I should have a blog up about the horrible farm I'm at but the 2 and 1/2 hours of work I just did were deleted by this stupid India computer. I will not have internet access again until I get to Greece which, thank god, is in less than a week. Even then I am not sure when I will have a computer again so, sorry. I really tried. Just another reason why I can't wait to leave India!

The Taj Mahal

The next day we went to the Taj Mahal. We wanted to get their for sunrise and Mimi was told that it was a nice place to spend the day and read so I brought my kindle. Once we got our tickets and waited in line I got to security and they told me that electronic reading devices were not allowed. I then had to walk about a mile to the "locker room" and pay to keep my kindle there. By the time I got back the sun had risen. The Taj Mahal was still beautiful and it was early enough that there weren't that many people there and we got some good pictures. We dressed in our "saris" that day and wore colorful bindis and looked very festive. Throughout the day I think more people took pictures of us than the Taj Mahal and we got many comments on how nice my sari was. It was especially nice to hear it from the older Indian women because I find them the most judgmental and it seemed to validate what I was wearing. We left for 10 minutes for lunch and decided to buy playing cards. Security almost didn't let us in, but finally told us we could bring them in if we didn't open them. We got away with playing cards on a bench for about an hour until 2 men told us it was not allowed. I asked them why and they just pointed at the Taj Mahal. Apparently because its a mausoleum you are not allowed to do anything fun there. It was nice to watch the light change on the building which, from a distance seemed small and far away, but with the feeling that it would be huge when you got up closer. It was very big, but once inside it seemed like it should have been even bigger. The inside of the building was intricately designed, with semi precious stones, but not nearly as impressive as the exterior view. We ended up spending 6 hours there which seemed to fly by. If I don't see anything else in India, my trip here was worth it for that.

Sandipani Muni School

On our 4th day we went to the Sandipani Muni School. They title this school "For the Poorest of the Poor." They started in 2002 and now have over 1000 kids. The school goes from preschool to 9th grade and the facilities are amazing. Many of the more promising children who are more likely to stay in school are sponsored by people around the world. Some sponsors pay more money when sponsoring girls to ensure that they stay in school through the age of 18th to prevent child marriage, and at the age of 18 they are giving a pension. Some girls enter marriage at age 12 and get pregnant immediately which makes them very sick, as they are children and don't get any medical care. The school has a computer room, library, classrooms, a play ground, a tennis court, basketball court and 3 ping pong tables. Kids get free breakfast and lunch everyday. The chef has been working there/serving food to the poor for 18 years, cooking 2000 meals every day. The children are overly friendly and affectionate, but all seem fairly well behaved. The head of the sponsor program was telling us how the children come to school knowing krishna is god, but not knowing the earth is round. When she said this, for a moment I thought that his might be a bit more secular than any of the other teachings in the city, but I soon realized that all the teachers, Indian or ex-pats were krishna devotees and the main goal of the students was for them to become practicing devotee themselves. They still teach manners, math, basic facts, and low level education, but mostly religion. She said its hard too keep a lot of the kids in school because the parents put them in, but then take them out after they have been given their uniforms, just so they could get the free clothes. She also told us that most of the kids come into the school with blond hair due to malnutrition, but leave with dark black hair.

The next day we went back and spent the whole day at the school. In the morning we played with the pre-schoolers who were ages 5-9. We played head, shoulders, knees and toes with them, and the hokey pokey as well as with some of the toys that were in the play room. Most of the toys had a ton of gekko poop in the bottom of the bins, which came with a really foul smell. Teaching is a lot of work. By our third and last group of children my energy level was at a 3. The kids don't really know how to share and they hit each other a lot which is not reprimanded by the teachers. It was hard to communicate with them since they don't really speak any english. They all called us Matadee (which i'm sure i'm spoelling wrong) which means "Mother."

After lunch we played sports with them. The day before we had decided to buy Gopi sets, which look just like saris but are comprised of a skirt and a scarf, making it much easier to wear and, wouldn't you know it, being specific to krishna devotees and vrindavan, which we found out after our purchase. So we had to play sports in these get ups, which made everything more difficult. I felt like an Indian version of Laura Ingles Wilder running in 115 degree heat with a basketball being chased by 10 fourteen year old boys. They know what a basketball is, but they don't know how to play it as an organized sport and they don't care to learn, so it was very difficult to keep a game going. If there was one aggressive child, the game was over, because he was the only one who was allowed to touch the basketball. I tried my best to make things fair, but that didn't really fly with the children and the smaller ones got pushed away.

