In the process of having an amazing gap-year trip to India, I simply didn’t find the time to write my GapGuru Blog. However, now I am comfortably settled back home, I can collect my thoughts on all my experiences throughout the three and a half months that I spent there in one go.
I was based in Bangalore for 2 months, working at an orphanage and staying with a retired couple called Maria and Albert. It was brilliant to live with “real” Indians like Maria and Albert, and they made me feel at home. Maria cooked great food, and even taught me how to cook one of her chicken curries – which I have since made for my family back home in Birmingham. As well as Maria and Albert there was Hema, our local representative who lived with her husband Kitu on the adjacent road. Hema and Kitu were the loveliest people I have ever met. I found them so helpful, generous, friendly and personable – if I had any problem whatsoever I knew I could ring Hema and she would sort it out. As they lived so close to me, I would often just pop by to see them and have a chat about how things were going etc. which was so comforting, especially in the first week, which to be honest was a bit scary.
At the orphanage, I was working with Savitha, the teacher, in helping to teach mainly English and Maths to the 4 children who were taught there in the mornings. I also helped to teach Italian (I’d done Italian GCSE at school) to two of them who were moving into their Italian adoptive-families homes in the summer. Then after a lunch of sambar, rice and vegetables, I would usually go upstairs to the nursery where babies as young as 5days old were looked after. I got so attached to some of the toddlers there and really enjoyed holding and playing with the infants. Later on in the day, I attempted to organise activities for the children (about 8 children came from foster homes and 4 lived permanently at the orphanage), such as drawing, reading stories and learning poems and songs, doing origami or sometimes I took them to the nearby park. The children were quite excitable which sometimes made planning such activities difficult…but that is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the time I spent with them. They really are great kids and I was struck at how cheerful they seemed, when their lives had already been so unhappy. I also redecorated the classroom during some spare time which they were very grateful for.
At weekends, I met up with the other GapGuru volunteers, who were working and living at other places around Bangalore, and we made weekend excursions to nearby places together. We went to Kerala on the first weekend, then to Mysore on the next, then Goa, then Ooty and finally Hampi. We had so much fun together, and it was quite easy to fix up overnight buses and hotels.
Once the two months were up, it was really sad to say goodbye as I had become so attached to the people I’d met. We were all teary-eyed when saying goodbye to Hema and Kitu – but I hope that I will go back and visit them one day. Maria and Albert had almost become adoptive parents to me and I was fond of the teachers and office-staff at Orphanage, not to mention the kids. On the other-hand I was ready to go on the tour and travel north to see more of India. So, on 7th March all the Bangalore crew flew up to Dehli and met the other GapGuru volunteers from the other placements who were joining us. From Dehli, we went to Agra, then to Jaipur, Jodhpur then Jaisalmer and then up to Amritsar, across to Haridwar and finally to Dharamsala. It was a mind-blowing 17 day tour which was jam-packed with monuments, forts and palaces. We saw the Taj Mahal which was incredible; rode on a camel in the Thar Desert; visited the exquisite Golden Temple; and white-water rafted and camped on the river Ganges –obviously once-in-a-life-time experiences that I am very proud to have.
After this whirlwind tour of the north, I decided to travel for a month with one of the other GapGuru volunteers I’d got to know. It was a chance to go to the places we fancied and be independent. We first took the train up to India’s largest hill-station called Shimla, in Himachal Pradesh region. We spent a week there, in the rather pleasant English-style weather (rain and wind which was a change from the heat we had experienced up until that point) relaxing and seeing the local sights. We then made our way on to Varanasi which is a very holy Hindu city halfway across to Kolkata. It is astonishingly beautiful and the Ganges, although terribly polluted due to all the dead bodies and rubbish in it, looked stunning at sunrise and sunset – we went on boat rides to see the river at these times. We met loads of travellers on our journey and had lots of fun hearing all their stories and sharing our own. From Varanasi, we moved on east to Kolkata where we met more GapGuru friends from the tour. We only spent a long weekend there, but even from that I felt very impressed by the city and its British raj grandeur. We went to Darjeeling from Kolkata where like Shimla the weather was very cool but unfortunately the mist covered the Himalayas, so we were denied the famous view. However we had a lovely time there, drinking lots of tea of course, and walking up and down all the winding stall-lined streets.
After this, I had to say goodbye to my friends who were going on to Nepal/Kerala/Kolkata and journey alone to Dehli (on a non A/C sleeper-class train, taking 33hours in total…I think I was the only tourist on it and I am proud to say that I survived.) I don’t think I really clocked-on to the fact that I was leaving India, and even now it seems extremely odd that I was there only a month ago. I miss it dreadfully and can’t wait to go back. I also miss all the friends I made during my time in India; we shared an unforgettable time with each other. The cleanliness and ordered way of life back here in the UK feels so odd and almost dull compared to the exciting chaotic activity in India. Time flew past so quickly – it’s incredible; time definitely whizzes by when you’re having fun!
I admit that before going out to India, I felt very apprehensive about how it would be living in a completely new setting with completely new people. But after a week I already knew my way around the city quite well and got to know the other volunteers. I thought that eight weeks at one project would be perhaps too long and tiring, but actually I kind of wished I’d had one more month at Orphanage. It took time to get to know all the children and staff there, and once that had been achieved it was nearly time to say goodbye. So I would most definitely recommend to any prospective gap-yearer to do a volunteering job for a good long stint rather than a few weeks. Although I wouldn’t have missed out on the travelling, I found the volunteering the best bit of the trip. I was fully immersed into the way of life and felt like a resident in Bangalore rather than a tourist. And getting to know the Indians there made the experience all the more valuable. There are certain things I wished I’d brought with me from home, so maybe this might be useful to anyone setting out on a similar journey; a bikini, as it had never occurred to me that I would ever go to an Indian beach for a weekend; some earplugs would have been useful although not necessary for the first few weeks of getting used to the noise at night; a drawing pad and pencils to do sketches myself– I found it quite difficult to buy these things out there, but looking back at even the scrappiest drawings I did, brings it back so clearly; a box full of pens to hand out to children – I was asked countless times for “school-pen” and I could never find one; and finally I wish I’d brought more photos of England and the English with me – people are so interested about our way of life!