Fasting and mice!

Odd subject I know, but more on that later!

Firstly, thank you to all you lovely people who have sent me encouraging replies, I really appreciate them :)

This last week had been a pretty average week, apart from Shashi's wedding on Friday. It was a lot smaller and less extravagant than the previous wedding we'd been to on Tuesday. As it was in a village (where people are generally poorer than people living in towns or cities) Shashi's father had put everything he had into this wedding. So we arrived at village school on Friday evening (near to Shashi's wedding) and we saw her with all her make-up, jewelery and henna on, we found this quite hard as a team and didn't really know how to react in this situation, as weddings here are neither particularly happy times, or sad times.

We then walked round to the wedding where we were greeted with lots of 'Namaste didi's from all the children and women at school who were also attending. It was so good to see them all dressed up in their fancy salwars! Unfortuantly this wedding didn't really have much of a happy ending as a fight broke out, before we'd even properly seen Shashi and the groom hadn't even arrived. Apparently this is common in village weddings, as thier are often fights over money or food. This led to the majority of the guests leaving, our hosts ushered us out pretty swiftly as it could have, and did, turn into something more serious. On the way home we found out that her husband was already drunk before he's even arrived at his own wedding. My heart just broke for Shashi... So the way home from the wedding we all prayed for her. As a team we've found it very easy to judge arranged marriages, just because it' not in our western culture, but I pray that they will fall in love, and treat each other with respect.


As a said this week as been a pretty average week, teaching at both village and city school. It's been lots of fun with the children.

Now it comes to the subject of this email/blog... well a mouse update for you all - we currently have two resident mice in our flat. Freddie, the big mouse and Frankie, the small mouse. And it was Freddie that kept me up since 4am this morning - mice are so noisy. So I'm tired now, and I'm feeling hungry. Today our church is having a day of fasting and praying. So we're all fasting until 8pm, and everyone has been allotted an hour to spend praying for Anusaran and it's members. I've already had my hour, and found it really good just to be able to focus for a whole hour on praying for Anusaran.

Thank you for your prayers about health - we're all better now, except Lydia who's been to the doctors and now has medicine, so hopefully she'll be back to herself soon.


Thanks for reading once again,
Love Hannah x