Cole in India!

When I first came to India I expected to see a tiger and some elephants, and I expected it to be clean. I was wrong...the whole 12 months I was here I didn’t see any tigers or elephants in the wild. It was so hot and disgusting I thought I was going to have to take 50 showers a day. When I got to the Rising Star campus and the director then Ron Hanson showed us are house I was shocked to see that it was a three room house for a family of 7!  For the first few days I was surprised when the power went out but then I got used to it.

 In Chennai a really big city next to us there was a few grocery stores that sold American products but we ate the kitchen food at rising star which is Indian food.  Indian food is really spicy; my mom made us eat that for lunch and dinner. Everyone in the family did not like Indian food. Once my mom saw how little we were eating she stuck with some American food that she found in Chennai. She buys things like spaghetti, and beans. I like when she makes chicken rice and beans.  We eat a lot of eggs.  Our family eats between 60 and 90 eggs a week.  We eat a lot of oatmeal, apples, bananas, pancakes, toasted sandwiches, mangoes, and pineapples. It is nice when my mom makes American food to have a change from the same Indian food everyday.

Sometimes we go to out, like to the Chennai zoo or to an Indian restaurant each time we do that it becomes something to remember forever. When I learned that church was 2 hours away I was surprised but all this stuff I eventually got used to. One day when we decided to go to the zoo which I thought it would be dangerous with like a foot high cages for tigers and stuff but when I got there it was actually really nice and shady but when I heard that there were elephant rides at 4 o clock secretly inside I was scared. My mom though, said we were doing it. When I walked up the stairs to get on top of the elephants back I was really scared but later in the ride I enjoyed it.
Whenever we get back from long trips like that to Chennai we were so happy to be home where it was clean and there were no trash and no bad smells.

 At rising star it is fun to go exploring and you find yellow and black caterpillars the grass and frogs in puddles and monkeys in trees. Also it is fun to knock down coconuts from a coconut tree and climb a mango tree high as you can. I have a lot of friends here at rising star I play with them on the playground after school we play cricket an Indian sport and also lots of other fun games. I go to a few classes at the rising star school like pe and computers the rest like math and science are too difficult and hard to understand because there way of teaching is so different from what I am used too.

Every once in a while we go to the leprosy colonies at first I was a little bit nervous about going to a real leprosy colonies! In America I didn’t even know leprosy existed but here we are helping them. But once we started going I wasn’t nervous. The leprosy-affected people are so happy even though they have huts smaller than a tent to live in.  When I go to the colonies I help and clean their wounds, and take their blood pressure We also just visit with them; play games or sing and dance.  They are happy to have us come visit with them.  I like going to the moot colony because there are only seven people left and they are so happy and nice to be around.  There is a nice spirit at that colony.  I also like to go to the colony and work on construction projects.  Rising Star is building a community center and toilet for the colonies and we go help them build.


These are all the reasons I love rising star and India.