That night we helped give out food to poor children and widows in the multipurpose room of the lower school. We were planning on going to Agra the next day and found out that some of the kids from the school, as well as the school directors were going and we could join them on the bus.

On the bus, which was a school bus, we each sat in a seat with about 4-5 children. Most of them had never been out of Vrindavan before and were very excited about looking out the window. They were very well behaved on the bus which surprised me. We found out that their field trip was to a hotel where the owner lets them use the multipurpose room for games and dancing and them provides lunch in the dining room. Because we came with the school we were given a discount on the hotel. We played with the children all day, learning how to dance with them, picking them up and spinning them around. During lunch we tried to teach them about napkins and forks and not to dip your hands in the water. By the end of the day we were exhausted and smelled very badly, but were sad to see the kids go.

March 18th: day 3 at the ashram

Day 3 at the ashram. Today we went to Chandi's farm and....cleaned up trash!!! Chandi lives in a huge red sandstone house with lots of guard dogs and more construction workers than furniture. In the one furnished room we saw, was a monkey in a carrier who had just had his arm amputated after sticking his finger in an electrical socket at the ashram and getting electrocuted. All the walls of the house are glass. We were quickly hurried out of the house and riven to the farm, without getting the opportunity to meet Chandi. We asked when we got there if we could help with the harvest and they said firmly, no, and just to pick up trash, so we did that, even though there wasn't much trash to be collected. We had been told the farm was next to a bird sanctuary, and while we were there we saw 5 egrets, so I guess that's what they were talking about. Around noon, it got too hot so we came back to the ashram. Later that night we went to a "concert" in a temple. The concert consisted of lots of people, women on one side, men on the other, sitting cross-legged around 3 men singing and playing instruments. They sang about 7 renditions of the "hare krishna" chant while we were there. The melodies changed each time, but the words stayed the same. Everyone sang and clapped and prayed to the deities that were on display. The deities looked like the means for a puppet show. A red velvet curtain would open to a stage which gets lit up and everyone runs over towards the deities to pray. I really expected music to start and the deities dolls to jump up and start telling a story.

After the concert we went to a restaurant that served western food. Most of the hare krishna devotees are westerners who make their pilgrimage to Vrindavan. It actually became more interesting to me once I learned more about Vridnavan, and it being the place where the religion started and where krishna was born. One woman we met compared it to people making their pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It made me a little more understanding of how intense everyone's devotion was, as this really was the mecca of krishna, rather than just being a cult town.

March 17th: first day of work

"We do selfless work for a higher power. We ask for NOTHING in return, not even gratitude or thanks. It's purely selfless."

We went to the Yamuna river to clean up the trash. On arrival we learned that everyone from this town who dies is cremated on the beach where we were cleaning and their ashes sent out into the water. So during our clean up we had to pick up dead peoples clothing, some still covered in ash, human hair, an occasional human bone. There are cows littering the beach, which in India are sacred so no one picks up their crap. There are also a lot of cow skeletons on the beach. I'm not exactly sure what happened to those, but probably a mixture of heat exhaustion and being attacked by a dog makes the most sense. Most of the trash is buried under cow shit which is all covered in flies. A lot of the garbage is torn up into little pieces and some of it even looks as if it made its way all the way through the cow. At one point children approached and instead of helping, threw garbage at us and yelled at us, which really was very comforting and made our charitable work that much more rewarding. Another group of children approached up and threw dirt at us using a big stick. The dirt came with a girl of a snake, and so I excused myself out of the landfill and went back towards the water. As the sun rose higher in the sky the heat became almost unbearable. I picked up a floating bag and out rushed what I could only identify as blood and I did my best not to faint. For the 3 hours we picked up garbage a man and woman in the distance sang, in turn "Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishan, Hare Hare. Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare." over and over and over again. I know these words very well as I sang them in the musical "Hair" my junior year of high school, but these devotees did not continue their song with "Love, love love love love love love love drop out drop out drop out drop out be in be in be in be in" or "beads love freedom happiness" or any of the lyrics about getting high. It was simply those phrases sung over and over and over again, continuing on until after we left. On our walk back I commented to Rada Govinda, one of the devotees staying at the ashram, that the people singing the songs must have a lot of patience to sing the same thing over and over. She smiled and replied "Its an honor to sing the name of god. They are lucky they get to do it all day long. It will bring them closer to god." Personally I think the only thing it could possibly bring on is insanity. On the way back to the ashram I saw 2 monkeys have sex. It was the raunchiest thing in the world and I am traumatized. I saw the male monkey lick his palm to lubricate his member, bend the female monkey over, and have his way with her from behind. It was almost as if he was mocking the guru. Later that day taking a shower never felt so good, even though I did have to squat under a faucet next to a ground toilet that didn't flush. Being clean felt like a privilege.

