Last full day in Gulbarga

Gulbarga…last full day
After spending a day quite ill yesterday with GI upset, I was able to make the rounds with the team today. My host’s wife woke me from a healing night’s rest at 6:50 am and my host then took me to mass in the only Catholic Church in the area. It was a delightful folk mass in KANADA, the local language with the first lesson and the homily done in English. Although the mass was said in KANADA, the mass music was in English.. Following this, we joined the team and local Rotarians for breakfast above a large Sari shop (4 flights above). As we were headed out to our appearance at a local school, we were stopped by the women of the host family on the third floor and one by one decked out in jewelry made of sugars and saris draped in every imaginable manner.

On Sundays here, the schools only have a half day so we arrived at the local Montessori school which has over 4000 students from age 2 though about the 6th grade and visited several classrooms then went on back to the government secondary school behind it.
Here we were treated to a variety of classical Indian dances performed by the students followed by a famous dance routine from a Ballywood movie. Photo ops with each dance troupe followed by photos with the parents of the children who had performed followed. These students grilled us in Q&A period about how we perceived differences and similarities in Indian versus US culture and American politics. They are following Obama and Hilary with great interest and wanted to know who we thought would be the next President. We dodged that question with a number of diversion tactics.
This afternoon we got to go to the Rotary hospital near here. Rotary, through matching grants, has put in a neonatal ICU. Up to 12 babies can be accommodated at any given time and the nursery had 10 at the time of our visit. Ant that is with only 6 warmers. There are no isolettes. Babies share space with one nurse to manage all of the babies at one time. Moms were seated on beds in an adjacent room. Next we toured the pediatric surgical ward and the eye clinic where Rotary has provided for free eye clinics and does almost 100,000 eye surgeries annually.
From there, it was on to a visit at the Sai Baba temple. Sai Baba is a “saint” who accepted all religions and castes so his temple is open to all to worship. Following a brief stop to clean and refresh, we were put into saris by host families and taken to a joint meeting of the three Rotary Clubs in town and did our presentation there. Very well received and it is clear the Team is becoming quite comfortable with their telling of their story. Chris found an inflatable “world” ball and has circled our area of New England on it as well as the area of India we are visiting and then it gets tossed to the crowd and batted around. They love that visual aid.
We are all close to being well again thanks to the incredible hospitality and ministrations of our host families. It has been a soothing stop after the busy schedule of the past week an a half.
Tomorrow at 6:30 PM we leave by train for JVSL (the second largest steel production area in the country) and also will have a chance to visit Hampi, the site of many historical temples. We are told it will be very hot there and much walking but our hosts have been instructed to schedule our visits so we are not out in the hot mid day sun,
I do not know what Internet connections will be like but will try and update again as soon as we get to a place where I can post.