My silence over the last few days is because I have a new furry a friend. To be exact, I have a small, 4-month-old male dumbo rat that thinks that cheese is scary and pajamas are yummy.

Anyways, I'm sure some of my watchers and friends are wondering about my trip to India. It'd be impossible to sum it all up, but I'll try my best.

On February 15th, this year, I went with a small group from my church to Chennai (formerly Madras) in southern India. There we worked at a small Methodist church which doubled as an after-school tutoring site for Compassion-sponsored kids. We were helping lay down a new floor in their tiny sanctuary so the kids could go inside and be comfortable during the rainy season. We were the first group of foreigners to come through there in 12 years, so a lot of the kids had never even seen a white person before. To say that we had fun would be an understatement.
We stayed in Chennai for a week where I made quite a few friends and learned the language. Sorta.

After that we flew up north to do some sight-seeing, like the Taj Mahal. A lost of people in the group were subjected to food poisoning, which I barely managed to escape. The only reason I got out unscathed was because the night everyone got sick, I had a cold and opted to stay in the hotel and vegetate. I have never been so happy to have a bug.

Anyways, I'm hoping to someday return to Chennai. I managed to integrate myself into the local culture with ease and earned the respect of the locals which lead to even more learning as they told me about other aspects of their society. I wished I could say more, but it would take a novel to cover everything that we saw and experienced.
Hopefully my upcoming trip to Thailand and Cambodia will have some more stories, although I doubt many of them will be happy.