Fiesta at Udayan

Today we woke up ready for a full day at Udayan. After breakfast, we saw the kitchen staff preparing food for lunch and dinner including the killing of a few chickens! We then got started planning our lessons for later in the day and rested so that we could be full of energy for the children. rnrnWhen thinking of some ideas for our lessons we thought it might be fun for the children if we played a massive game with three of the classes. As you can probably tell, this did not go well and the lack of our Bengali led to much confusion. So we split up the classes again and played different learning games with them and rotated classes so that each class had maths, English, music and art lessons. rnrnrnrnAfter lunch we thought we better figure out what we were going to do for our performance later that evening. Luckily enough we have a few music-y people on this trip, including the one and only Liam Lynch, so we let them figure most of it out. After vaguely figuring out what we were going to later that day, we all got ready for the show in the privacy of the boys accommodation, so that it would be a big surprise for the children at Udayan. Once we all had our Indian outfit on and ready to go, we made a grand entrance into the hall filled with all the kids! They were very excited to say the least, all we could here was ‘aunty, aunty very nice’ or ‘Rohan, Rohan!’. rnrnrnrnThe night started off with the youngest girls performing the sweetest of dance routines! It was then our turn, so Bernie, Ruth and Sasha, with Liam on the Guitar, performed Doe A Deer. The older boys then showed us some of their very impressive yoga moves. Back to us, so Finn, Pedro (sorry Rohan), Ruth, Bernie and Sasha gave a recitation of ‘I wanna be like you’ from the Jungle book. It seemed to go down pretty well! After that, the older girls danced to Jai Ho, and as we had attempted to learn to moves to it yesterday we were dancing along at the back! We then sang along to ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ with Finn on the ukulele and the same gang as before doing the echoes. The older Udayan boys then did some breakdancing. This brought us to the reluctant Les Mis performance from Bernie and Sasha but they went for it anyway! Following this, the whole group performed a dance routine to ‘Batchan’ which had the kids in hysterics and joined in with the chorus. We threw Bollywood, a fight scene, Irish, Michael Jackson, The Matrix and a dance from ‘Happy New Year’ in and the children seemed to love it! Finally, James, the founder of Udayan gave a short speech singing for the children in his extraordinarily deep voice. rnrnrnrnrnrnWe were then taken up to the rooftop of the admin building which had been transformed it into a place of celebration. There were fairy lights dredged over the top us and tables were laid for food and a screen saying welcome surrounded with flowers balloons and other decorations! We all couldn’t believe how much effort they had gone to for us and we couldn’t be more touched. We were treated to lots of food including poppadum, dahl, chapatti and what seemed to be chicken nuggets (this may have been the chicken we saw being killed earlier that day)! During the meal we were show pictures that were taken during our trip and some pictures from the trip of the previous trip as well. It was lovely to reminisce on our time here but it also made us very sad to think our time in India is almost over! We are so appreciative of the staff at Udayan for letting us stay and getting to know them and the children. rn