Raksha Bandhan / Village Visit

As usual, I LOVE getting involved in the festivals and celebrations that seem to be a daily thing in Indian life here. One of the latest was Raksha Bandhan, aka Brother/Sister day.
On this day the sisters give their brothers a bracelet made with silk threads, and the brothers pledge to take care of them forever. It's widely celebrated in India and abroad and is a nice fun holiday and reason for families to be together.
Rakhi happened during Action in the Community so we had decided that since there are 8 men on staff here at Sangam we would have the International staff team give the boys bracelets to show the participants what the celebration was all about. We had the boys all line up in the hall on mats with rangoli around them and surprised them by bringing everyone in for the fun.
Each staff member (except me, I played photographer) who was there got a chance to perform puja and aarti to the men and then gave them their bracelets. It was a lot of fun, and we even had Datta our gardener (who is retired, and a typically adorable old Indian man) who we all call Azoba - grandfather participate. It was such fun and a great way to get the boys to spend quality time with us. They're all very shy, and usually its such a struggle!

Then a few days afterwards the staff team headed out to Navlakh Umbre Village about an hour outside of Pune. Its this small village in the middle of this lush intense green hilly area. It's beautiful. We stopped first at the school near the main town. The village had connections to Sangam in the past when we helped them start up a Guiding in the area, but over the years it was lost and now we are trying to build it up again. Because of the location of the village (near a lot of development - many plants openning up nearby, etc) they were chosen by the company UPS as a UPS development village. This means that a year ago they came and restored the schools, built computer labs, etc. and helped develop the resources for the children. They all seemed very proud of the work UPS had done, however like most development projects it came with its own downfalls. UPS had shipped massive containers halfway around the world with every single supply they needed for the projects. I'm talking like paint brushes, paint buckets, wheel barrows, sheeting and wood for the buildings....everything! Some may call that smart planning - I call that a massive error in judgement. For a company that was investing such time in development of an area, they could have spent far less money purchasing the goods locally here in India and helped develop the national economy. To each their own - but it seemed a little ridiculous to me.
Anyway, we then headed into the village and went to the primary school. Here they had tons of kids around and it was fun to spend time with them. We got a chance to see Coco (the national sport) being played by the kids in the yard. Minakshi, our wonderful Community Liason/Admin Assistant came with us and she joined in with the boys while they demonstrated the game to us. It was hilarious to see her running around in the mud in her Guiding uniform!
So much has been happening, and now with Ganpati in full swing I have even more stories to tell but little time to write them down! More to come soon, xo