Mandarim

As the kind ticket man had predicted, I had no problem at all making my way to Kottayam by train on Tuesday afternoon. I arrived at Mandarim just in time for tea. In the dining room, I got to meet some of the people Erin works and lives with. There are little old men and women who don’t speak a word of English and absolutely love to laugh at us when we can’t understand their Malayalam. And there are precious children, ages two to 12, who just love to hold our hands.

Mandarim is a large facility that houses a retirement community, a home for the destitute, and a girls’ orphanage, as well as a hospital, and there are people of all ages and backgrounds running (or walking very, very slowly in some instances) around this pretty campus. I enjoyed meeting them, even the ones who didn’t speak English and couldn’t pronounce my name. (Charlotte is a very hard word to say in Malayalam!)

We didn’t do much on Tuesday afternoon because it was hot and the electricity had gone off. When it’s summer in Kerala, the Americans cannot function without their fans. So we simply lay on Erin’s bed, sometimes talking, sometimes reading, sometimes resting; and it was the perfect afternoon.

We took ourselves out for a nice dinner and even treated ourselves to a rickshaw ride (rather than taking the hot bus). When we had finished dinner, we walked outside to find that it had begun to rain just a little bit. That is very good news, as the raindrops bring with them a slight drop in temperature that makes it easier to sleep at night. And we had no trouble sleeping.

And we didn’t have any trouble waking up the next morning either, what with the music blaring from the room below and the construction crew starting their daily work on the new buildings going up just after 6:00. Yikes!!!

We spent Wednesday morning visiting at the orphanage and the destitute homes. Although the young girls acted very shy and the old men and women don’t speak much English, I could tell from the way that they looked at and touched her that the people at Mandarim love Erin very much. As I watched her interact with the people in her community, I thought about my own community and the love that has blossomed there. And I realized that, although we sometimes still wonder just what we are doing here, we are making a difference.