Still Not Defeated

Here, one day feels like 3 days. Sara and I go through such a huge range of emotions in less than 24 hours, it's pretty ridiculous. Today was no exception to the rule.

Today we started out the day pretty pumped, but within a few hours I grew pretty homesick. I read a loving email from my mom and just wanted to be home, eating popcorn and watching Star Trek. When the girls got home it was kind of hard for me to be emotionally interested in them, honestly. I don't think they're stupid, and just because their English isn't very good doesn't mean they can't read my facial expressions or my body language - so they knew I wasn't particularly happy. Sujita, the angel that she is, asked me a few times if there were any "problems." I told her I didn't have any problems.

We celebrated Rani's and Promila's birthdays today and the cake was AWESOME!! The frosting melted in your mouth, and I don't think it was because of the heat here. So good! Every meal we ate today was amazing. It was an awesome food day - we didn't even have to break out the nutella, peanut butter and digestives. (Digestives are like cracker cookies from the UK, and they taste a lot better than they sound). 

When I asked Sara what I should write about today, she said, "Write about what you feel. Write about how you feel defeated." A part of me does feel defeated, because I feel kind of ill-prepared for this. I need training in social work to really make a difference in these girl's lives. And I also need to fluent in Hindi. We spend a lot of time with the girls learning vocabulary, so I can pretty much always understand what a conversation is about. But still, that's not enough. However, a part of me does NOT feel defeated. Tonight Ishika knocked on my door and had me come play a game with her. We played memory and she started cheating at first. I told her not to, and she scoffed it off. On about the third round, I started losing terribly. Ishika started giving me her matched tiles, and we ended the round with her having about 2 matches, and I had about 8. Whenever I'd try to give her some, she'd say, "No, didi! No, your's!" It was adorable. Also, by the end of the game, she started to penalize herself for cheating. I'm not sure if she actually learned something from me, or if she was just following the "no cheating" rule because she wanted a sticker after wards. Either way, she stopped cheating and I count that as a success.

Ishika was such a good example to me tonight. She taught me a Hindi hand-clap game as well, and took me upstairs to spend time with the other girls afterwards. Ishika can be kind of short-tempered sometimes, but she was really loving and Christ-like tonight. I'm glad I get to spend time with these girls and they are definitely a blessing in my life.