Kate's Corner: The Moment You Have All Been Waiting For

Kate’s Corner

Hey all (ie friends, family, man in the Chinese restaurant, approximately 90000 relatives of Ms. Deepa Sivarajan, and of course, My Favorite Young Alaskan):

It’s been a good long while since I’ve made an appearance on Alice’s blog, but the much anticipated moment has (finally) arrived. We have now moved on from UCH, and are out in the greater world, so this edition of Kate’s Corner has been conveniently divided into two aptly named subcategories: “At UCH” and “Not at UCH”.

What a thrill.

I: At UCH
Things tend to be fairly low key at the children’s home/less anecdotal, but every once and a while, things take a turn towards the (aforementioned) wild side. Mostly when we attempt to organize activities with a bit of structure. Read on.

Moisture
An early and thrilling activity we attempt with the children involves salt, flour, and a dramatic downturn in our slowly built-up credibility. We make up a clay-like mixture, bring it over to an empty room in a bucket, and have the kids make small and lovely sculptures out of it. Only about 50% of the sculptures survive, Vishali eats another child’s masterpiece, and the activity does not appear to reinforce the trailing masculinity of the three boys at UCH (they all choose to sculpt purses!), but overall, the project appears successful. We bring the sculptures to our room on a large sheet of paper, and promise the kids they can paint them next week after they dry in the sun. Then the rains come. And with them, humidity. Day by day, the sculptures become more swelled and bloated, until they are floating in large pools of their own liquid. Alice gets a new roommate and must struggle to explain the importance of filling half the floorspace with 37 foul and formless salty things. After several weeks, we realize they are more liquid than solid, and utterly terrifying. We bring them to the dustbin, and with a touch of sorrow, let them go.

SLAAAAATS
Several weeks back, we set about creating photo albums with some of the kids. In a more beautiful world, small groups of children would enter a room, spend about twelve seconds placing their six photos (already chosen by us!) into a book, and exit feeling calm, content, and in possession of all of their original body parts. But, as things go, the Photo Room becomes a zone of war. After accomplishing a mass and violent exodus, Alice and I lock the door, find a heavy chair to use as a barricade, and try to hold back the tide of small people flinging themselves against the entrance. All is well, until Alice, seated in the chair, begins to find herself a victim of inappropriate touch. The children have opened the slats in the door, and are vigorously poking Alice’s butt with both their own bodies (fingers! hands!) and tools (badminton rackets, pointy-beaked stuffed animals, wands). While we are distracted by Ms. Minor’s violation, the children discover small windows and conduct a thriving blackmarket trade of our carefully organized photos through these openings. Defeated, and highly concerned with the state of Alice’s buttocks, we open the door, and in they came…
(Sidenote: Inspired by these slats, we had a party the following evening with Megan in entitled Slatfest 07: The Party in Which People Outside of the Room Drop Things Into the Room Through Slats. It was a blast. This probably beats the party when we celebrated the half way point in our travels (in which broke cookies in half!) or maybe even Halloween (in which, lacking a costume, I dressed up by removing my pants).

Rejection
Towards the end of our stay at Uluru, my friend Zach Duffy from The Mountain School, who just finished a program in North India, joined us at The Children’s Home. On Christmas Eve, we go with Zach to Pondicherry, with the intention of him staying a few days while we wrap up business at UCH. We get into the holiday spirit early in the day when Zach is hit by a motorcycle. The Christmas cheer continues as we call about 30 hotels and guesthouses, none of which have a room for Zach. Even the freaky ones with names like “The House of Fun” are entirely full. The clincher comes when we go to our eagerly anticipated dinner spot, convince them we have a reservation (we don’t), sit down, and then learn that the special holiday meal will not be served for another three hours. It is not until we are back on the bus to Uluru (bursting with holiday spirit!) that we realize Zach, a (Jewish) wanderer rejected from every inn, is reenacting the story of Christmas Eve. Is Zach Jesus? We scan the highway for barns/troughs of hay/maybe a manger, but even those do not present themselves. The next morning, more desperate, we bust out our Lonely Planet and try hotels in Jew Town (no Christmas rush there!) and distant Nagaland. But nothing, nothing, nothing.

A Very Beautiful Man
In our final days of UCH, a newcomer arrives. In order to preserve his privacy on this blog, we will call him by another name of a similarly Hispanic nature: Juan Rodrigo de la Noche (English translation: John Roderick of the Night).
Here are some pertinent facts about Rodrigo (who was rooming with Zach):
1. He is six foot six (at least) and has hair like Jesus.
2. Rodrigo is a wearer of alarmingly short shorts. Some of them, alarmingly short pink (neon!) shorts.
3. During dinner one evening, he discovers “ants in his pants”, and proceeds to stand up in the direct center of the dining area, and fish these ants out of his pants (in reality, alarmingly short shorts) with his hands.
4. When not wearing these shorts, Rodrigo travels in style with very very skinny jeans and a fedora (how perfect for the heat!).
5. His “Where’s Waldo?” style stripy underwear becomes a permanent hanging fixture in the volunteer area. When Alice is sent by the kitchen staff to look for a red and white dishcloth, she comes shockingly close to bringing these beauties.
6. As he is an engineer, we assume he has come to UCH to install new computers in the computer center. Instead, he has come to organize an intercommunity cricket match.
7. Never one to support corporations, Rodrigo spends a day fashioning a homemade cricket trophy out of a slab of rock and a smart looking red ribbon. After painstaking hours, he proceeds to drop the trophy and render it unusable.
8. He finds the act of riding a motorcycle very, very sensual.

