24 hour countdown

KC & Pastor James

All our baaaags are packed we're ready to goooooo' (if you know it sing a long...currently I am singing it alone, in our sweltering hot bedroom while KC washes dishes). But literally, all of our bags are packed, we wanted to be ready for tomorrow so we could spend time at Church and making the rounds with the students and staff saying goodbye one last time. Also KC is a bit anal and requires that we weigh our luggage. What can I say-its off to casualty with our giant suitcase to borrow their one and only scale!

See? Wouldn't YOU visit her a lot?

This last week has been bittersweet. I wasn't really sure whether I was expected to do duty in Casualty or not, so the first couple days I made an appearance, in fact Monday I actually started IV's and tried to make myself useful. They were really busy.  (Day after holi...everybody drank too much alcohol, and then drank too much insecticide unfortunately as a means of suicide attempt).  But Tuesday I wandered around the hospital going to the NICU to hold Tuktuk(orphan baby who I am sneaking home in our luggage), saying hi to staff, visiting the business office to print our tickets for home, holding Tuktuk, taking pictures with people, holding Tuktuk again, taking pictures with Tuktuk, promising Tuktuk I would take her home (she's really cute) etc etc. I also spent a lot of time putting together and editing the pictures that we wanted to hand out to peopleas souvenirs, thinking that we would be able to just go print them ourselves-you know, like at Walmart-at the Kodak station?  As with all things in India-we thought incorrectly-but we found someone who was supposed to be able to get those pictures printed for us. He told us he would have them for us by today at 5 pm. It is 3:39, we'll let you know how that goes, I don't see it going well, just because of the language barrier and because there were almost 60 photos that needed printed, some with several copies so that the girls could each have one.  Everybody keeps asking for our contact info, so we promised them pictures with our info on the back. Hopefully that works out.

Us at the orphanage

We are working on giving things away that we didn't want to take home with us, books, scarves, gum, etc (the students are loving it) and it is really great to see how happy it makes them to keep as a reminder from the US. Every single person has asked when are we coming back. At first I started saying -'when we win the lottery!' (Probably not appropriate to reference Ben here for 2 blog entries in a row, but seriously ...did you win yet?) But they don't have the lottery...so they just stared awkwardly-and I have now changed the answer to, 'Whenever we save enough money!' This to them means we are coming back next year. Oops.

Me and my nursing student friends

I'll just skip right over Wednesday and Thursday as KC described my illness in detail (sorry) but now I am doing fine-well better at least- so we were able to spend some time with Pastor James at the orphanage one last time. We took pictures of each child with their name & age so we could help them with sponsors. Friday night we had some people over for an 'American dinner' of chicken mac'n'cheese, garlic mashed potatoes, and what I thought were green beans. Turns out they weren't green beans and neither were they very good, but I think everybody liked the meal okay. It was noted that the food was much more bland than what they were used to, but it was the thought that counted I suppose. And hey-Aadi the 2 year old loved my mashed potatoes.

Us with the Chatterjees and Mrs.
Lal (our Hindi tutor)

We have cleaned and scrubbed what we can in the apartment, and given away all of our left over groceries. We have said goodbye to Casualty, OT, and both the classes we taught. We have said goodbye to Dr.Chatterjee as he will be out of town tomorrow and have packed up packages to take to people his family knows in the US. I also took one last peek at Tuktuk, but she was sleeping :(. All that we have left is distributing pictures to people, a trip to Raipur with Dr.Neha for another disco adventure tonight (I'm sure all of Chhattisgarh is excited to see my dancing skills again) and then church in the morning! What had started out as a confusing adventure has really turned out to have some good memories. We are going to miss some of the people in Dhamtari, and hope that we have blessed their lives with our service. Although some people never really fully understood why we came, they were happy to see us and we hope that it brightened their lives a little for those 3 months. I know it probably changed us in ways we will not see until later down the road. Thank you so much for your support!



Love,
Raina (and KC who is still cleaning, I am amazed)