This became the craziest day I have had in India and this place is so wild it takes a lot to qualify as the craziest. We went to a neighboring village to have Sunday morning church service. Everyone at the orphanage wakes up at 5:30 every morning. By the time we had church at 10 am the little ones were starting to doze off. Several were nodding off while clapping to a song. I asked Mike if I could grab one of the boys who kept falling forward and almost hitting his mouth on a concrete step. Mike grabbed him and sat him in my lap. It took him about an hour to get comfortable and relax in my arms and sleep. Once he fell asleep he was out.
Meredith also had a girl fall asleep in her arms. Her little one would not wake up when church was over. So she rode with us to pray for the pastor of the church who was having some sort of paralysis. After we prayed we piled in the Jeep that holds 10 with 10 adults and 15 children. On the way home the little girl Meredith was holding started throwing up. We were so crammed and the road was so narrow there was nothing to do but keep going to the orphanage.
When we returned to the orphanage Meredith and I asked KK if we could take a rickshaw back to the hotel to change. We found a rickshaw driver who said he knew where our hotel was but really just brought us to the center of town. That was ok because the hotel was just around the corner. We ran inside but the power was still out so we found more clothes in the dark, ran back to the rickshaw, and continued home. There was a festival about to begin so things were kind of crazy in town and felt more populated than usual which is hard to say because this “small town” is double the size of the Beaches population. Our rickshaw driver was an older man and very very skinny. Our ride there and back took longer than we anticipated.
The man took us back to orphanage and we paid him. As we walked away about 20 feet we heard loud honking behind us and a commotion and then shouting. We turned to see our rickshaw driver rolling on the ground and his rickshaw turned over and a taxi speeding away. Everyone was rushing to him and shouting. We didn’t know what to do. Meredith walked over to see if he was ok and I ran inside to find KK. We came outside to find they had moved him off the road and we gave him some water. Miraculously he was only scraped up but his leg hurt. Two men put him in the back of his rickshaw and took him to the hospital.
Meredith and I came inside and joined the boys at lunch who were oblivious to anything that had happened. We were very shook up and ate very little. It was such a surreal thing. The man’s face kept going through my mind.
We then took a 45 minute ride to an orphanage and played with a lot of kids. They had a lot of older kids at this orphanage. There was a different dynamic trying to interact with older kids versus younger kids and without knowing the language. We try out the words we have learned but they look at us like we have three heads. I guess we have really bad accents.  This was not my typical day!!!! The people who go to India have always said T I I – This Is India…but this day made it so real.