I continue to go to the Mother Teresa house with the expectation that I'll be helping them and in turn, I end up being the one helped.
Today, Navita was back from the hospital. Which made me happy, because she wasn't there last week, I got a little worried about what was going on with her. As it turns out, the operation must have been planned because she had some skin grafting done. So today, instead of clipping nails and doing laundry, I spent the day sitting on her bed visiting with her. Her sister Kavita brought out the nail polish and I ended up getting a manicure and pedicure. My fingernails are now a very pretty shade of sparkly pale pink and I have bright red toe nails!
As I learned more of Navita and Kavita's story today, I was surprised I didn't burst into tears. I knew a little, but today I got a bit broader of a scope. I know I've had some challenges in my life, but nothing compares to these two girls.
Navita is 15 and Kavita is 16. They are parentless. Not sure when or how exactly this happened, but Navita has told me more than once that she has no parents. As it turns out, they've been traveling to different Missions of Charity homes working since they have no parents. Completely taking care of each other and themselves. Pulling their own weight in a house where the work is tedious and exhausting. I couldn't believe it when Navita told me this. I knew she was at the house in Jaipur, staying for a while, but I didn't realize that they just moved from one house to another working. Navita leaves the house in July to go to boarding school, which she seems to be excited about.
In addition to having to take care of yourself at such a young age, Navita suffered a horrible accident in December, from which she is VERY lucky to have survived. She was on the terrace of a building and an electrical cable fell down onto her head. She was electrocuted and has burns on the top of her head and you can see where the electricity left her body on her feet. This is why she had skin grafting done. They grafted skin from the back of her head to the top, so that hair will be able to grow on the top of her head. And then grafted skin from her thigh to the back of her head. Can you imagine being 15 years old, when your self esteem is probably the most fragile and having to have a shaved head and facing the prospect of not being able to have a normal head of hair?! I asked her if she was excited about her hair growing back and she said yes, she also showed me how long her hair was before the accident.
Another lesson that India continues to teach me is confidence and being able to have the ability to joke about my body and my imperfections. Navita is dark, not dark like some, but she's not fair either. One of the big things here is being fair, white, you're automatically beautiful if you're white. It doesn't matter if you have an ugly face or not. So during the course of our time visiting, Navita, Kavita and some of the other ladies started joking that they should have taken my extra skin, because I'm so big, and grafted it onto Navita so she could be fair. It was actually pretty funny. But if someone had said something like that two months ago, I would have been mortified. But now, I can laugh at myself and not out of embarrassment or courtesy, but out of genuine good humor. I am confident and content enough with myself to see the humor in the comments now.
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