That says Hello Everyone in Tamil, the language spoken where I was in Southeast India. I've been back home for a week now so I thought that I had better write about the rest of my trip. I've also finally gotten some pictures to post too, so I think I'll fill everyone in on the trip with a sort of slideshow.
I'll start with this picture because it represents one of the main themes that I experienced in India: people. There were people everywhere. It is hard to really explain; we stayed in large cities for a couple days, but we were mostly in smaller "towns", and I really couldn't tell the difference in population. As far as I could tell there was traffic all day, every day. The closest comparison I can make to the traffic is to Mexico City and the amount of people NYC, but even those seem like a stretch.
This is a picture at a boarding school that we visited. We visited a total of 5 schools on our trip. I wrote about it a bit in the other posts but the visits really stuck out as the reason we went to India. The kids at these schools are supported by Lutheran Partners in Global Mission, an organization started by a couple from our church. I think this picture captures the attitude of the kids perfectly; they know what type of opportunity they have and they take every advantage of it by listening and doing what their told. For them going to school, if only till the 12th grade, means not having to work as day labors doing backbreaking work for almost nothing from the age of 15 on.
I took this picture at Lebanon home for women. The women here were either widowers or left by their husbands. Because of this they have no real way to support themselves. At the Lebanon home they weave all different types of things like scarves, bags, etc. They depend on travelers like us to bring them back to the US for sale where we live. It was amazing to see a large open room full of women in all stages of the weaving process, and than to see the final product.
This is one of my favorite pictures that I took, its the view from the mountain in Tiruvannamalai. We got up at 6:00 and walked through the ashram at the bottom of the mountain. The ashram was founded by the Yogi Ramana Maharshi who lived on the mountain for some time. Check out the Wiki for him, it's pretty interesting stuff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramana_Maharshi.Well I've got to go to work now, I've got some more pictures I'll try and get up later.
