Part two of Lynnette’s journal of her trip to India to serve the poor and support our sister Mission in Bangalore, India. A day has passed, and I now have a computer set up in my room. It is very slow, but it is a computer! So now I will be able to do my work. And I will also be able to contact you more through the 14th – then I will lose contact again, when I travel to Bangalore. This morning I visited a home and school for blind children. The children (coed) ranage in age from 3-18. The children were very sweet and shy. Some had white clouds over the iris on their eyes. Some didn’t even have eye sockets. They all came from very poor families – two girls were sisters. Most were born blind, but a few were not. One of the volunteers went to take photos of them, and I am supposed to write brief stories about each. These will be given to people who choose to sponsor them. We delivered to them some books in Braille and some musical instruments that rattled and tamberines. (Someone donated them.) The children just loved the insturments. The children have lots of room to run and play there – large green area, and they have a big garden to help supply food. So I will work on those sponsorship summaries after I finish this email. I am staying in a hospital room on the sixth floor. There are actually eight floors to this hospital, but they count the basement as negative one, and the ground floor as zero. They put me here because they didn’t think it was safe for me to be alone in the volunteer house. It is pleasant – does not smell like a hospital in the USA and does not have a scary atmosphere. It is not busy and is not large despite the six to eight floors – only one long hallway with rooms on either side, and most doors are shut. The rooms on two of these floors are single rooms. I have not seen rooms on the other floors. Quite a few nursing students from Kirkland WA (Northwest Unviersity) will be arriving tomorrow, and they will stay in the volunteer house since there are so many of them. They just didn’t want me to be alone there. I don’t know how long the nursing students will be here. Many people have come and left since I have been here including a couple who is traveling around the world for a year to see all the places they have wanted to see. The wife is 56 and I suppose the husband in about the same. He is in real estate – they are from Canada. They will be in India until sometime in March but have left this location. He has been to India before, but this is her first time. A young couple from Seattle (the photographer and her husband who is an engineer and graduate student) leave tomorrow morning. A team from Germany left last night. A physician is here from the US (I think Salf Lake City) to do cleft palate surgery on poor children. He has come here to do this since 2003, and has also trained physicians here to do it. So the hospital provides this surgery free to poor children. The hospital has some paying patients and some free patients. All of Mother Teresa’s nuns receive free medical care here, and all poor patients they request help for receive free medical care here. So do many other poor people. (I have seen some of her nuns here twice now – I don’t know if they were bringing patients or coming for themselves.) The hospital also has medical clinics that operate one day each week in rural areas. A physician goes to examine patients, and a nurse is there with her, and also someone to dispense medicine if she writes them a persciption. Those who can pay, do so, the rest are served free. We visited also some of the schools. The children start school at three and learn to write their names, learn letters and phonics, and numbers to 10.l By the time they are in kindergarten, ther cursive handwriting is amazing and they seem way beyond USA children. These are children at Calcutta Mission of Mercy schools. I don’t know about all schools. We also visited a school run by a man and his wife out of his own home for the poor children in his neighborhood who were not attending school. The reason we visited is that his wife is a physician, and she wants us to open a free clinic for people in the neighborhood so that she can be the physician there. So we are doing that. She and her husband are retired. Her husband has a Masters in Business Administration and taught in a Business College. The lady was so sweet – I really liked her so much. The husband is the one teaching the children. It was his idea to open the school, and although she helps in the school, she prefers to practice medicine for free for the neighbohood people since that is her specialty. She is 78. Their children are all over the world. It is kind of an interesting story. They liked each other in college, but when it was time to get married, their parents arranged their marriages to someone else. Then after both their partners had died, in their old age, they met up again and decided to marry. So they got married in their 70s after dating years earlier in college. It is nice they both want to help poor people. She is one of the sweetest ladies you can imagine. Another lady I like very much is the wife of the hospital administrator. He seems like a nice person also, but I especially like her. I think if I would live here long, I would want to be her friend. Huldah Buntain (the founder) is here – I saw her last night at dinnner and talked with her some. I enjoy her. However, she is very busy, and I don’t know how much I will see her. I have decided to take most of my meals here in my room so that I can accomplish more. I want to really be of some help while I am here. One interesting thing about this state (West Bengal) is that it is communist. I think I already mentioned that it has way more Muslim people than most of India because they immigrate here from nearby Bangaladesh (it is easy to cross the border). Another interesting thing is that it has many people from China who have lived here for generations. Most of them work hard and study hard and are reasonably successful. Both in the morning (about 5 AM) and in the evening I hear the singing calling Muslims to prayer. God bless you all!!!!! Love, Lynette
