Banana Peals

Hello!

Before I begin telling you about the most awe-inspiring hours of my life, I’d like to give you a brief synopsis of last week. The “teacher’s day presentation” was great! For an entire hour and a half the “stage” was jam packed with jazz, swing, Indian jokes, hip-hop, tradition Indian Dance, theatre, piano compositions…creativity, beauty and above all joyous smiles.

There were a few tears at the end when Francesca said her goodbyes but only because in just 5 weeks she established a very genuine and beautiful relationship with everyone at Shanti-Bhavan. Her innate way of making everyone smile with her bumpy, excited walk, her contagious smile, and her powerful, heartening voice is something Shanti-Bhavan treasured especially right now during the difficult situation they are trying to overcome. I feel so blessed that I was able to share this experience with someone as special as her. I only knew her on the surface before India, now I consider her a friend for life and someone I can always count on for encouragement or for those amazing, long conversations about anything; she is the best person to speak with about the deep matters of life and the world but also someone with whom talks about a whole lot of nothing can be entirely enjoyable. I will miss her dearly.

Back to the events of the week before I fall to tears, I was able to perform my dance and I danced my heart out; I had such a wonderful time. I say ‘able’, because, it was bound to happen, I fell sick last week. Stomach. Yep, excruciating stomach pains, couldn’t keep any food in my body, didn’t eat for a couple days. I think it is often our faults when we get sick…I bought bananas in Hosur last Sunday and I believe I might have eaten one whose peal was cracked or whose tip was open. I bought them off a vendor who was sitting on the curb of a street, sprawled out on a dirty matt, and who by the way tried to rip me off 10 rupees (luckily, after a month in India, I know my way around rip offs, knock on wood). Anyways, the stomach infection was awful and Friday morning I felt so sick that I had decided not to dance; I didn’t want to get worst before my flight to New Delhi. Well, you know me, as soon as I started playing the music and saw all my cute kids dancing up storms, I put on my jazz shoes and said: “off course, I’m dancing.”

Funny story: Before the presentation, when I had set up all the music equipment, I sat on the floor with this grin of pain on my face as I held my stomach. Debbie, native of a town near Bangalore and the first grade teacher, comes up to me and asks if I’m feeling any better. “No, I’m feeling worst and I can’t keep anything in”. She proceeds to ask me “which way”? And with an embarrassed look, I say, both. She says (with an awesome, thick Indian accent): “No problem, is just your intestine not in good spot, come here, jump off these steps, all together, all together, your intestine will jump back to place”. Haha, I was like oh goodness this is nuts, what the heck does that mean. Then she gave me some axe oil to rub on my belly. I did both because I had nothing to loose and I’m not kidding, I felt better 20 minutes later, haha, oh the natural ways of curing, what ingenuity. After jumping off steps, rubbing axe oil and taking about a dozen pills, my stomach is fine now and, yes I know, I’ll check the banana peal before I eat another banana.

Anyhow, straight after the presentation, Francesca gave a hug to each of the kids, hmm yeah more than 200 hugs, and then at around noon we both quickly got into the bumpy Shanti-Bhavan jeep to embark in a LONG journey with rising excitement about reaching a “wonder of the world”.