My Final Week In Jaipur

My last week in Jaipur passed quickly. On Tuesday, Liesbet and I went to Galta Gate (also known as the monkey temple) to see one of the view attractions in Jaipur I hadn’t yet visited. The rickshaw ride took close to an hour to get there. The Monkey Temple is actually a series of temples located in a barren spot between two rocky mountains. There are several huge pools of water where we saw women bathing – whether it was for a religious purpose or simply to get clean I couldn’t tell. There were also, as one might expect, many many monkeys. They, like all the monkeys I’ve seen in India, were unfazed by people and just carried on their monkey routines.

            Friday was my last day at the project, and I will say right now that at first it was rather anticlimactic. It began like every other Friday with the girls asking for games and drawing. In the first hour the only remarkable thing about my last day was that Komal did some mehandi (henna) on my arm. Akshat, the brother of one of my students who frequently hangs around my class, was the first one to mention that it was my last day, and that he would miss me.

            A bit later, I handed out the small gifts that I had brought: chocolates, mechanical pencils and some decorative hair clips. Again, it did not go as I expected – rather than displaying gratitude, the girls behaved as if getting gifts were par for the course, and there was nothing special about it. As I drove away from Ninder from the last time, it occurred to me that to my girls, there WAS nothing special about today. Volunteers come and go all the time. I have been referring to them as MY girls, but they are many other people’s girls too. While I thought I was enlightening them and making such an impact on them and they’d be eternally grateful to me for teaching them, etc. etc., the real truth of the matter is that THEY left a much more profound impact on ME than I ever could on them. It was a valuable, humbling realization, and a good one to have considering I have 3 more months left of volunteering. It doesn’t alter the affection I feel towards my students, nor does it lessen my motivation to volunteer. It simply made me appreciate what my trip is about. I set out to make a difference to other people, but more than anything, those other people have made a difference to me.