Veggies are my friend...

I’m now 1-hour outside Mumbai at a home for HIV+ women who have left the red-light district and are trying to get off the streets for good through counseling and job training.

The language barrier is much higher here than with the kids, because at least the children all wanted to learn English. I spent the afternoon teaching a 20-yr old woman how to use Microsoft Excel and how to type properly, as she would like to eventually do bookkeeping.

I really enjoyed watching the women cook their native dishes. However, once again I went with someone to buy fish and once again, I swore I was only going to eat vegetables and rice for the rest of my time here! You have to trust me that I AM being low-maintenance while I’m here, but it is so incredibly unsanitary. They chop it up for you on the street corner and there are flies and blood everywhere. Ugh!

The home currently has 2 staff and 5 former prostitutes living here. This month, they had a $200 budget to pay salaries, utilities, food, etc. and it’s just not enough. Normally they get $400 and make it work. Tomorrow is (yet another) national holiday so I’m taking everyone out for lunch at a restaurant, because it’s a treat they just can’t afford themselves.

I spent some time hanging out at a phone store this evening. They are SO different than in the US. They are little hole-in-the-wall shops where people come to recharge their SIM cards (so essentially everything is prepaid). Today I loaded 1000 rupees on my phone (~$20) but people were coming in charging 20-40 rupees – less than $1! Most people in India must literally live day-to-day on what they make. These phone stores are the busiest places around – if I lived here (doing non-NGO work) I think I’d open a phone store. I bet they make a load of money...