After a long journey here, and some travel delays, we are all settled in Madurai. On our first full day here with the entire group, we had our orientation at Grace Peter Charitable Trust with Vijayakumar and his teachers and volunteers. Everyone is so welcoming and they put huge garlands around our necks, and gave us each two towels that were sewn by the women in the Charitable Trust's Women's Empowerment program. Each member of the group handed out a gift of either clothing, books or backpacks to some of the teachers and students. One woman who was laughing and smiling the entire time was supposed to be handed a gift by Jesse, but was too embarassed and too giggly to do it! Vijayakumar then talked to us about Indian culture and taught us a few Tamil words. We also found out that we will be teaching swim lessons at least one of the days. After that we saw the King's Palace which was 600 years old.
Today, we went to the huge temple in Madurai, it has four entrances: South, West, North and East. The temple was beautiful, over 160 feet tall with 1,511 statues inside. Not only was the temple beautiful, complete with cow temples with live cows inside, but there was an elephant that we got ride! And we got some great news, Carley, Betheny and Jesse had their bags lost when we arrived in India, and they were delivered to our hotel today!
Tomorrow we will have our first day teaching, and we are all very excited. We start out at the YWCA Matric School.
Sending our love from across the world,
Kaitlin, Carley, Bela, Caitlin, Betheny and Jesse.
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