First Day and other notes about the city..

So we had our first day today. Walking to work the streets and allys are filled with people making bambu frames for the huge Dunja festival coming up. The whole city literally shuts down from Oct 18-28. There are huge parades, festivities, and overall absolute mayhem, as if the city wasn't chaotic enough to begin with. Anyway, the craftmanship of these people is simply astounding. As of now we just see bambu frames, but they are starting to add paper mache and we can see shapes arising- dragons, egyption figurines - everything. Its going to be sooo cool! The women we work with are very nice. It is a small space on the top floor of a building. There are eight woman and one man who oversees the project. The NGO that started the business is Christian, along with most of the organizations we work with, and live at..which isn't a problem. I have no problem with that, don't get me wrong. AS long as I don't have to go to the prayer readings after or before the girls go to work I'm fine with it. Yet - For the first 30 minutes today our boss/manager guy gave us a whole schpeal on Christianity and how finding Jesus/God(he wasn't too clear on the distinction) was the way to happiness and peace of mind and there is only one god and realizing that is the only way...neadless to say I got a little miffed...It seems to me the people who converted all these people from hinduism to Christianity really focused on the importance singular God and lumped that all in with the teachings of Jesus - I'm not sure if I will take the time to find out. Its actually really interesting. In this country, one of the first things people ask is "What do you believe?" not, "what is your religion, or do you believe in God", but "What do you believe?". Its a little disconcerting, I still haven't quite figured out my answer. So far all I've come up with is "I dunno, everything? nothing?" That answer gets me a very peculiar look...so does the fact that I am 22 and unmarried - that was the first question the girls asked me at work today. It is hard talking to them as of now, but I will practice my phrases and get better with my sign language and I think I will have fun with them. They are just a bunch of young girls doing craftywork all day...its not a sweatshop because we get tons of breaks - all though we do sweat all day..hahah...but I think it will be fun. The very best best part is that I will get to do computer stuff. Semal asked me to help him type up some prices for a proposal to send to Boston and I had to hold back from making a spiffy excel spreadsheet. I couldn't help from fixing the formatting though. I think now that he knows I like doing stuff like I will do it more often. He has to catch up on the books for the past three months in the next week because the big boss is returning..:)..Today was my first day walking around by myself, it felt good to not be with a huge group all the time. All the other volunteers are really nice and I have fun hanging out with them - but sometimes you just need some space. There is an older woman, Anne, from new york, who is great, but is staying at a hotel accross the street. Her days of dorm living are over..I went over there last night with the other older woman and talked for awhile which was fun. After I mentioned wanting to go to the Jewish settlement in Kochi we found we were all Jewish and are going to try to find the one Temple this Saturday. In fact I'm going to look online for the phone number right now..still no pictures, they will come..