When we met the family who were in a van, I realized we may have made things a little difficult for our rep. She assured me we did not. It was a lengthy trip for our 2 vehicles to get to the only restaurant available.
Traffic jam big time. This truck is to the right of our vehicle. Several vehicles ahead of us is a few large vehicles, all of us completely stopped. Several people had to work for about 20 minutes to have our car, for instance, drive back ½ block, to allow the SUV to squeeze by us within inches, then the truck to squeeze by. One of the people in the van turned out to be the father of a sponsored child who does volunteer work for the local charity organizations.
This village was NOTHING like Noida. Noida had beggars and was very dirty. This village was industrious and clean, very pleasant. It was such an impressive delight to see how educated, well mannered, well taken care of Anjushree and her family are. The charity organizations are doing a superb job.
I asked the rep if there were these programs in Noida. She didn’t know if there was.
We arrived at the restaurant, had a wonderful meal. Anjushree was delighted to be able to have mutton. She hadn’t been feeling well enough to eat much. She ate heartily at this meal. She insisted herself on eating with a fork thru most of the meal. Near the end, at everyone's encouragement, she finally goodnaturedly gave up and used her fingers to finish off the mutton.
It cost us $60.
We let them play with our Iphones and Ipod (album pictures). Funnily enough the elderly “godfather” was the most adept at using them.
These are the names of everyone at the dinner (I think I got the names with the right relationship…
Urmila – children.org rep
Namia – social worker
Bronoy - brother
Anita - mom
Parimal - dad
Bhanatosh – male social worker
Dolly - godmother
Ujjala - godfather
Sachindra - aunt
Uttam - uncle
Gurupada - volunteer
As we left, I greeted them each with Namaste as is their tradition, and the father warmly asked us to come back anytime. I told him I have a new dream. I dream of taking my grandchildren to visit some day. With the 5 star hotel, and this lovely family and village, that would be a doable dream.
As we drove back to Kolkata I finally thought to ask the rep about her own family. She says there are about 35 sponsor visits a year. They have 24,000 children. Some sponsors sponsor more than one child, but all the children are sponsored. The rep has an 11 and 17yo child herself. Her husband works in Mumbai, which is a LONG ways away, and thus he is home only every two months. They want their oldest to finish high school in Kolkata before she moves to Mumbai.
Mark had paid for the toll road whenever it had to be paid. Rs20 $.50, paid 2xs.
The rep wouldn’t let us pay for the taxi. I wouldn’t accept that. She finally said she didn’t know how much it would be and she would submit a bill to children.org and we could make it a tax deductible donation. I suspect we aren’t going to hear about the bill.
My next blog will be about flying to Singapore tomorrow night, to Hong Kong where we have a layover of 10 hours - and we hear the government supplies the cab and tour of their city and it is safe to leave your passport while you go do that, then finishing our flight home. (oh joy flying all night, then touring all day, then flying the rest of the time home. Sounded like a good idea at the time to Mark.)
