Warangal Tales

Every single week surprises us... without fail. Here are some of our main surprises and successes (and challenges) this week!

1) Although we expected 5 new volunteers to arrive on Wednesday of last week, we only got 3. But they are a solid 3 and they dove in head first. We picked them up at 11:55pm on Wednesday, and got home from the airport at 2am, and then woke up at 6:15am on Thursday to head out the HELP India's first ever team outreach in a village about 3 hours outside of Hyderabad. This village is in a province of Telangana called Warangal. It was shaping up to be an awesome weekend, full of nutrition, hydration, and exercise workshops at two impoverished government schools in the area, as a pre-accompaniment to the water filtration systems we will be providing for them in coming weeks. We were also going to be hosting a field day at both schools! That's right... tug of war, relay races, wheelbarrow racing, and ball tosses.

2) Not so surprisingly, throwing a field day and running workshops all day at a middle school/high school is completely and utterly exhausting! Especially when the elementary school kids are peeking out of their classroom windows (since their building is on the same school grounds) and are sad they aren't included so the teachers as you to throw them into the mix as well. Another volunteer (Courtney) and I played duck duck goose for an hour straight with those rambunctious children and wow... I am not as young as I used to be! And the best part is, we did it two days in a row!





3) Success: At the first school, we successfully painted some awesome wall murals in their brand new library (they rearranged things and dedicated a big classroom to be their new library/computer lab since the old one was just a storage closet).

4) Surprisingly, sleeping on the wooden pews of a tiny Christian church in the middle of a tiny village in Warangal is not as uncomfortable as it sounds! Everybody slept like babies, even without AC and only a few fans for 11 people. That church had about a billion bugs in it (insert non-explicit explicative pun here: holy mosquitos!) but none of us even got more than one or two bites! That was a very pleasant surprise. 

5) Another big surprise; our second night in the village, we stayed in a nicer guesthouse that actually had AC (insert glorious singing angels here even though we were no longer staying in the church)! That's not the surprising part... the surprising part is that because we have now been living in India heat for 3 months without AC, we could hardly sleep because it was so cold in the bedrooms!

6) The two field day/workshop days at the two schools were not-so-surprisingly a huge hit (we have done similar things at several schools here in Hyderabad and everyone has loved it). But the best part of it all, and something that shocked us all, was what the teachers at the first school said to our partner while they were watching us teach/play. They all said that they had never before seen any of their students smile, laugh, and be as enthusiastic as they were while we were there. And most of those teachers have been teaching for 20+ years. Our partner who set up this whole outreach asked us to make it a goal of our outreach to just help the kids feel confident and successful in using their english with native english speakers. The kids we were teaching were from very poor backgrounds, and the only english training they have is from their underpaid Indian teachers at these public schools. They weren't the strongest english speakers, but we were extremely impressed with their ability to listen, understand, and respond to us! You could see how much pride they had in their education and their school because they were able to communicate successfully with us. For these students, experiencing that feeling has a far greater impact than any field day game we would play with them.

7) We got to participate in a rice distribution day for the organization called Rice Love (check them out at ricelove.org) that employs women in India on fair wages to make handbags, sells the bags in the USA, then uses the money to buy and distribute rice to families that don't have enough money to make ends meet even though they have jobs, or don't have enough money to send their kids to school. This way, those families can save the money they would have spent for a month on rice and put it towards something else. We helped interview the families and distribute the 25 kg bags of rice to 57 families on Saturday. It was awesome :) It is a great cause, run by an incredible man from Hyderabad who was able to go to Hawaii for his college education and has decided to dedicate his life back to his people by trying to help them in anyway possible. Go buy a bag.

The auto full of rice bags got very stuck in mud...

One of the many families blessed with a bag of rice. I won't post the tons of picture we took because we took them for the Rice Love blog. Seriously, go check it out!

8) We came back to Hyderabad, exhausted, but happy, and slept well on Saturday night. Well some of us did... this is the biggest surprise of the whole week... While successfully having ZERO sickness for the first 7 weeks of our volunteer program, all of the sickness seemed to have piled up and just dumped on us all this weekend. Sunday came to find a house full of very very sick people. Braxton had food poisoning, Erik does too, we think Courtney does, Haylie has salmonella, and Danielle is just not used to Indian food and her stomach is all flipped upside down. Doctors came Sunday night, IVs came Monday morning, recovery is a slow process. We will be laying low for a while.

9) Our healthy volunteers, Jaret, Eric, Kaile, and Claire, pulled a massive miraculous feat by overcoming another unpleasant surprise when they went to the preschool where we have been building a playground. The playground had been vandalized. Stomped on, spray painted, tipped over. They did an amazing job of keeping their tempers, pivoting, making the best out of a bad surprise. The playground is FINISHED and it looks awesome. The kids are going to love it. And they even painted murals on the walls of the school, and repainted the entire inside as well! Good health goes a long way.

10) Final surprise of the week (which shouldn't have been a surprise): Braxton and I are realizing that we really need to take time to relax for ourselves, and to just take a chill pill when there is a new and unexpected surprise every other second. If we want to have any sort of good health, we need to take a breath every now and then during the day. Not the biggest surprise, but still an important truth.


Also, we're taking over the HELP International instagram story this week, so follow us on instagram @helpintl .

PS: Braxton and I have been married for 9 months!!!