settle in!