rain, rain go away

Yup, thats right. Rain. Yesterday it was POURING when we got up to go to Sealdah. Despite my umbrella, I was pretty thoroughly soaked by the time we got on the train. When we got to Sealdah, Rita informed us that Kakoli and Babai weren't coming because of the rain and that we would only do food distribution, no wound care or coloring. This made sense because we usually set up outside, but because of the rain we were forced indoors, and the space is very limited. There are already few people because of Durga Puja, and there were even less because of the rain. We only gave food to like 30 kids. We gave them hard-boiled eggs and plain bread. I was really surprised to see some kids throw away their crust. These kids can barely afford food and they don't eat crust. Amazing.
So anyway, we were only at the station for like half an hour because there were so few people. Back at the flat, I went to sleep then finished The Book Theif and had lunch. The kids didn't show up for computer class. Later they told me they didn't come because it was raining. We made our way through the rain to school, only to find that it had been cancelled, again because of the rain. Bobby had tried to call us, but I had my volume down low. So we went back to the flat for awhile and I attempted to work on Bengali, but was utterly perplexed. Something about inherent vowels and only writing them part of the time, and two ways to pronounce them... pure jargon. So I came to the Iway and talked to some folks on Skype for awhile. I was about to write my blog when my computer just turned off. It does that sometimes. So I just left, and went and bought a few random food items before heading home.

When I got up this morning, it still hadn't stopped raining (yes, it rained for over 24 hours straight). We were getting ready to go to Sealdah when we got a call from Kakoli. The program was cancelled due to rain. Back to bed for me. It was only 5:30 at the time.
When I got up, I read and played cards and did other things to entertain myself (including laundry) until the girls showed up for computer class. We had them doing a computer game where you put scrambled words into order to make a sentence. Then the power went out, so we played BINGO for the rest of the time. At school the kids painted plastic things to hang in wondows. Think stained glass. They came in all sorts of shapes, including butterflies, monkeys, and flowers. I took my camera with me, so I got lots of cute pics of the kids with their masterpieces.

~m