After the final day of a week-long training workshop with my organization in downtown Mumbai, Will met me on Saturday afternoon for relaxing evening in the city.

We took a leisurely stroll along Marine Drive, on the Arabian coast, then headed for a nice dinner in Colaba...


To see more photos of the evening, click here

Happy Birthday to Surenity! 

My 29th birthday was spent in India this year, travelling back from a week-long work retreat, to wonderful Will! Awaiting me, along with my exceptional husband was a dinner of fresh hummus, flat bread, tomatoes and onions, a heart-shaped chocolate cake, and a coffee press to wake us up each morning. Hooray! 

Phone calls from all over California kept me busy much of the evening with love and laughter... thanks everyone! 

And, as always, the highlight of the evening was watching the latest downloaded episode of LOST. Oh, we are so hooked it's ridiculous. 

On to year 29!

I spent 6 days and 5 nights in the town of Lonavla, about an hour from our home, on a professional retreat with the NGO I'm working for, and it was a great experience. 

Despite coming down with either a very nasty bug or some sort of food poisoning on the second day, and spending almost 2 days in bed, the rest of the time was spent meeting and interacting with about 35 new faces, all with similar hopes and dreams of a better world through education. 

The retreat was held at a training center, which had a small hotel, dining hall, conference room, gardens, an outdoor pavilion, a tennis court, barbeque, you name it. The place was gorgeous. 

We attended workshops from 7am until about 11pm every day, which of course tired most of us out pretty significantly. But, it was all worth it all the way through. We focused on poverty and the need to provide solid, meaningful education to those in need, in order for those who live in poverty to lift themselves out through increased opportunities. 

In short, it was a wonderful time, I learned a lot, and solidified my thoughts about what I'm doing and where we're both headed. 

But I missed home, and I'm glad to be back! 

I stood on an open-air train platform one day this week, waiting in the afternoon humidity, overhead fans whirring noisily above. Old women in worn saris sat lazily on the benches, quietly discussing the gossip of the day. Men in slacks dialed buttons on their cell phones, while older men with less fortunate lives smoked bidis and spat on the ground. 

A large black crow and its buddies swooped down onto the empty tracks, searching for morsels to peck at, or stems to carry off. After some deliberation, one crow decided upon a small twig, and with just a little effort, lifted itself into the air, carrying the twig precariously in its beak. It landed on the metal support beams above the tracks, and placed the twig crosswise, adding it to a small collection of similarly shaped items. The crow looked at the new twig, then adjusted the placement with its beak, once, then twice, before settling on the best angle. Surveying its surroundings, the crow then jumped into the abyss of sweltering empty space and flew to join others in a congregation just down the way. 

As I looked up at the small collection of twigs, collected and carefully positioned by the crow, I realized that in fact they were not twigs, but that many of them were long pieces of rubber-coated wire and plastic zip-ties - the beginnings of a make-shift nest, with whatever materials the crow found suitable among the rubbish and chaos of this massive city. 

Images of women washing clothes, men soaping up from buckets for their bath, children playing with sticks and garbage came to me, and the dwellings in which those people find themselves was suddenly familiar. Walls of corrugated sheet metal, window curtains of discarded canvas signs, roofs covered in old rags, soccer fields of trash. Yet not everything is discarded goods. Handmade wooden ladders lead to second-story rooms made of earthen bricks. Stones and bricks are stacked into pathway walls.

We all have to make do with what we've got.

You know you're in India when you look outside your apartment window

and the beggar in the street looks like this:

Got on the train yesterday at 5:16pm. The rush hour had not yet flooded the trains with bodies, and one woman was all that there was in the ladies' first class car. She sat next to the window, feet up on the bench opposite her. I sat across from her, glanced at the sparkling bangles around her wrist, the colorful weave of her salwaar kameez, the bottoms of her bare feet next to me. As I opened my book to its mark, and prepared to dig into the story, I noticed that her head was also buried in a book - Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It jolted me slightly to see such a well-known book from the U.S. in the hands of a middle-aged Indian woman, whizzing through the city on the other side of the world. Culture really can travel far. 

Well, the Indian summer is here, and what a summer it is. 

The temperature itself is not quite so bad, but the humidity is what catches us off guard. I've never drank so much water in my life. We had our first cloudy morning here today - relatively low cumulus clouds, dark gray on the bottom... a sign of things to come.

Otherwise, life is trucking along fine here. At work, I'm in the middle of getting good, solid curriculum ready for our school to open in June, and getting a clear idea of where I'll be taking the kids throughout the year, and what they'll be able to do at the end of it. 

We've been staying close to home on the weekends, as the time to rest and relax is so enjoyable just being in our sunny apartment. We discovered a movie theater in the neighborhood that shows some English films, so we've been taking advantage of that. 170 rupees / person for the best seats, which is about $3. Not bad.

We saw Iron Man last weekend, and loved it - full of action, adventure, romance, and to top it all off, a great plot! Highly recommended, even if you think you don't like comic-book action heroes.