Update 11

Hello everyone,

i am pressently suffering a cold, reading animal farm by george orwell (ive now run out of books to read having read lord of the rings and cs lewis' "the magician's nephew", the first in the narinia books) luke took 2 weeks or so to read it...i took an afternoon and the next morning! other books ive been reading are christian ones, like "prayer" by philip yancey, whch is pretty good, and one called "if you want to walk on water, youve got to get out of the boat" which is alos good. check them out. i find in so much easier to read fiction though, than reading for learning, so ive only got through these 2 books, and 3x as many fiction ones!anyway....thats quite dull....moving swiftly on:

Our busy schedule has now kicked off! were working quite hard now, though i was just reading an email from another oasis guy in uganda who has to entertain 2000 kids, feed them all on thier team budget, give an hour long talk, and this is from 9 am to 5pm!! (thankyou God for sending me to india....). so in comparison our work is pretty light, but much more than we had been doing before!

today luke is ill again and steve has to finish some card designs (to be sold in the uk, so buy them when they come out!!!) so i am going into SM Nagar by myself. a bit daunting, but as luke had prepared loads of coulouring things todo, hopefully i should have enough to do with them! yesterday was my first time helping running the football club at kk pettai (ragpickers). went with Vijay, who is being seconded to oasis from the christian sports fellowship, who ran the football camp which we 'helped' at. left the office at 3 and took a few packed buses to the far north of chennai, to the area where the seaport is, arriving at about 4 20. arrived and found the kids all running about happily (we had gone with the girls to visit and it was a dark gloomy day, and most kids were pretty joyless. more on that later) but all the older boys and thier fathers and mothers working at sorting the rubbish they had picked up that day. so now got to see what their work is like. there are flies everywhere, and they are sorting through massive white plastic bags, putting stuff in different piles at a fast pace. they are all silent, and looking pretty sad, or rather, just expressionless. so therefore the boys we would have played football with were still busy, so we took all the oyunger kids, maybe aged 5-8, and walked to a dirty sand area between the sea defences and the slum. this also doubled up as the community's toilet, so you had to be pretty careful as you entered. the way it is with these kids, they will grow up, and help thier fathers and mothers, then take over the work, then have thier own kids and continue the cycle. they will live in the same little square of houses for thier whole lives, and have no way of escaping, or have any knowledge of the are beyond where they can walk, to shops or school. the local school has however just closed down, and the kids now have no shool, as the nearest is to far to send kids under 10 years old, and the bus fares, though very cheap to us and the workers of oasis, and 90% of the population, is too much for them to pay each day. anyway, we played with these kids for an hour or so, then vijay sat them down (about 4 of them on the ground, 3 on myself and vijay!) and sung them a "jesus song", as kids say when the want you to sing, and taught them the actions. i knew these from doing it in the football camp, so was able to join in. then we went back to the little community and chatted with some of the adults and washed some of the kids we were with . oasis installed a pump there a few months back, but ew are unable to get the people there to wash consistently, so when ever we go, we tell them to wash themselves. the level of dirtyness that they are can be seen by ones clothes afterhaving themclimb over you- a grey polo shirt i was wearing now has a brown shade over it, ater just one session with them.

on ourt way back, vijay began to say some really encouraging things. he pointed to a church, just the other side of the main road from the community, and said sopmehting along the lines of "look, there is a church, they are so close to this place, but they do nothing to help.(an 'upper class' style church it was) you and steve and luke come from hundreds of kilometres from your country, to help them...." and went on to say how encouraging and so on it was. it was really good to hear, as sometimes it does feel pointless being here, as we cannot speak the language and so on, but really, just being with these guys helps, showing them a bit of love and care, which so many indians dont bother to do. he went on for a while about this, and it was really encouraging.

then, waiting for the bus, hear some loud bangs coming slowly up the street, then saw a boy laying a large firework thing in the road and setting it off. it was extremely loud, now it was close to us, and vijay -having seemingly not noticed it before- pointed back down the road where there was a loud crowd dancing and chanting in the road. he then exlained htis was a hindu funeral, as daniel had acted out for me many times before in jest. a few drunken guys were dancing in front of a priest, behid whom was being carried the deceased. a very odd thing to see.

eventually got back to the flat at 7 30, after another long journey on packed buses. will be going again tomorow, but vijay does it everyday!

am running out of time to write this, as i need to be going to sm nagar soon. but i will start recounting my actions last week in the gaps when i wasnt writing any blogs. having arrived back in chennai form the methodist youth camp, we had a week of nothing to do except teaching and moving oasis to a new office 20 mins away. we were very thankful to get back after so long travelling about, and able to do whatever we wanted in our own time. on the camp, we had been put into groups and forced to memorise chunks of the bible do loads of pointless activities, was not much fun at all, and meant we had no time at all to relax and enjoy the scenery. the night we got back we treated ourselves to a sparkys and went to see pirates of the carribean, which was pretty good, but not half as good as the first. the res of that week is pretty boring, and we were just counting the days till the girls came to stay on the saturday. that saturday turned out to be a bit of a disaster! arrived at the station at 5 30 to pick up the girls, and found thier train was delayed until 7 30. then travelled to thier hotel, and checked in. at first they said no reservation had been made, and spent a while on the phone to becky trying to sort it out. finally got them a room with only two beds. they then called up to the room asking to see their passports. we had booked a car to take us to the same hotel as we went to with steve's dad a while back, and to go to the beach. i then turned out that the girls didnt actually have thier passports on them......and to cut a long tedious story short, we were kicked out! swamy arrived to try and rectify thesituation, as by now becky had been on the phone to the manager trying to let them stay until thier passports were sent on monday. still, they refused to let them stay with thier passports, so we managed to get the car to pick us up at the hotel, and take us to the flat, where we fudn a worried luke standing in the road, as we were meant to have been there 2 hours before! we had prepared a breakfast for them, so we ate that and heded to mahablipuram, to near where the SU camp is, and where we went to with steves dad. managed to hit the traffic, and it took ages to get there. the crazyness of the day continued over lunch, as it took 40 mins for the first bit of our meal to arrive, then another half an hour for my (and everyone elses food) to arrive! not a bunch of happy bunnies. instead of swimming in ther pool and playing it, we went straight to the beach, as the monsoon coming in slowly mean the weatehr was slightly overcast, protecting us mostly from the intense heat of the sun. returned later and hit the evenng traffic, which was aggravated by our driver taking the longest possible route back to the flat as he could (im reckon i know north east/central chennai as well as most autodrivers now!).

i will have to leave my dull narrative there for now, as i need to prepare for my visit to the community to run the kids club. will continue with the more interesting (well, sort of interesting!) bits of the week before last, and other random obervations, tomorow. hopefully. at least, not tonoght, as we are going to sparkys for the independance day celebrations. an evening of glorifying america...yay!

see ya
josh