Hot and Getting Hotter

So after a successful weekend in Agra I came back home and promptly got really, really sick for about a day and a half: throwing up, fever, chills, the whole nine yards. But I just kind of rode it out and by this morning I was out school again, and other than being a bit more tired than usual I feel fine. I just finished doing laundry,  which in Indian terms means running water from the shower into a bucket, squirting in some detergent and rubbing the clothes against one another with my hands. I'm not really convinced it was all that effective, but now all my clothes smell a little like detergent so I can at least pretend they're clean!

Not many kids have been showing up to school so far this week because it's been so hot. I don't really blame them -- the electricity's been out at the school for the last couple of days so there's been no fan to even circulate the air and the weather today saw a high of 108 degrees. I feel so bad even trying to get the kids to learn in this weather. Imagine sending kids to a 108 degree school in the US? They spent half the day just laying on the ground and were actually fighting over the water cooler this morning.

It's hard to tell if the kids are sick or not because they're pretty full of life and most of them have runny noses all the time anyway, but today I noticed that one little girl had really yellow eyes and another boy seemed to be oozing out of his ears and nose. I feel like being here has really shown me that I definitely want to be a doctor more than ever, because all I keep thinking about is how disease must be rampant here and how stupid it is that so many kid's lives are ruined by things that we think are silly, like the flu or polio (which is still very much at large here).

But it's also crazy how inflated prices are in the US and other Western countries. My $10 leather shoes are considered 'very expensive' here, according to the teacher at the school, and my $5 shirt is considered out of the prices range of Pooni, who has a pretty good job as the housekeeper here. The really amazing thing is that processed food (like juice or canned food) is pretty expensive in comparison to everything else, but fruit is SO cheap -- it was about 37 cents to buy a large watermelon from the supermarket the other day, and that's more expensive than buying it from a vendor off of the street. I guess that's a sign that I've gone from an industrialized nation to one that's not nearly as modern, because here farms and produce are cheap while anything that requires machinery or power is much more expensive.

But anyway, done enough reflecting for today! Here's a link to some of the photos that I've taken so far:

India Favs

Adios!