A Lifetime, In Just One Week

 

After 3 straight days of traveling non-stop, myself and a handful of the other girls on my program have finally arrived in Hyderabad, India! There were some complications in flights so we were separated and had to take a flight from New Delhi to Mumbai, instead of straight to Hyderabad. Once we got to Mumbai however, we ended up missing the connecting flight to Hyderabad which would have gotten us with the rest of the group that same night. So at around midnight we stayed in a hotel near the airport for about 3 hours until we had to get up to board our final plane to Hyderabad. The good that came out of this experience was I got to bond a lot more with the group I was waiting at the airports with. This really helped me in the first day starting the program.

 When arriving to Hyderabad my first impressions were how hot it was. I was sweating so much and I couldn’t wait to be in the AC. Besides the weather, the scenery was absolutely breathtaking, I’ve never seen anything like India before. I was surprised how dirty it was though. Trash pollution is very prevalent, and I thought it was bad back home. I’d like to learn more about why it’s become such a problem for communities in India because I always wonder why anyone could just ignore litter right where they live everyday. 

On our second day, my group and I took a day trip to some attractions of Hyderabad. Our first stop, we walked through a temple known as Birla Mandir. We had to remove our shoes and store them in cubby’s and we could not bring our cellphones in either out of respect of course, since it was a religious temple. It is completely made of marble, so you can imagine how hot it was to walk on especially with the beating India sun. There was mats along where we walked but at some points it had been torn up and we had to run across burning hot marble at the end. Some locals were laughing at this, but so were we even though our feet burned for awhile after that. The inside of the temple was absolutely beautiful and very authentic since there are no pictures of anything inside. That made it very special that I got to see it in person. On our next stop, we visited The Buddha Temple Of Hyderabad. We all took a ferry out to the statue that stood in the middle of the heart shaped Hussein Sagar Lake. I compare the Buddha statue to Lady Liberty in the US, it served as a simple of the state. This was a short, but beautiful visit filled with many pictures! Later on, we took the bus to a beautiful hotel to have lunch. What surprised me a lot with this hotel is that is was incredibly luxurious and you could tell that from both the inside and outside of the building, but just across the street you could see the poverty side of India. It was crazy to me how close the struggles of the country were so close to the privileged parts of it. 

My expectations that I talked about in my last blog post have recently been a letdown in all honesty. Everything that I thought I was doing within these three weeks abroad is completely different now.  We aren’t doing what we thought, which is teaching girls about health education, it’s more of teaching boys and girls the english language. Although things do change and it is out of our program leaders and coordinators control, I still have been upset. Of course I’ve been making the very best of it that I can while I’m here and I hope it still ends up being enjoyable. Class has been long but full of valuable information for our service project. Although it was mostly lecturing, we still had the chance to move around when we practiced energizers that we would also be teaching to our students. I still feel like I’m in school while my friends back home are on summer vacation while I was in the classes, but it is studying abroad right? Just in the summer. Everything I’ve learned in the past three days have been very educating and have got me excited to teach the young children in the VOICE camps and I can’t wait to write all about it by the end of the six days in the schools.