Ki Khobor?!

That means "What's up?!" in Assamese! 

So it’s our last week at Parijat Academy, and the feeling is bitter-sweet. We’ve had such an amazing time here and we are nowhere near ready to leave our new home, but we have new and exciting adventures ahead of us. We leave Parijat Academy July 28^th and will be traveling about India until our flight out of New Delhi August 7^th. We are going to Varanasi, Goa, Mumbai, Agra, Jaipur and Delhi. We’re eager to travel and get to see other parts of India, but Assam has become our home, and will always be our favorite part of India. Our last week means tons of cramming. We want to make sure we get all the information and material necessary to make our Capstone Project everything we are planning for. It’s sad to leave, because we are really starting to feel 100% comfortable here. We’ve made friends in the city, we've made friends in the village, we've become friends with the family at one of the corner stores in Garchuck, and we’ve become friends with some of the local rickshaw drivers who take us places! Basically, we don’t want to leave all our new friends and family. We’ve gotten so used to the routine here. We have a group of about 10 kids who come to our art class every day, and we’ve gotten so close with them! Whenever we are late for class, they come running up to our house and yell “Ma’am, teaching today?!” It’s so cute, they are so eager to learn from us! But we find comfort in the fact that we know we will be back in Assam and at Parijat in the near future, as we’ve fallen so in love with it we promised everyone here we’d come back within the next few years.

Lately, we’ve been getting out of Parijat more and exploring the area around us. Recently, a friend of ours took us into the forest to meet some elephants that his friend owns. Seeing as elephants are my favorite animal EVER, it was seriously a dream come true. We went out and bought INR 1200 worth of bananas (more than 20 U.S dollars worth) for the 3 elephants, and carried them almost 2 miles down the road and into the forest. We fed them, pet them and played with them for almost two hours, and it was such an awesome experience. We also found this great Shiva temple right down the road, also in the forest. LeeAnne and I went one day with our local friend Suman, and it was beautiful. It’s a small temple, with no actual structure or building. Just some bamboo bridges over a river, some incense burning, and lots of offerings to Lord Shiva. The caretaker of the temple, Sunkor, taught us how to make offerings and pray to Lord Shiva which was great. We sat with about 8 of the other men who were at the temple and had a fantastic conversation with them. They didn’t speak English, so we had to have Suman translate for us. The men asked us why we were in Assam, how we liked it, and questions like that. They were really funny, and said they have never met anyone who looks like us or speaks like us, and that they have only seen it on television! They thanked us for coming to the temple and taking the time to sit with them. We asked them all questions about their families, occupations, and about some of the local tribes like Karbi and Boro. It was an excellent interview, and we’ll definitely include more detail about it in our final project.

Our Capstone and our Volunteer Resource are coming along beautifully. We decided our resource is going to be basically a step-by-step how to for incoming Parijat volunteers, containing advice and all kinds of information they might find helpful. Things like the language, how the school works, and the family dynamics, their role here at Parijat as well as Assam, even things like “How to do your laundry” and where to go to purchase different things. When we arrived in Parijat, we didn’t have any guidance to help us transition into how things are done here, so it was difficult. We hope that future volunteers will read this resource either before coming to Parijat or as soon as they get here, to make it super easy for them to get into the groove of things. It also includes lesson plans and projects we set up that we hope they will continue.

This will be a short blog post, since we’re super busy wrapping up our work here and packing. As always, check out our personal Tumblr blog because we update that almost every day. You can find the link in my previous blog posts. But before I forget, I have a hilarious story! So since we’ve been here, we’ve been learning some Assamese. We both know a decent amount, but for the longest time we felt insecure speaking the language because our pronunciation was terrible. Apparently, people here love the way foreigners speak Assamese! Uttam told us this at first, but we didn’t believe him. Until one day, we were talking with a few friends we’ve made here and they were trying to get us to talk in Assamese with them. So I gave in and said “Lahe lahe, moi Oxomiya xixi aasu” which means “Slowly, I am learning Assamese.” They all got such a kick out of it! When we asked why, they said it sounded so cute, like a baby talking, one of them even said it sounded “sweeter than sugar.” This gave us more confidence to speak Assamese, so now we do our best to try and use the little we know whenever possible! It’s great to learn the local language a little, and the people here really appreciate it.

I’ll post again before we leave for our travels, with some photos and one last update. But in the meantime, enjoy these photos of LeeAnne and I in traditional Indian Saris! Cheers!