Since I've been up at school, I've started to like my English class more and more. Our wonderful teacher had us write about a personal experience that meant something to us. So of course I wrote about India:
This Is India
I had been traveling for 25 hours straight as an
unaccompanied minor. With two layovers and barely any sleep, I crawled through
customs and arrived at baggage claim. My parents said people had lost their
luggage before, but I didn't think it would be me. I'm pretty sure my luggage
didn't even get out of my mother country. This meant I only had my backpack,
which included my laptop, journal, a shirt, a pair of pants, and undergarments;
good thing I packed another set of clothes! After the hour-long process of
filling out all the useless paperwork, I went outside. The e-mail the program
director sent me said an Indian man would be out there holding a sign with my
name on it. I stepped outside onto the streets and saw a never-ending crowd of
darker skinned men, shouting their company name, hoping I was the white girl
who they were supposed to pick up. Well,
it looks like a lot of Indian men are holding a sign, but none of them have my name,
I thought.
I dragged my body, my backpack, and my dignity up and
down the crowd for forever. I continued looking around, hoping and praying that
these people were playing hide-and-go-seek with me or that Ashton Kutcher was filming
an episode of “Punk’d.” Much to my dismay, it was Friday the 13th.
It turned out my reservation, for some reason unknown to me, was cancelled. No
one waited there for a 17 year-old American girl in a third world country. Completely
alone, with no understanding of the culture or language, my heart pounded
through my chest and tears nearly exploded from my face. I eventually composed
myself enough to ask a shady stranger if I could use his phone. My fingers shook
as I pressed the buttons down. He began to tell me, in a thick Indian accent,
that I would have to pay him in “rupees.” My head was rushing, my palms were as
moist as the air and my mind wouldn’t stop panicking! What if they don’t answer? What are ‘rupees’? What am I going to do?
What am I going to do? What am I going to do?
After I got off the stranger’s phone, I saw a white
Toyota Corolla with the Marriott symbol embedded onto the side of the car door.
This matched the description that the person on the phone told me about. Hands
still sweating and on the verge of tears, I took the handle of the car. I sat
uncomfortably upright on the right side, exactly behind the driver. I looked
for the missing seatbelt while tears streamed down my face. Up until this
point, I deliberately had kept these tears locked up in my eyes. I wiped them,
embarrassed and a little distraught over my situation. The driver sped down the
road, which usually would bother me, but I did not care. I just wanted to get to
the hotel as fast as I could, hoping this experience would go away when I woke
up the next morning. The driver eventually stopped the car in front of the
Marriott. He opened my car door and I climbed outside. An Indian lady searched
my person and my bags went through a screening; it reminded me of TSA security
at the airport. I walked inside when they cleared me and was told my
reservation was cancelled. Cancelled?!,
I thought, What else could go wrong
tonight? However, I certainly did not have the strength or motivation to be
frustrated. After a long pause, the hotel workers proceeded to tell me that a
different hotel had a room for me and they were “sorry for the inconvenience.”
They brought another car around and after a couple of minutes I arrived at the
Radisson Blu where I was greeted with paperwork. The workers probably thought I
was drunk or on something, because I was so out of it and kept looking at them
in a daze. The hotel’s bell hoppers eagerly brought my backpack to my room and
helped with the light. In order for the lights to go on in the room, they had
to slide my key into a slot. Thankfully they did that or I would’ve been in
darkness. They closed the door and I quickly slipped into a robe and made my
way into the bed. Too exhausted to cry anymore, my head hit the pillow, I
closed my eyes and fell fast asleep.
While I peered out my window, I contemplated the previous
night’s experience. I could’ve been
taken. I could’ve never seen my family again, I thought. However, those
memories quickly left my consciousness as I looked at this whole new world. I
saw cars whizzing right past each other, crossing the solid, bold yellow lines.
I saw a mom, dad, and their two adolescent kids riding on a motorcycle, with
their 10 month-old straddling on the handlebars. As I walked outside, I felt
light tapping on my feet; it tickled. When I looked down, I saw flies landing
and taking off constantly. I tried to shoo them away, but they always came
back. I could feel the sweat drip down the back of my neck; it was continuous.
I couldn’t do anything to stop the humidity from making my hair poof. Strolling throughout the city, I smelled fish,
rotting in the blazing sun. There were millions of beautifully dark skinned
people. Some had a place to be, some slept on a cardboard box on the uneven
sidewalk, and some, whenever my eyes met theirs, moaned in a language I
couldn’t understand and held out their disfigured hands toward me, in hopes of
getting a rupee or two.
