India. KB addendum. The first part.

(please excuse typos. It very difficult to type long entries on the iPhone. Please direct all comments about spelling and grammar to the complaint deparment AKA devo)

In general:

The amount of diffrent ways that people make their homes here..from sticks to bricks to old doors to hay to dung to train stations to blankets to tree lean-tos to the side of train tracks to cardboard boxes to one 3 walled one rooms to palaces to regular old houses and apartments and tents and everything in between. People are making their homes out of whatever they have. It s difficult to expres in words my feelings about the poverty I've seen in the small amount if time that I've been here. I didn't want to gloss over it so I'll mention it right now and continue to mull it over. And promise to myself to find a way to give back. When we were in luni we met a tour guide named pooja who told us that in her small town called LUNI the small girls all went to school. All they needed were shoes and a uniform. Pooja and her friends often saved up money to buy the girls the things they needed to go to school. Pooja beamed with pride as she told us about the girls getting an education. Somewhere in here is my opportunity to help. Beautiful paradoxes - this phrase keeps coming back to me. I see an empty dusty brown field filled with women wearing jeweled toned saris. I see 2 little boys playing with a yellow kite on top of a roof in a slum with a puppy wearing a blue sweater tipping around them. 2 boys waving rainbow colored pinwheels from a jodphur blue roof. A goat wearing a burlap sack eating daisies from a man's bicycle basket. A family of four including one baby riding one small motorcycle - the red sari-ed mother riding side saddle on the back. A lamb and a puppy playing in the dust. A cow eating out of a golden trashcan marked the taj mahal. Acres and acres of yellow mustardseed flowers at sunset. Driving through fog/smog so thick, people appear like spectres out of nowhere and disappear into the fog the same way. Traffic - the national sound of India is the car horn. Beep to get by. Beep to say I'm behind you. Beeep to say I'm passing you. Beeep to say I've passed. Beep to say hello. Beeep to say get out of the way cow beeep beep beep. These are the many ways one can navigate around India - car, rickshaw, autorickshaw, camel, elephant, animal cart, truck, miltary jeep, maxi taxi, donkeys, big taxi and small taxi
Pollution - there is a lot. And it's he'll on your skin and allergies. The amount of people in India is staggering. The are IN FACT lots and lots of people here. And they are everywhere. Indian food is now my number one favorite food in the world. I spend every day looking greedily forwad to mealtime. Since we are expected to eat with our hands I dig in happily like a plump one year old eating her first birthday cake. I still havent had dehli belly and my jeans are getting tight. When I return home, I expect you all to whip me back into shape like burgess Meredith did for rocky.