India Begins

As I write this, I’m sitting in our hotel in Trivandrum, feeling very hot, sleepy, still pretty ill but having an amazing time so far. Spent yesterday in Dubai, saw the world’s tallest building and an amazing water fountain display and a lot of the metro stations! The plane ride from Dubai to Trivandrum had us worried about what we’d let ourselves in for, me and Lyds had the best seats on the plane if the rating was based on amount of action. Firstly a fight started out between a drunk guy and the man sitting next to us, the drunk guy was then asked to move to the back of the plane, then his friend decided to take revenge and carry on where he’d left off, and - after being spoken to by 7 stewardesses – was moved to the front of the plane! Later on Lyds commented to me that it smelt of smoke, we found out later that would be due to the guy in front of us going for a cheeky cigarette in the toilet, he was later found out and reprimanded, shortly followed by second drunk guy falling down the stairs and his suitcases going crashing everywhere.

So its not surprising we were slightly regretting our decision to come here, however after a lovely couple of days we are feeling much better about everything. Went to a children’s meeting in the afternoon with Roy & Ponna and their gorgeous boys Ricky & Eric, where we taught about 60 children the story of the lost sheep. The children were so sweet and they’re all so beautiful as well! We were swarmed at the end by hoards of them wanting to meet us, and they definitely weren’t camera-shy either. I only have a few pictures to put up though because most of them are on the camera which we don’t have a lead for.

These are a few of the girls we started talking to, they dragged me outside to talk to me and loved having girls their age coming to visit.

I took a cute video of Ricky singing us his repertoire of English songs on the drive home, ‘Blessed be the name of the Lord’ being a highlight, I’ll see if I can post it on here at some point but I didn’t bring my phone lead so will have to be when I get home.This is me & Lyds with the two of them, Ricky is on the left and Eric on the right.

Everyone is so welcoming here and treats visitors like royalty, which is lovely but quite hard to adjust to! We went to Roy & Ponna’s church at SEMI this morning and gave our testimonies, it was really different to anything I’ve been to before, loads of clapping and shouting (most of which I couldn’t understand!) but really exciting to watch. The little girl in the picture below has just come out of hospital, she was ridiculously cute & came up to me at the end to sing me three songs.

After lunch we came back to our hotel and met Chris’ friend Handel, who took us around the local market before going for a rickshaw ride, and we've just finished having dinner with them all. Catching the 21 hour train to Goa tomorrow so I'd better be off to sleep.

Just to finish, look at this cute little guy in our hotel :)

Amy x