India part 10

One day we took a little walk to a village near our hotel. By this time, we were in a much more remote area of the country than we had been -- we were about 2 hours outside of the closest city, Jaipur. We learned during our tour that our guide was from this village, and he showed us his house, his cow, his school, and finally, his mother. He said that he started working in the hotel as a car washer, and had worked his way up to chauffer. I'm not kidding when I say that this tour really humbled me.

This is our guide with his mom. He's wearing a uniform from the hotel. She's not.





There were a few things he said that had us laughing out loud, after which, he'd just look at us with a look that said, "What?" One of those things was "The women work really hard, but the men just sit around. They're lazy." We believed them after seeing things like this...









Again, it always was stunning to see their beautiful saris while doing this hard labor.

For some reason, one thing that surprsed me was seeing little kids like this one running around with no pants on. It's one of those things you don't even consider before hand, but of course they don't have diapers in these little villages. Even families that we saw in tourist attractions, i.e. people that have resources to leave their villages/towns/whatever had bare-bottomed babies with them. I wonder how this factors into potty training.

This is the school in the village. We were there on a local holiday, so the kids were not in school that day. Notice there are no doors in the school -- just doorways. The homes were the same (don't have photos of the homes).

Here are some of the characters we came across....


We were told that it was "cold" so a lot of the kids were wearing hats. I guess they needed hats to keep their heads warm, but the babies still had no pants on?

This guy looks like he's about a thousand years old. Whereas some of the people that saw us just gave us a shy look, this one asked, in very good English, to have his picture, posed in front of this tree and then asked us to send him a copy.

At the beginning of our walk, there was another guy that kind of looked like this one. Trevor had learned the word for "Holy Man" in Hindi during his research for the trip and asked our guide if this man was a Holy Man. This made the boys laugh so hard. We figured that was a sufficient answer to that question.

I'm not sure if this is the baby... but as we were walking along, a woman holding a little baby like this one held him out towards me. I'm not one to say no to an offer like this... but unfortunately, this kid had no pants on and scabby parts on his little bum. I just smiled, waved and walked on.

Obviously, the kids are put to work too, so it's not just the women out there. These three girls were really shy at first. After a few minutes, they warmed up to us and started asking for their pictures to be taken. The oldest girl yelled out something, and Trevor called back the words to her, which sent all three into hysterics. After panicking and asking our guide what he had said to them, Trevor learned that they had said, "Take a picture of me!" and he yelled back, "Take a picture of me!"

This little guy was following closely behind the other three. He looked completely confused about who these crazy white people were.

We asked our guide why these little guys were carrying dirt and rocks in their bowls. He said this is what they use to clean the floors of their homes. I tried to ask him... they use dirt to clean their floors??? I'm sure I didn't get the right story there.

As we walked along, we just gathered a group of kids. I'm pretty sure they thought I was Angelina Jolie and that I might adopt them.

How they loved to see themselves in our cameras! It makes sense that they probably don't get to see themselves very often.

The kids loved to use the few English words they knew, so they called out "Bye bye" and "Ta-ta" and we said it back roughly 8000 times in the two hours we were there.

What an adventure!