Jeff's Day @ the orphanage

So, last night we ran into my friend from Panama, Lila. She has been in Chennai for the past 2 months working for a couple non-profit organizations and helping kids who have HIV . Lila invited me to go to the orphanage with her in the morning and I most certainly accepted her generous invite. This orphanage had 19 children in it and I forget the exact numbers, but I think 10 of them were HIV + and 5 had full blown AIDS. She wrote down her address on a bar napkin and told me to meet her @ 9 am. I woke up very excited and I met Lila outside of the church she is staying at (Church of South India CSI). We each got a café and a bottle of water total came to 20 rupees (- about 50 cents and it was a litre of water- good deal) . We then took an autorickshaw for 50 minutes thru some of the worst living conditions I had ever seen. We almost got into 9 accidents on the way there... The stench was bloody awful, a mixture of urine, human/dog/ox feces, throw-up, burning tires, massive amounts of car pollution, body odor, and a hint of jasmine... (this smell is a familiar smell when we are not in the best parts of the cities here) . I was pretty nervous about the experience because I am not that good with kids (especially large groups of kids that I have never met). We arrived around 10:30 am and then I spent the next 3 hours playing with all the kids, watching them dance, and celebrating one of their birthdays. All the children were in very good spirits and were amazing to be around. At times I was entertaining groups of 5-10 children (hard to believe, me entertaining children...) by taking pictures of them while they were posing and showing them the fotos. They thoroughly enjoyed looking @ their pictures . It was a very humbling experience because they are dealing with horrible situation much better than I thought possible. It is heartbreaking to see children who (ages 5-9) are born with HIV, at no fault of their own (most of them were born to Indian sex working mothers or to other HIV + parents who abandoned them). In Indian the people with HIV are completely shunned by the society and most doctors and people won't touch or get near them. It makes normal challenges and hardships that I face utterly miniscule. I took many pictures and videos of the children (I posted all of the pics from the orphanage on Fbook, if you are my friend). If you guys want to see the videos that I have taken please check out my youtube account (search jjw04f ).

All in all today was breathtaking to say the least. I am extremely thankful for the opportunity that Lila gave me. We have upgraded our blogging skills (we added pictures + video to our past posts). Now I am off to bed...

Jeff