Beauty and Body Language- But not Boredom!

It's hard to believe that I am writing one of the final posts of my gap year, as I only have 2 more weeks left in India! Two weeks from this moment I will be sitting at my gate in the Chennai airport, preparing for the next 24 hours travel. My days at the hostel are numbered, as I am planning to leave the 17th, the day after most of the girls will have left, and I am trying to make the most of my time here. 

During the day I usually just hang out with the girls and help them study. They love playing hand/clapping games, and are always excited to learn new "exotic" hand games from the US, as well as teach me games that they know. One of their favorite hand games is done while singing the chorus of (2010 FIFA World Cup song) Waka Waka, but they weren't aware it was an actual song. I looked up the lyrics and wrote them down, and now they love memorizing them and singing the song at all hours of the day. The girls are also always eager to learn about my life, and they love looking at pictures of all of my friends and family, and memorizing their names, faces, and even birthdays (discovering that "friend Ben" and "brother Ben" were two different people really confused them). One of the highlights of their day last week was talking to my dad on his birthday! It's not unusual for a girl to come up to me randomly and begin listing all of my family and extended family's names, and if you're reading this, there's a sizable chance that a bunch of 13 year old girls in India know who you are. 

Despite loving to spend time with me, the girls are always reminding me how I can't stay in India for too much longer, because apparently this country has take a toll on my appearance. They routinely tell me I need to go back to the US soon, because there I am beautiful and look like a Barbie (this is what I get for letting them look at my photos...) but India has made me brown, sweaty, freckly, and ugly. It always makes me laugh because it seems so absurd, but it's also a sad example of the Indian beauty standards, and I'm always quick to gush over how pretty their dark skin is, when they talk about how they wish the had mine- which is pretty often. 

I sometimes spend afternoons with the "kitchen aunties", which is what they call the cooks of the hostel. These are two woman who look about 85, though I recently learn they're around 50, and don't speak a single word of English. I'm sure they know that my Tamil is limited to about 10 words, but that doesn't stop them from talking my ear off and trying to communicate with me. It's definitely exhausting, exerting so much effort in a conversation to not even completely understand what they're trying to convey, but it is definitely worth it. I realized that this was the first time I had been alone with people who didn't speak any language that I spoke, but even if we couldn't understand each other through words, the affection and joy that we shared was certainly evident through body language. 

My days are very unstructured, and although it was initially hard to come to terms with, I learned to accept that "unstructured" is not synonymous with boring or meaningless. It's very different from my other endeavors in Kochi and Corinto, as I don't have a specific job or project that I am continually working on, but I've realized (with the help of some friends and family, of course!) that I don't have to do something "big" to have a learning experience or make a little difference in the lives of the people that I'm with every day. I am thrilled to be here, and learn an incredible about about myself and others every single day, and the girls are thrilled to have me, a strange 18 year old American girl, to interact with, and that is more than I could ask for.