the happiest blistered feet in andhra pradesh

so. guess what we did today? ha! you'll never guess.

ok so there is mild political turmoil in the state of andhra pradesh right now. its caused mostly from the rallying of a local (statewide) political party called the TRS who are fighting the state government for an independent state for the telangana people. i don't understand it very much, but the jist of it is that there are two people groups in this state, the andhra people and the telangana people. so the TRS is opposing the government to form their own state within india but independent from andhra pradesh. and they have been enforcing several "bandht" in the last few weeks, which is basically a strike. so they come marching into the school, usually with flags or wearing pink, and demand that the school close for a holiday. and they will rough things up a bit if the school doesn't comply, so we say ok, we'll close the school tomorrow. the reason they have been doing this lately is because at the beginning of the week the TRS chief started a fast until telangana is given an independent state government. and because india is run with a parliamentary system this is a somewhat significant demand.

on monday there was bandht, tuesday and wednesday were mostly back to normal with classes going on and such. then today there was bandht again because of the TRS chief doing this fast (although he hasn't been very consistent about it, he started on sunday evening, then stopped, then started again). the local levels of the party feel that they must show their strength by shutting everything down. at a telugu school across the way from Matilda they even went in and stopped students in the middle of an exam and roughed things up a bit because they hadn't closed down.

so today. since there was no school in session, we decided to do something fun with the bindu kids. these are the kids who live at the hostile on campus because most of their families cannot care for them adequately or give them proper education. some of them don't have parents left at all, but most of them still have a little family left who come and visit on sundays. they are all excellent students and really good kids.

today andrea and i took some recordings of earl scruggs over to the school, and in the upstairs hall we taught them square dancing. it wasn't perfect but it was similar to what i experienced as a child. they loved it too! they love getting to spend free time with us, but it was really great to be interacting with them on the level of something as ordinarily human as a simple dance. and they showed us some indian dancing moves too, wild! it was so much fun, i couldn't stop laughing, i couldn't stop moving my feet even though they were the same songs over and over. we started at about 5:30 and didn't stop until 7:30. we were barefoot dancing for two hours strait and didn't fall over! even though andrea and i were both red-faced (indian people don't get red when they are hot because they are already brown, so this seems odd to them), so sweaty our hair was wet, we have the happiest blistered feet in maybe even all of india.