Indian traffic and a school update

I thought I would give you some information on Indian traffic systems. Well basically any rules that do exist, don't! If (yes, if, there isn't always) there is a white line in the middle of the road, then it doesn't matter which side of it you drive. If there is lots of traffic you can just drive on the other side of the road. Which means the the cars/rickshaws/scooters/motorbikes sometimes end up off-roading on the other side of the road! Earlier today there was a rickshaw trying to turn right across the traffic but the traffic on the other side was stationary and lots of it, so the rickshaw ended up stationary in the middle of the road. As we went past it on the left, a motorcycle (from the other side of the road) tried to pass this stationary rickshaw on our side of the road! It was crazy, we both ended up stopping and honking! Yes Indian drivers honk their horns a lot, this comes from the basis that a lot of them do not actually have wing mirrors (or any mirrors for that matter) so we honk to overtake/undertake/you're in my way or even just 'I am here'. The trucks all have 'Honk OK Please' painted on the back. Dad, you know how you often joke that people buy models of cars without indicators, well here some of the vehicles don't have indicators or mirrors! I even saw one car today which had one wing mirror and the other one wasn't even bashed off, it just never existed! It is quite crazy system, one person said to me, you don't have to be a good driver here just a lucky one! But don't worry the rickshaw drivers know what they are doing and we are safe! We would be very unsafe, however, if we tried to drive on these roads ourselves as there are literally no rules, it is every man for themselves. You can pull out in front of anyone no matter how close they are, roundabouts are pointless here, give way to the right, what is that? You just push your way out and get driving! It is interesting, another thing is, they do have traffic police, but apparently they always stay on the same roads so people just avoid those roads. So they are basically pointless too, the only real traffic police are the animals! If the cows, goats, dogs, donkeys or any other animal just wonders across the street, as they often do, then the traffic will all stop. One classic things we saw the other day was a cow walking into a petrol station and one of the girls saying that they cow was being filled up with gas!

School is going well, the activities that I am doing this week with the kids are maths, colours, newspaper hats and friendship bracelets. I do a lesson and a craft in the morning and another in the afternoon. It is generally different children in the morning to the afternoon as I have the older group (about 8 to 16) and so they go to school or help with chores at home. A couple stay all day though, so I do activity A with the children one morning and activity B with the children that afternoon, then I swap them over the next day. So that the likelihood of the same children doing the same activity is reduced as they don't always turn up every day and even if they do it can act as a revision session! I do about a 45 minutes to an hours lesson then a craft for 30 to 45 minutes. I also repeat the Monday/Tuesday activities on Thursday/Friday as we visit a different site. The newspaper hats went down so well with the older children that suddenly all the children in the creche wanted one! The friendship bracelets also worked well with the boys and girls, even the teachers loved making them. About 10 minutes (3.50pm) before we were due today, we had a monsoon down pour which in a building with a tin roof (we have bricks walls but metal sheets on the roof) is very noisy. The teachers wouldn't let us go home as it is about a 15 minute walk back to the main road to find a rickshaw, so we continued playing games with the children and one of the teachers, Aarchina, made us chai. Indian chai is amazing! At about 4.30pm it was still raining but much slower and the river which had formed outside the door to the creche had subsided quite a lot. So we headed out with our umbrellas and raincoats and said bye the children. Bye Didi, bye. Didi means older sister and it is what we get called all day at school, it is a respectful thing and is much nicer than Madam or teacher! A funny thing about the kids English, m is pronounced as yam, n is yan and y is yes. I was asking the children, 'what colour is this?' and they had to answer 'this is...' and it turned into 'yes yes pink' or 'yes yes blue'. After a while they got the hang of it but it was funny at first, I wonder whether it was because they knew the word for yes and hadn't heard of 'this is...' before. It was good when it clicked and they got it. :)