II: Not at UCH

On the 27th of December, we left UCH for Goa, a beachy area with quite the good reputation for New Year’s where we planned to meet up with Phil (another Mountain School friend of mine). Goa (we’re here now) has been wonderfully relaxing—we have found time to buff up the muscles in our pinky toes (go zach!), perfect the art of leckfast (breakfast that stretches long enough to order lunch as well), and in the case of Alice and Deepa, name every member of the Fall 05 TMS semester.

As things often go with us, the fun gets started on the train:

Fiesta Time
The Vasco Express, running straight from Chennai to Goa, turned out to be quite the party car. We had our suspicions early on, when we noticed our Indian neighbors were presiding over a large stash of bongo drums, but didn’t think much of it until we reached the hills near Goa—ie: The Land of Tunnels. The instant our train entered a tunnel, everyone in our car immediately switched off the lights, started beating their bongos, screaming, and in the case of many, participating in a frisky dance party. Then, the second the train emerged from the tunnel, the noise died instantly, the lights came on, and everyone sat around looking normal, pretending nothing had happened. This went down not once, but at least fifteen times, no matter how long or short (8 second fiesta!) the tunnels were. During one tunnel where we failed to make enough noise, we heard cheering coming from an adjacent car, and realized our wild tradition had spread. Let me also note that most everyone in our car was over the age of 30.
Also interesting in our train experience were a number of (what appeared to be) planned stops. They were:

1) Scenic View Stop. Pretty self-explanatory. Everyone gets out of the train, takes some pictures of mountains, we move on.
2) Monkey Feeding Stop. Shortly after the SVS, our train came to a halt (in the middle of nowhere) next to a large group of monkeys. Immediately, every Indian tourist on the train rushed to the windows and began throwing food out to the primates. While some of it was train food, much of it was taken from little prepacked ziplocked bags, as if the passengers had anticipated this feeding session, and boarded the train prepared!
3) Let the Men Throw Rocks Stop. In LMTRS, the train halted for about 35 minutes in the middle of nowhere, so every man on the train could exit and throw a large number of stones off the side of the mountain. It began as quickly as it ended, and we all moved on.

Despite at least an hour and a half of halt time, our train arrived punctually in Goa, implying these stops were all planned into the timetable as part of a grander scheme.

From Hilton to Homeless
Enter Phil. Unlike Zach, Alice, Deepa, and I, Phil has no really clear reason to be in India. He just came. This is what you should know about Phil:
Phil spent his first night in India in the Mumbai Hilton (swanky!!).
Phil spent his second night in India on a beach chair (homeless!!)
Phil managed to procure the absolutely last ticket to Goa from Mumbai. It was a small miracle.
Hooray.

New Years
We had ourselves a lovely little New Years on the beach, featuring a very elongated dinner and the musical stylings of a certain Rick Shaw (note the name, my friends). We hoped it might be some sort of singing motorcar, but no, Rick is in fact, a man, albeit a musically incompetent and rather bitter one. As he got up to play his tunes (ie play his backing tape), the five of us decided to break out our crazy teenage moves on the dance floor. We suspect Rick Shaw has been trying to reach out to the youth for quite some time now (coarsening up his image, perhaps?), and this was—most likely—the greatest moment of his life. He later stormed off the stage in a huff, vitriolically cursing the inferior sound system. Beside us on the dance floor, was the breathtakingly sensual and very middle-aged Scarf Lady. At first we thought she was twisting her hips and shaking her scarf in a special monogamous treat only for the eyes of Rick Shaw, but we soon discovered that she was, in fact, non-discriminatory. What a scandal! Another key player in the dancing was Old White Man, who gradually (under the wing of some young friends) transformed his classic old man swivel step to crazed Indian-male style flinging of the hands.
The New Year was ushered in with a rather spectacular display of fireworks (I think they are just tighter if they are coming out of a box approximately eight feet away from you), a swim in the ocean, and a very nice group hug. As we finally drifted off to bed, a sleeping Deepa was heard to make some deeply earnest comment about “science of the butt” (a future major, perhaps?). We are still puzzling over this.

Xavier’s
Kate’s Corner has now moved up to pretty much the present, with this event occurring last evening. We’ve had some issues with speed of dining service (thus the leckfasts), but Xavier’s took it to a stunningly new height. We have our own special waiter who doesn’t appear to a) be serving anyone else or b) exist. After much speculation on his whereabouts (is he sleeping? injured? organizing a riot?), he finally comes to take our orders. A short decade passes before we see him once more, at last with Zach’s soup and rice in hand. But then he vanishes. When he appears again (without food) after a huge hiatus, we ask him to bring the rest of our meals. He responds by bringing us an extra table (almost what we wanted!), and by sweeping in to take away Zach’s rice and run away with it before we can protest. In all my dining experience, this rice removal was unprecedented. Eventually things shook themselves out, and actually came, but only the drinks he thought Zach ordered (he seemed to be only willing to serve Mr. Duffy). What a struggle it was.

Well, that is that.
We’re off to Mumbai tomorrow, then Ooty area (for Alice/Kate/Phil) or Bangalore (for Deepa), then Kerala, then Sikkim, then the loveliest of them all, Seattle, Washington, USA (on the 26th, I think).

Happy New Year!
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Love,
Kate