March 17th: morning meeting

We woke up at 6:30 AM, and I quickly washed out my wounds in the communal port-a-potty they call a bathroom. We went downstairs where the "guru" was waiting for us and surprised we weren't up at 5 am for yoga, which he never mentioned to us. He then asked us what we knew about the Hare Krishna and when we said nothing he led us upstairs and had us sit down on the roof. Soon we were surrounded by about 16-20 devotees, all wearing headphones and I realized that one man was translating the guru's talk into spanish so everyone else could understand him. (most of the devotees living at the ashram were found in South America and "led" to India by the guru). The guru assumed, because we happened to be volunteering at the ashram, that unlike your typical westerners, we were living a life of purity and searching for meaning through a higher power. He did not know how wrong he was about us. He talked about wealth and beauty and plastic surgery as evils and purely materialistic and in his words therefore "horrible sins." He looked right as me when he said it as if he knew something, but them smiled and I realized that only one of his eyes was looking at me and I wasn't sure if it was the working one. His eyes were never looking the same direction. He talked about sex, aside form procreation, as an evil and drinking as well. He talked about love as something stupid that your soul in your temporary body might seek out in another temporary body, but that it wasn't really love because the only love you could feel was for god. I don't believe in God. He doesn't believe in Darwin. I figured we were even and dismissed any feeling of discomfort that his lecture had made me feel.

There are two little girls living here with their mother. One is 3 and the other is 6. They are originally from Australia. They each have nose rings, a side one and a bull ring. They have no manners and are rude and obnoxious. They know how to dance and preach to us about Krishna and what we should do to please him, but they don't know how to count. The guru talks about secular education as a downfall, but who is teaching these children? All they know is a cult religion. He talks about money as if it doesn't exist in India, and that westerners are ruining everything for them (He is German, everyone else is South American), but I had been in India for one week by that point and already I had noticed a caste system that still exists and has everything to do with money. The men working at the hotel we stayed at in New Delhi are treated like slaves by the managers there and the people across the street from the hotel were living in lean-to's made out of garbage. He also talked about disease as punishment for one's past lives and a lesson that has to be taught. I'm not sure if its a coping method, or if he has never been sick or known anyone sick, but I thought that was crazy. He thinks that everyone who doesn't believe in god is closed minded, but he seemed more closed minded than anyone I had ever met.

Vrindivan/ the "Eco Village" aka ashram/ hare krishna ashram

We took a train from New Delhi to Vrindavan, where the Eco Village we were going to stay at was. The train was dirty and crowded and lots of beggars came through with missing limbs or eyes, waiting for you to give them money and screaming at you in multiple languages. Ignoring them did not work you had to scream at them in return to get them to leave. It was only a 2 hour train ride and once we got off we were bombarded by tuktuk drivers. We finally found a van cab to take us and our huge bags to Vrindavan which was 40 minutes from the station. Once we arrived at the Eco Village we realized it wasn't an eco village at all...it was an ashram. And on top of that it was a hare krishna ashram called the Vrindavan Institute for Vaishnava Culture and Studies. Straight off the bat it was 100% cultish. The guru, Swami B.A. Paramadvaiti, started telling us his views which included "secular teachings are ruining the world and giving out poor eductation," "vegetariansism is the only way to live and if you dont you are a murderer," and " you must believe in a god or else your life is meaningless and serves no purpose." He told us that the next day we were required to attend a class at 7 am, led by himself, and that we had the honor of going to the Yamuna river and "collecting" garbage. It felt more like convict roadside community service especially since many of the men in the hare krishna wear orange. The beds in our rooms were essentially small wooden tables with a cushion on them and had there not been so many bugs, I might have been more comfortable sleeping on the ground.

Vrindavan has more monkeys than people and they will steal your glasses, sunglasses, cameras in order to get food. Sometimes when they give you food they give your items back, sometimes they throw them, and sometimes they break them. Its really a toss up. They are apparently vicious too, biting people and taking large chunks of skin with them. As much as I was already feeling threatened and uncomfortable by the aggressiveness of the Indian people, now I had to fear the animals, too. India is by far the hardest place I have been in my life.