September 19-24, 2012 - India with the Girl Scouts

For five days, Brooke and I went to India with her Girl Scout troop and visited the Girl Scout Sangam World Centre in Pune, India.  We also toured Delhi.  We were a total of six -- four girls and two adults.  Here we are waiting for our flight in the Bahrain airport.

Here we have just arrived in Mumbai after flying all night long, and we're waiting for our connection to Pune.

Brooke and Megan are taking a rickshaw from the airport in Pune to the Girl Scout center.  Only two people could fit in each rickshaw.  I always thought they were bicycles!  I guess they're motorized now.

The best parts about India were all the colorful clothes, and the people.  The people were always friendly.  We saw a lot of women riding on the backs of motorcycles (side saddle) in their beautiful saris.  I was so amazed with that that I took so many pictures of them.  They even carried babies in their laps sometimes!

This woman is carrying a baby!  I hope he drives carefully.  The women kept their heads covered, but didn't wear helmets.  I wondered if this woman was a Saudi woman because she wore black and didn't wear the colorful sari that all the other women wore.

We also saw a lot of homes made alongside the roads.

Here we are arriving in our rickshaws.

This is Sangam World Centre of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts founded in 1966.

This is the kitchen staff.

This was our dorm-style room.

These are the volunteers in their uniform.

This was our first Indian meal.

We were told that we could eat with our hands or with the tableware.

On the first day we were taught how to wear a sari.  This Dutch girl is a new volunteer and she is also learning how to dress.

Brooke has chosen her fabric.

This tall girl, Moon, is a volunteer from Korea.  She is helping Brooke wrap her sari correctly.

I think we'd look a lot better if we had the proper shirts on underneath!

Here we were learning about Rangoli, which is a traditional Indian decorative folk art. They are decorative designs made on floors of living rooms and courtyards during Hindu festivals and are meant as sacred welcoming areas for the Hindu deities.  The designs can be simple geometric shapes, deity impressions, flower and petal shapes (appropriate for the given celebrations), but they can also become very elaborate designs crafted by numerous people.  The base material is usually dry or wet granulated rice or dry flour, to which Sindoor (vermilion), Haldi (turmeric), and other natural colors can be added.  Chemical colors are a modern variation.  Here we were using colored sand.

Here is what our Indian teacher drew.

It's a lot harder than it looks!  I decided to draw a picture of my God :)

Brooke drew a rainbow, but when it became too difficult, she abandoned her drawing.

Here is a picture of Rangoli which I found on the internet.  It is a picture of their god, Ganesh, the elephant god.  The Ganesh celebration was the following day, so we heard a lot about it.  Some of the ladies we visited later went to great lengths to show us a shrine to Ganesh.

An Indian girl gave us mehndi, the art of henna painting on the body.  The henna plant is believed to bring love and good fortune, and to protect against evil.  Mehndi is traditionally practiced for wedding ceremonies, during important rites of passage, and in celebrations.  A paste made from the crushed leaves of the henna plant is applied to the skin, and when removed several hours later, leaves markings on the skin that fade naturally over 1-3 weeks.

As far back as 1200 B.C. the ancient Egyptians were using henna on their nails and hair. Henna was also used to dye animal skins, textiles, and men's beards.  Once the henna plant's cooling properties were discovered, painting the skin became a way for the desert people of India to cool down their body temperatures.

At tea time we were served chai which was a spicy, milky tea.  It is usually made with half water and half milk, sugar, grated ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, ground cloves, ginger powder, pepper powder, and black tea.  It was a little too spicy for my tastes, but everyone else loved it.

A potato snack with chai.

Playing badminton.

The kitchen staff preparing our special Indian dinner.

As we entered the room for dinner, we were to hold our hands as pictured below and say, "Namaste."  It can be used as just a casual or formal greeting, or an act of worship.  However, the real meeting between people is the meeting of the minds, and when they greet each other with Namaste, it means, 'may our minds meet', indicated by the folded palms placed before the chest.  The bowing down of the head is a gracious form of extending friendship in love, respect, and humility.

It doesn't look like much, but they came around and served you as many times as you wanted.  The two items in the center are dessert.  The yellow item tasted like sweet coconut.

These were the ladies that prepared and served our food.

We also had a welcoming ceremony where the candles on this altar were lit.

We were given mosquito nets to sleep under, but I was too tired to figure mine out, and I didn't get any mosquito bites.

In the morning, we had a flag cermony.

In Pune, we were taken by the Sangam volunteers for a walk into the town when it started to rain.  By the time we arrived at our destination, we were drenched.  We walked up these tiny dark corridors.

Here, we visited a female doctor who gave up her practice to form an organization called Green Tara Foundation where she focuses on the overall development of adolescent girls.  Her organization teaches the girls about life skills, self & gender awareness, legal awareness, self-defense in general situations of attack, arts & crafts, sewing, and computer training, and also focuses on their health.  Here is the doctor with the Sangam volunteers.

Brooke, Samia, and Serena are being introduced.

We were served chai while the doctor showed us the apron she uses to help the girls learn about their bodies.

This map shows all the neighborhoods that Green Tara is currently helping.

These girls are showing us their sewing.

Then these little girls took us to their neighborhood next door to show us their homes. They're wearing their school uniforms.

This was a shrine they had built in their neighborhood.  Notice the nice tile all around the idol?  Not one house in this neighborhood had tile in their home.

This is the front door to the first home we visited.

This is inside the living room.

