Took the day off on Thursday, because I can.

Yes, I most certainly did do that. It's not like I just decided to sleep in and watch TV all day--I actually did something "remotely nice for such a hulli girl" as my friend worded it. I went with my dad to volunteer! As I said in my last post, I had two things specifically in mind when I came to Bangalore. I wanted to learn Hindi and volunteer as much as possible. Because of Indus, I hadn't been able to do much of either of those things. Since I was recently freed from the cruel bindings that so stifled these desires for 4 months, I have been able to get straight onto doing those two things! When we go out to stores or when we're driving somewhere, my dad points to random stuff that we see and teaches me how to say it in Hindi. Also, since I've been home all day and since I've been eating lunch with him, he tries to speak to me in Hindi as much as possible. Immersion works well for me to learn languages--it's how I got so good at Spanish. Anyways, what I was aiming to talk about in this post was volunteering at Bosco Mane. Bosco Mane is an all boys orphanage. Most of the boys are between the ages of 5 and 15. Some are only there for a few days just to get back on their feet after living on the streets, but some stay for a long time. The majority of these boys come from living on the streets, even the really little ones. Some come from really far away--even from several hours away sometimes. Seeing the places in which the orphans live (both at Bosco and at Angel's) makes me more and more thankful every time for our apartment here in Bangalore and our house back in the States. It's crazy how many kids they manage to fit into one space, but you'll never once hear a kid complain. They're more than happy to be there. After all, it's either that or live on the streets, and street life can be pretty rough. Not that I would know, but it's obviously nowhere close to a good life.

What we did at Bosco Mane was the same thing that we did for the kids at Angel's. We did physical exams on them. My dad and the other doctors went to Bosco about a week before and started doing physicals, but there are a LOT of kids there so they didn't get time to finish. We went back on Thursday to finish up, but a meeting was happening in the room that they used last time. Because of that, we had to set everything up in a completely different room with a very limited amount of tables and chairs to use. This kinda took a while, and even after that we were a little slow to get a flow going. Once we finally got started, we only saw about 25 or 30 kids before it was time for us to pack up again and head out. We're planning on going back again on Tuesday, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to go again. I want to go, but since I didn't have any of my text books this week I have a lot of work to catch up on. I was pretty much doing Spanish all day every day this week, so I'm really ahead in Spanish but I haven't done anything in any of my other classes. I'm gonna have a crap-load of catching up to do in the next few weeks!

Back to Bosco Mane though. These little guys are so adorable. I think it's probably a good thing that my mom didn't go because she would have fallen in love with every single one of them, kind of like I did. :) They were mostly healthy, but a large majority of them had dental issues. Most of the dental issues could be fixed easily by better brushing habits or things like this, but some had serious issues like tonsillitis or other things that needed surgery. Luckily for them, there's a dental college and clinic really close to the orphanage so it shouldn't be too terribly hard for them to get help. A couple were also in desperate need of glasses, which will probably be much harder for them to get access to. It's so sad that they have trouble getting access to things which we Americans usually take for granted. While we were doing physicals on them, we had a lady who is an oral surgeon with us. She was doing general dental check ups to see which ones were in really bad shape and which ones would probably be fine if they started being more careful. Y'all should have seen how excited these little guys were to go to the dentist! Going to the dentist is something that 5-15 year olds usually throw a crying and screaming fit about! There was a crowd of about ten kids surrounding our dentist as she was doing check ups, and she spoke Kannada as well so she was able to communicate with the kids. They got such a kick out of going to the dentist, and it was really cool to see how interested they were in everything she was doing. I officially have a new perspective on what it means to truly give back to the community. The feeling that you get deep inside your heart after you see how happy those kids are is one that can't be replicated by doing anything else. I love volunteering!!

Thanks for reading guys! And also thanks for being such loyal followers/reading my blog whenever you come across it, because today I broke 1000 page views and they're still climbing up before my eyes! Thanks so much and more later! :)