End of feasts and festivals, beginning of a new adventure

So the feasts and festivals event finished today with a wonderful closing ceremony which talked about new beginnings, starting CVP, new Sangam volunteers, new travels and new friendships. We all talked about what we had enjoyed to the sound of the Ganapati drum beats. There were 5 winners of the Ganapati/Ganesh photo competition (see facebook) and I was one of them.

Yesterday we went to the Mobile Creche site for the first time, it was not the site we will be working at but the same organisation. I will see my site on Thursday when I start working. We played with the kids, sang songs with them (they sang incy wincy spider in Marati which was very cute) and they welcomed their homemade Ganesh to their creche whilst we were there. We also had a walk around their homes, which was a slum, so their homes were made out of sheets of metal and were very hot inside and were only about 3m by 3m. The first thing that most people noticed about the site was the slum was in the shadow of the Radisson hotel, whether this was one of the buildings that they had built I am not sure but it was a stark contrast. When I was sitting with one of the girls, she showed me her school books (some of the children go to a government school in morning or afternoon and go to creche when not at school). She sang a beautiful song to me in Marati.

Out in the slum they had a Ganesh statue and this was when it struck me quite how much the Ganesh festival means to these people, as even though this people had so little they had all donated some money and brought a Ganesh for the community and they had put up flowers around and tinsel and I thought it was the most beautifully decorated Ganesh that I have seen so far which really touched me the amount of effort they had put in.

In the afternoon, back at Sangam, I did some Indian embroidery, I will take a photo when it is finished, there were some lovely stiches that we learnt. It is a flower design. In the evening we had a campfire, which unfortunately was indoors as the campfire circle was still wet, even though we have had quite a few very hot days now. However, the staff and volunteers came to our rescue by having sparklers and standing around the pool whilst we sang the first song, land of the elephant. This was to the tune of 'land of the silver birch', it is a lovely song and the first chorus goes like this:

Land of the elephant, home of the rickshaw,
where still the sacred cow wanders at will.

Sangam an open door, I will return once more
Boom didi i di, boom ddii i di, boom didi i di, booooom

We then headed into the hall and continued our campfire sitting in a circle with candles in the middle.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, will be our first Hindi lesson and more information about Sangam/our projects. On Thursday and Friday we will have half days at the creche to get used to everything then weekend free, then Mon we start with the full days and will continue with Mon, Tues, Thurs, Fri full days at mobile creche and Wed cultural and Hindi lessons.

I hope you are still enjoying my blog and everyone is ok at home.
xxx