Because providing rooms at the school for Liza and I would have meant giving up classrooms, RDF arranged for us to live across the street in two bedrooms and a shared bathroom on the top floor of a house. Downstairs live three generations of one family. I sometimes wake up to the singing of the grandfather who sits on a plastic lawn chair underneath my window most of the day. There he is bathed and fed and if he needs to move anywhere the chair becomes his walker. When I stepped out of my room on the first morning I was greeted with “Good Morning, Auntie” by Parvya, the 2 ½ year old daughter. Parvya loves to visit us upstairs and often performs, sometime singing nursery rhymes and yesterday by dancing around my room singing “Hare Krishna!”
In the morning we scatter chickens as we leave the house and cross the yard, walking through the rice powder designs made by the grandmother first thing each day. If we come home to do laundry in the afternoon, we often find the mother and grandmother stringing together fresh picked marigolds to sell. There is a multi-level roof where we hang our clothes to dry and if we go out in the evening we can watch the buffalo, cow, and goats coming back from the fields. This will be my home for as long as I stay in Kalleda.
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