Week 40, Aurangabad, India

Dear Ethel, Family and friends

It has been quite a week for us. We stayed last weekend with our hosts, Melinda and Brian who live in a lovely apartment block with their two children. It’s is certainly different here than elsewhere in India. We even attended a Jazz festival, of all things, on Sunday night. The festival was held at an amphitheater attached to a brand new shopping mall, catering for home furnishings. The amphitheater has a water and laser light show that was going on in the background of the Jazz bands. It was spectacular, but we really never expected to see anything like this in India...Wow!

After some new year juggling, Melinda found us some teaching work in Aurangabad, 200km away from Puna, with a Christian group called Youth With a Mission, YWAM. They are a community organisation, helping the under privileged and poorest in their communities. They run a child care center for street children that live on the railway stations and are providing micro loans and support for abandoned women by helping them own sewing machines and providing lessons in how to use them. We have been teaching English to groups of the YWAM people for the last week. Louise takes the beginners, mostly women and I’m with the intermediates. We have also been doing a children's class in the evenings. It’s been a lot of fun and we have been welcomed very warmly and given a place to stay, basic but comfortable enough. I got sung happy birthday to in Marathi, the local language here and Louise & I were blessed and were decorated with garlands of flowers.

Aurangabad itself is much like a lot of small Indian town, chaotic dusty and strewn with rubbish, but it does have its own version of the Taj Mahal (not quite as grand), old city walls and a very long history. It also has a fantastic fort about 20 km away, which we saw yesterday and today we traveled 100km to the Heritage listed Ajanta and Ellora caves. It’s was a full days trip but well worth it. We got the feeling of Egypt and Ankor Watt from these places.

We are busy with lesson plans and domestic tasks in our humble abode, so I’ll sign off early till next week.

All The best.
Ric & Louise