The next day we, all the volunteers, took a two-hour van
ride to the hostel. This included everyone singing various pop culture songs,
several “get to know you games”, and a load of traffic. Upon arrival, the
director gave us our room assignments and I headed straight there. A few
minutes later, one of the volunteers said it was playtime. Exhausted and
anxious to meet the kids that I would be playing with for the next three weeks,
I stretched and fell out of my rock hard bed. I walked casually over to the
playground with the other volunteers making small talk along our way. When we
reached the playground, I saw hundreds of kids running around. Some of them
were as tall as I was and some just barely came up to my thighs. They swung on
the swings as high as they could possibly go without making a full 360 over the
bars. Some tripped over a soccer ball trying to score a goal in between two
trees and some jumped off the slide pretending they were Spiderman. This
overwhelmed me. I didn’t know any of these kids, they didn’t know me; I wasn’t
sure where to start. I walked over to the swings and felt a Wham!, go right into my side. I looked
down and saw a bright and wide-eyed face that squealed with excitement. He
began to ask me, “Are you Emily? Are you Carl’s sister?” My brother told me
about this program and came the year before. He decided to have this boy, Sanjay,
as one of his sponsor kids. My brother donated money every month and
continuously wrote letters and sent pictures of himself and his family to this
little boy. I answered, “Yes, and you must be Sanjay.” With a feeling of
relief, I followed Sanjay to his usual play area, the cricket field.
The following day my group went to one of the colonies to
give them medical aid. After roughly an hour and a half of driving down unpaved
roads with a small fan in a white van, we pulled up to a small village. I
expected barbed wire fences and a guard at a rickety old gate, with a sign that
said, “Lepers’ Village.” That’s not what
I saw; I saw a village that looked most like the rest. I saw a few huts and a
chipped blue painted gate. A few patients awaited our arrival when I began to
look around the village. I helped put all the supplies into the little run-down
church. When the medical coordinator
gave us our assignments, I hoped I would be in charge of snapping pictures. She
called out my name and said, “Can you wash their feet?” I gulped. I would be
cleaning their ulcers. What if I hurt
them, I thought. I carefully watched the person next to me unravel the
bandage as I poured the water slowly into the small blue bucket. I couldn’t
help but cringe and look away when I saw the blistering red sore. I couldn’t
imagine the pain that this lady went through everyday. My hands shook as I
picked up the washcloth and she moved to the seat in front of me. I began to
wash this lady’s foot when suddenly everything got quiet. I looked up to see
her kissing her hands and then put them on my head. At first I didn’t know what
to think, but then I realized she was blessing me. With tears streaming down
both our faces, my heart warmed with love for her.
The
leprosy patients have kids or grandkids that come to the boarding school that
Rising Star Outreach (the organization I volunteered with) sponsors. These kids
stay at the boarding school for roughly 10 months of the year with limited to
no contact from their families. I walked to the dining hall for lunch and smelled
the deliciously spiced curry the staff freshly made. I caught the whiff and
started walking faster and faster until I started skipping up the steps. When I
arrived at the dining hall, I came to a halt; I saw all the familiar glowing faces
of my favorite 200 kids. I peered around the room and for a split second, time
stood still. My gaze was broken as soon as Enokelee started dragging me to his
spot on the floor. Then my group of boys frantically waved their arms and
screamed, “Auntie! Auntie Emily! Come sit. Sit by me! Sit by me!” My heart
filled with so much love. I sat crisscross right next to them and ate my lunch,
scooping up the rice with my right hand. Heaven forbid I used my left hand to
even scoot the rice back onto my plate and my boys’ eyes would pop right out of
their face. (As part of Indian culture, they use their right hand for eating
and consider their left hand dirty for various reasons.) They began telling me
about their day and how they have all As in their subjects.
The kids are grouped up into houses, like Harry Potter, with
roughly 20 girls or boys to a house. Each house has a “house mom” who acts as
their mom while they stay at the school. Kala, one of the house moms, began to
wrap her beautiful red saree (an Indian dress) around my body. Her long dark
hair was braided to perfection, never a hair out of place. I meekly told her
that I didn’t want my stomach to show. Without any hesitation in her hands, she
pulled the fabric covering my stomach. She turned me around toward the mirror,
and I saw the vibrant reddish orange fabric pop like that was the only color in
the room. It was so beautifully wrapped that there wasn’t even a wrinkle in the
fabric.
Each kid came up to me and said goodbye. I could feel my
stomach turn. I kept coaching myself, silently whispering, “You can do this.
You’ll come back. Don’t cry.” However, all I could think was, I am leaving my home. The kids in unison
waved their hands and said, “Goodbye, Emily.” I couldn’t hold back the tears
any longer. I turned away and Kala caught me in her arms. I didn’t let go and
she didn’t either for a long time. I bawled, tears streaming down my face, into
her shoulder. I began to let go, and everything looked blurry. She took her
hand in mine and we walked down the steps. She turned to me, her eyes watering,
and with choked back tears said, “Have a happy journey.” I gave her one last
hug and started to walk away. After a couple hundred feet, I turned back to see
her still standing there and my sweet boy Sanjay shouting, “Bye, Emily. Bye,
Emily. I will miss you.”