There is one bed, but I'm not sure who gets to sleep in it.  We know there is a mother and children living here.  This lady in the green translated for us, but we couldn't understand everything that was said.

Not everyone could afford a shrine in their home, but this home had one.

We were allowed to take pictures of the kitchen, which looked like a very nice kitchen compared to the rest of the homes we visited.  There was a separate room for the kitchen, which most homes didn't have, and a shelf full of pots and tools, with what looked like a hot plate on the floor, and a back door to throw out garbage, maybe, or to clean messy pots.

This was the walkway between some of the smaller homes.

After we had been touring the neighborhood, several women began following us, and everyone was curious about us.  I was touched by these people's friendliness and hospitality to invite total strangers to take pictures inside their homes.  We were offered drinks, but were told to politely refuse because they were too poor to be giving things to us.

This is another kitchen which only had the one shelf.  But as you can see on the white shelf to the right, they had a TV.

This was another home we visited.

These four girls are sisters and live in this one room.  I think there was a fifth sister that was too shy to be in the picture.

Brooke and Serena couldn't resist playing with this puppy.  

Brooke kept trying to join us in the next home, but the puppy wouldn't stop following her; so she stayed outside.

No one else seemed to care how cute the puppy was, but they were very interested to see Brooke giving it so much attention.

She attracted many of the kids while she played with the puppy.

This was the shrine to Ganesh, the elephant god.

This home even had a ceiling fan!

This grandmother was 95 years old.  When we walked in, she was sitting on the concrete floor, but the daughter (sitting next to her,) insisted that she get up and sit on the bed so we could take pictures with her.  I felt kind of sorry for the grandmother... she doesn't look very happy.

As we left, these ladies put the red and yellow powders on each of our foreheads just like you see on this lady on the left.  Kumkum is a powder used for social and religious markings in Hinduism.  It is either made from turmeric or saffron.  The turmeric is dried and powdered with a bit of slaked lime, which turns the rich yellow powder into a red color.  The reason it is applied to the forehead has to do with the ancient Hindu belief that the body is divided into seven vortices of energy and this location is known to be the third eye and is believed to be the channel through which humankind opens spiritually to the divine and is the most holy location on the body.

I read that when a girl or married woman visits a house, it is a sign of respect or blessings to offer kumkum to them when they leave.

We were also offered a little piece of this white dough.  It tasted somewhat like cookie dough.

We rode in a rickshaw back to the airport to fly to Delhi.

Here we are on our bus ride from Delhi to Agra.

These are some of the sights we saw on our 4-1/2-hour drive from Delhi to Agra.  I think we saw every possible form of transportation along the way!

I couldn't see, but it looked like this mother was carrying an infant!

I didn't get the front of the animal, but this was a camel!

We were in bumper-to-bumper traffic and it looks like if the traffic were any closer in the picture below, the two men would be knocked off their seats!

They would fit as many people as they possibly could in a vehicle.

Here's a home on the side of the road with their cows.

This lady is holding TWO babies!

This is the entrance to the Taj Mahal in Agra.

Look at the sea of people we are among!

This is one of the beautiful carvings in marble.

We were stared at a lot, but as we were resting a bit afterwards, we had people ask us if they could have a picture taken with us.  We were told that it was because our skin is so white and they only see that on TV, so it's kind of like being a movie star!

This was one of our lunches... so pretty.

Here we went to a marble factory where they made marble tables with inlaid stones just like the marble on the Taj Mahal.  The men here are sanding the stones into smooth shapes.

This man is taking these tiny pieces of stone and making a mosaic with them in the marble.

This man is carving designs in the table.

These were the tables that were for sale.

Here's the table I bought.

It doubles as a lazy susan.

Here Samia is thinking about buying this sari.

You can barely see these monkeys through our van window, but they were just sitting alongside the road.

We found a stray puppy at the Minar Monuments and had a hard time leaving him there.

I almost got pick-pocketed here!  Two girls were closely following us, but I didn't think much of it, when I felt a hand touch my side pocket!  I grabbed it, moved away. and looked at her, but she ignored me and walked away.

Don't ya love Brooke's new purse?

These homes along the road were used by construction workers.  They are like modern-day nomads.  They move with their work.

At a stop light, this boy came to my window to beg and do tricks for money.  He had a mustache drawn on his face.

Our tour guide always took us to a nice restaurant for our meal (which made me feel kind of guilty!)

We were given so much food that we couldn't eat it, and we couldn't keep it in our hotel room, so I decided to have them box it up so we could feed it to the stray dogs that are everywhere.

Here is one of the dogs we fed.

We visited the Red Fort.

The girls are buying bracelets.

It seems to be common in every country but America for people to hold hands.

I loved to look at all the beautiful fabrics the women wore.

Shopping for souvenirs.

The girls got tired of shopping.

This little girl was begging for money and began doing tricks.  She was so fast I couldn't get a picture of her face.

This was a memorial to the Indian armies.

There were carts of food along the sidewalk, but when business was low, the owners would just crawl onto their cart and go to sleep.

A snake charmer.

He tried to get Brooke to hold the snake, but she preferred to watch from a distance.

This little girl carried a newborn baby to our van window to beg for money.

This is one way to keep your hands free.

There was so much traffic of every kind... it was entertaining just to watch everyone weave in and out of each other and not hit anyone!

There were monkeys sitting on the fence as we drove by.

We saw a lot in such a short time.  It was an interesting trip.  I sure wish the rest of the family could have come with us.

- Pattie -