Day 11: KFC- Never Again

Hey there Readers,

My first morning back Rajat comes up and wakes me at 6 to go exercise with him and the other orphans in the park. I get up a groggy mess and by the time I got down Manish was already crying because he fell down on something sharp. Rajat (the big brother of the group) says we should go so I carry Manish over to the orphanage where I’m joined by Mom, B, and Hannah. I help the boys shower and dress as they get ready for school and then Mom and I leave to eat breakfast and get ready for another project. Just a note - when people visit they usually only volunteer at one project and stay with a host familuy that lives close to the project. We are going to try and see as many different projects as possible because Mom is evaluating all of them and will give feedback to help Nuria organize her future volunteer placements and projects. We head off to the Morning Star slum school and see what’s going down there. Bandhu drives us and he pulls up at the side of the road where you have a small dirt path and at the end, a massive slum that stretches in both directions along the road as far as I could see. This was one of those, “What have I gotten myself into?” moments and we walked towards the slum. Eventually we arrived at a sort of tent thing that was curved but didn’t reach the floor. It’s difficult to explain so I’ll just get a picture. Here we met Rakish and his wife, both teachers at the school who had organized the students into three groups: beginners, intermediate, and advanced. He showed us the ropes and then Mom got the advanced class while I started with the intermediate. This class consisted of a blackboard and about 25 kids who were differing ages but most of them looked about 8 years old. On the blackboard were a couple of addition, multiplication, and subtraction problems that the kids had to copy down and solve. My first task was grading all of their work including a multiplication table up to ten. Afterwards I made them write 5 animals, vegetables, etc. which I also had to check. Once this was finished the smaller kids left for lunch but the intermediate and advanced groups had to stay for another hour. We decided to make them both stand up so we could do some exercises with them. Once again we showed them the Macarena and then Simon Says and after that just a clapping game. The kids were dismissed and now Mom and I went to check out the rooming accommodations of the volunteers who wanted to work at Morning Star, which happened to be at Rakish’s house. I was invited to go with him on his motorcycle while the women went home in a rickshaw. On the way to his house we stopped to get lunch which turned out to be fresh chicken. Normally that’s fine, but here’s what I mean when I say fresh. We stopped at a little, open shack at the side of the road swarming with flies. Rakish talked to the guy at the table and then went to a cage with a couple of chickens in it and pulled out one by the legs. It flapped for a bit and then gave up so he gave it to the man he spoke with earlier. The man picks up a massive knife which I hadn’t seen earlier because it had been so covered in flies and he uses this to cut the chickens throat over a wooden barrel. He drops the chicken in the bucket and leaves it to bleed to death. He then deals with another man’s chicken by chopping it into various pieces and packaging it. I heard a knocking sound and realized that the chicken in the barrel was flapping its wings in a final attempt to get out before it bled to death. It was pretty gruesome for me, not gonna lie. So he then took it out, removed all of the skin and feathers and cut it up, pulled the organs out and put them on a balance. I would like to remind you that everything is covered in flies: the knife, the chicken, the table, the balance, the pile of organs, everything. He then put all this into a small plastic bag and we drove off once again, this time headed for his home. We got off the bike and we went inside where his wife cooked dinner. Needless to say, I stayed away from the chicken. It was a nice family in general and after lunch we went to the market with Angie, the volunteer staying at Rakish’s place. It was pretty awesome because we went to this place called ‘Perfect Bake’ where they have ice cream and coffee and all that good stuff that’s difficult to find anywhere else and we know it’s safe there to eat. We left Angie and returned to Bandhu’s where we spent the rest of the day in an exhausted stupor and after dinner we welcomed sleep.