Catching up!!

17 April 2010

I’m nearly 1 month behind on my journal/blog now and I deeply regret it. I fell behind when I left Kolkata because I became sick with a cold, and then sick with a stomach bug, and then sick with the flu, and then sick with a cough. All due, I’m sure, to the inevitable stress of traveling alone that I allowed to finally catch up to me as I was approaching “the end” of my trip. The beginning of April represented, for me, the end of my journey through SE-Asia to India in several ways. While I was only about one half of the way through my total 4.5 months when I left Kolkata the countdown had begun in my head until the day I would reach Delhi. There I would have a home to stay in with my dear friend, Niharika. I would be able to unload my pack and relax for 1 week. I would be working with the NGO Swechha, adding some much needed significance to my trip. And all while I waited for the real goal I have been traveling to reach, Atish joining me in India.

I’m struggling to unpack the individual memories of the past 3 weeks from my jumble of stories I have been sharing haphazardly with Atish recently. New adventures and 2 month old conversations are easily confused, but I do have some notes in my journal to guide me. I’m going to attempt to catch up with my writing in the next several days but everything will surely be abbreviated. I’m sorry for the delay and if you have been reading my blog I want to say thank you! It’s really only because I hear from you, that you are enjoying my blog, that I’ve been writing as much as I have and that I’m now tackling the missing weeks.

I will jump ahead to today to share that Atish is now in India, for his first time, and we are traveling through Gujarat state together. I’m not sure how long it will take me to get to the present in my writing so I think a current update is needed, but I don’t want to spoil the stories, because we have some good ones!

We have been together for about 10 days now and I’m really proud of how well he is doing here. After 10 days we are nearly equals in terms of communicating here. In fact, Atish’s strengths from his knowledge of Gujarati/Hindi are becoming increasingly apparent and useful and I’m quickly running out of things to teach him. Since his arrival we have taught children from a slum community music/dance with Swechha (a blog entry), sight-see’d in Delhi (a blog entry), flew to Ahmedbad, had very firsthand experience with just how kind and hospitable Gujarati’s are (a blog entry!), escaped to Portugal and back (a blog entry), safari’d in Africa (a blog entry), we pilgrimaged with Hindus (a blog entry), and I taught Atish how to do his laundry by hand (a blog entry?). Wish me luck as I try to sort through all of this, plus the 2 weeks before Atish’s arrival, and capture it in writing!