Ponga (GO!)

It's already been 2 weeks that I've been in India! Its so crazy; time just seems to be flying by!

This week, I finally arrived in Chennai, in the state of Tamil Nadu in Southern India. This is where I will be living and teaching HIV/AIDS education for the next two months! Compared to Delhi and the other cities of northern India, Chennai seems a bit cleaner and more developed....it is also much larger and harder to navigate, but I'm starting to get the hang of it. 

This week was orientation week. We started off each day with a half hour of travel time walking and taking rickshaw/taxis in the awful humidity to get to our orientation classroom. I thought living in Arizona during the summer was bad...but Indian summers are just incredibly sweaty. Even if I am just standing in the shade, I drip sweat because of the insane humidity!

During orientation we learned a bit of Tamil each day, did team building activities, had Indian history and culture lessons, and, most importantly, practiced teaching with the small teams we will teach with for the rest of our time here. My group is composed of myself, one other girl from ASU, Britney, a boy from UofA, Israel, and our Indian counterpart/translator Vinoth. We were all a bit rusty during the practice teachings this week since we haven't really practiced since April, but we got lot of feedback from the Indian counterparts here and are excited to begin teaching in the classroom. Next Tuesday will be our first real teaching in an Indian school!

Introductions! This is Seema and Louis our Indian "mother" and "father" while in India. They are basically the heads of IAPA in India and help us with everything from flagging down rickshaws to sari shopping. I've even heard that if you get sick, Seema will rub coconut oil on your stomach and force you to eat soup. 

Tamil Lessons!

Playing Snake on our awesome old-fashioned Nokia cell phones! The two people on either side of me are my teaching group by the way. Also known as Group 5, Team Mahambram (Mango), or Israel, Laura, and Britney.

Our teaching group with our Indian counterpart Vinoth on a scavenger hunt. We came in dead last, finishing an hour after all the other teams.

After every practice teaching this week, we got feedback from all the coordinators on what we did well and what needed improvement.

Practicing teaching. This is the immunology section where we invite members from the audience to act out what each cell of the immune system does in the body. (Our team won first place in the poster contest for my poster there!)

The whole group at the beach in Chennai!