A lice treatment before bed, and one when you wake up. :) Poor baby. :)
Today our driver Surrender came and took us around. He took us to the Lotus Temple. This is a Baiha Temple. I went to see one in Chicago once too. Wennetka, outside of Chicago, I think. It was very beautiful. It was also very peaceful. I made Surrender come in with us. He said, "I park, you go." I said, "No, you come." He said, "Okay." :) We had to take off our shoes. There was a reflection pool outside, and there were school classes touring the place. The school kids were all around the reflection pond, and then the guard came, and smacked them all with a cane on the butt. He did. He ran after them, and smacked them. It was very strange to see. I was gasping, and Surrender was laughing. :)
I took tons of pictures. I had something like 500 pictures from my 3+ days here. They were all really cool. However, little miss Sonjena took a turn taking pictures out the window like Momma, and she accidentally deleted all 500+ pictures. Yeap. It's true. I was upset. It took me a minute to bounce back. Surrender doesn't speak very good English, or understand very well either, so I had to explain it to him, 3 times. I asked him to take me to a photo shop to buy a new memory card, so he did. I know that when I get back to the states someone can retrieve some of those pictures. So, I put that disk away, and starting snapping on the new one. Sonjena and I had a really smooth start. Even with all the lice treatments. She was really leaning on me, and looking to me, and bonding with me. This morning I said, "I love you Sonjena," and she said, "I love you Mommy." I could have cried, but VJ told me not to cry anymore while I am here, after the first night. She said, if I cry the child will not know what to think. :) After the pictures were delete, she did not talk to me for 2 hours, she just looked out the window. I kept talking to her, and talking to her. And she just looked out the window. Then I pulled her over to me, and put my arm around her, and was rubbing her arm, and she started crying. (I never even said anything to her. I just explained to Surrender why I needed a new memory card.) Then guess what it was time for, yeap, lunch with VJ, the director of the orphanage. Can you imagine? So, VJ took over, took Sonjena, had her sit by her, ordered for her, etc. Yeap. It was embarrassing. Then VJ gave me a lecture that children are not allowed to play with cameras, and that I should have taken it from her, she did not know. I told her I knew she didnot mean to, and I was not mad. (When Sonjena was taking pictures, I thought about taking the camera back, but then I thought, she looks really happy, and if the memory card gets full, I'll just delete one or two if I want to take more picures. I was looking out my window, while she was taking pictures out her window. The next time I looked, all the photos were gone. Oh, Owen's 2nd birthday was on there too.) I should have been loading them on to Shutterfly each night, but I didn't even think about it. That was all my fault. So, when you are on vacation or an adoption trip, load your pictures on your computer each night. Anyway, after lunch, Sonjena came around, and liked me again. Now she is taking a nap.
Surrender also took me to Delhi Haat, or it might have been Dilli Haat this morning. It's a market place. I bought a few more things for Sonjena. There was this huge gold statue of a god there, and Sonjena kept rubbing her face, and looking at her, and rubbing her cheeks. It was really cute. I asked a man the significance of this god, and he said, "I don't know about such things ma'am, I am only a slave." That's what he really said to me. It was so strange to hear.
Surrender also drove us by Gandhi's house, parliment, the priminister's house, and the Delhi gate. It was really cool. There were many children out begging today. Many of them came right up to my window, everywhere we went. They see an American, and they just run into the road towards you. At the first stop, I handed a girl, about the age of my girls, 10 rupees, and then a little boy about the same age, 10 rupees. Then tons of people came out into the street outside my window. We were stuck in a The beggers rushing the car was very sad, and scary. A business man in the next car rolled down his window, and told them to leave, but they wouldn't budge until the traffic started moving again. The traffic is always in a jam here. It takes a long time to get anywhere because of all the traffic.
Let's see, what else... Yesterday, when the embassy was closed for lunch, Madhu and I went to lunch. We went to a Chinese restaurant. It was very good. We sat there along time waiting for the Embassy to open, and we got comfortable, and talked. Madhu has two sons. Her sons, and their families live with her. She picked her son's wives. Her oldest son has two kids. They are 10 and 13. And her youngest has one son who is 1. She showed me pictures, they are, to my surprise, chubby, and very very very cute. She said her husband died very young serving in the military. He died on a plane. They were using very very very old war craft carriers, she said. She said they were planes no one else was using anymore. They were purchased from the U.S., because the U.S. did not use them anymore, but they were even older than that. She said many men died on these planes, but she did not think it would happen to her, and then it did. She was very young. Madhu said she was lucky, because her family was well enough off that they could help her, and her boys, plus she had friends who helped.
There are women walking around with red dots on their foreheads, and red paint in the part of their hair. I asked Madhu about this, she said it means they are married. At the end of the marriage ceremony, the husband puts red pant in the woman's part, and then she continues to do that for the rest of her life. Madhu was smiling very proudly when she told me this tradition.
Sonjena loves all the babies at the Children's home. She was so sweet and tender to them when we were there. She hugs them, and plays with them, and helps them. It's really sweet to watch.
On all my documents about Sonjena, it says, "baby Sonjena." They call her baby Sonjena on everything. It's very cute.
The Indian people that I have spent time with are very precious to me. You know that saying, once your eyes are open, they can never be closed again. I think it's true to a certain extent, I do. However, I think it is easy to forget, and easy to lose touch. Just like millionaires, and billionaires have no idea what it is like to be middle class anymore, even if they are friends with many people from the middle class, they just can't know. It is also true about people in wealthy countries like the U.S. not being able to relate to the street people of India. There is just know way we can understand. But now I know they are there in a different way than I knew before. What will I do now? .... ????
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