Tuesday, July 5, 2011

7.5 - a story with Sathya

Today I ended up doing construction instead of medical… We went to the colony in Monalapurnum (where Sathya’s grandparents live) about an hour away from the school and moved more bricks to different homes for them to build their own bathrooms! We formed assembly lines to load up each truck and then unloaded them at each of the homes and then…went back for more!! We walked past a home where they were building from the bricks that we had moved earlier – it was rewarding to see the final product!




We were able to stop off at one of the colony’s art schools (one of the microcredit portions RSO) and see some of the art work that they sell their. I bought this purple one from N.Shantin (who is standing with me in the photo).
*Me, Kim and Traci (Kim, sitting on the bricks did not know that we were taking the picture!)






A really sweet story from Sathya tonight…
She ran into family time tonight, holding something behind her back. She had the biggest smile on her face and I knew she was up to something :) She had one of the girls cover my eyes and then she placed a large “package” in my hands and ran out of the room laughing. I looked down and saw a bunch of little presents wrapped together in white paper glued shut with purple paint that I had left behind from art classes last week. Inside each one was a little present, carefully wrapped in the thin white paper. The first little present had two small hair clips and a bright yellow hair tie. In the next one was a book cover… one of the stretchy fabric book covers that I loved when I was in middle school! And in the last one was a friendship bracelet made out of India’s flag colors (white, green, and orange). The last present had a piece of dried plaster that we had found in some of the paper cups we had used for our art class as well and on it she had painted, “I love u c” (c for corey… what she normally calls me :))On the very top, she had taped a letter that was one of the sweetest letters that I have ever gotten… at the end of her letter she wrote, “Never forget me when you go home to America. I love you to the moon, to the sea, and back around the earth. Love, Sathya”. I couldn’t help but cry as read her sweet note, holding her gifts in my lap. I went and found her, hiding behind her door in her room…she saw that I had tears in my eyes and said, “don’t cry corey”… I told her that I had just cried because I was so happy. She had gone to so much work to make everything for me and had used so many of her stars that she had worked so hard to earn to buy me presents. She was so giving and her love and her willingness to give so much had touched me.
These kids have so little. They are here at the school for a majority of the year (they have a month – two month break) and only get to see their families once a month during the rest of the time. They own a couple of outfits (maybe three to four each) and have everything else that they need. The leaders in the school have set it up so that they really learn to earn a lot of what they have. To do this, they have a point system set up for the kids and with good behavior they can earn stars throughout the week in their homes and in their classes. They can then save up their stars and use them to buy school supplies (if they loose of their school supplies, they are expected to save their stars to buy more). They can also buy little trinkets in the star store with their stars (such as some of the gifts Sathya had wrapped up). She had saved over one hundred of her stars for my gifts… she, at age twelve, is more giving than me at age twenty one… She really gave of all she had. Sathya teaches me each day to love more and give more of myself. She is an amazing example.
I know very little about Sathya’s life other than what she has shared with me (what I had shared in a post yesterday) but from what I do know, she has had a very hard life and has often, I believe, felt a huge lack of love and compassion from her family. And yet, even though she may have not been shown the love that I have been blessed with my whole life from my own family, she is still able to show so much love and give so much of herself to others.
I was talking to Buela tonight as well. She was just baptized this past Sunday! She and some of the other kids have a seminary class each day (they are studying the Old Testiment right now). She talked to me all about some of her favorite hymns and said that her favorite hymn was “I Stand All Amazed”. It is my favorite hymn “because it gives me so much comfort and makes me strong”, she said. Comfort and strength is given each and every one of us through the spirit (and in this case-through music) in a way that is personal to us… but it is also universal and can unify us even when we live and have lived different lives as it did tonight as Buela and I sang hymns together :)
Singing to all of the girls is once again my favorite end to my day. Nashanthi will always just lay there and hold out her hand for me while I sing to her and the rest of the girls. It is really sweet. As I sing to them, she will stroke my hand until she falls asleep. She is a sweetheart.

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