Into the World of Wizards

Good evening everyone!

Well the past few days have been rather uneventful to be honest. I believe I mentioned in my last blog post that I was running a fever of 101.1...luckily with some sleep and wonderful chinese herbs (kudos to Mother for those) I felt fantastic the next day!

Yesterday began what I hope to be one of the most fruitful and rewarding parts of our trip- reading the children at Lechu Cottage Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. As demonstrated by the title, we are reading the British version, but we were also surprised to find out (post-purchase) that we are also reading the abridged version.

Unfortunately, the abridged version was simply not abridged enough (where are the children's book version of Harry Potter?!). But we are steadfastly determined to introduce the children to the wonderful world of Harry Potter that revoltionized our lives so much.

Back to relaying  how it's been going-- So we started yesterday. We had brought candy with us with the intention of giving each kid that answered a question candy. We quickly found that the first chapters of Harry Potter are incredibly boring as J.K. Rowling is essentially laying the groundwork for the storie (i.e describing the Dursley family etc). To entertain the kids as well as to help them understand, we alwasy have two of us acting it out (Claudia has started joining us on more of our orphanage adventures...not as many as we'd like but anything is great!) and then we stop every few sentences to try and explain it to the children. Anyone that can answer the questions gets a candy...unfortunately this means all of the candy goes to approximately 4 kids, and then we give 1 piece to everyone at the end.

Anyways, we thought that there had been a bad reception to Harry Potter, but when we returned today they were really excited about it and used all Harry Potter words for Hangman. We desperately spent the past day trying to find the first movie, but to no avail. It has been an impressively daunting task to be honest. Due to limited internet access/strength of internet it's incredibly hard to get. Hopefully Anu will be able to get it in Delhi if we don't get it before then...although we'd really prefer to find it before that so that we can show it to the kids as soon as possible. If anyone has any ideas, please email me!

Anyways that's all for tonight. Oh! There was just yet another tremor/aftershock in some form...guess we'll see what happens! Only one of us noticed it (Claudia) but the family upstairs is cowering in fear at the moment...oh silly newbies!

Goodnight from this experienced Cali Kid :)

XOXO