Grown Up to Soon

One of the hardest things for me to wrap my head around in India is the desire of families to marry off their daughters at very young ages.  Some do it out of necessity, because they can't afford to take care everyone.  Some do it because that's just "what you do." Their parents did it and their parents did it.  And so on.  The girls go live with the husband's family and start having babies as soon as possible.  The circle of life, if you will.  (FYI, the legal age to marry is 18.)


The little girl to my right is 14 years old.  She looks more like she's 10.  She wanted me to pray for her to have a baby.  I mean SHE is just a baby.  She said she has been married several months and still hasn't conceived.  A lot of people ask me to pray for them to have babies, but she is the youngest one so far.

I can't even imagine this.  She should be in school.  She should be outside playing.  I am not judging.  This is a cultural thing that you see mostly in the lower castes.  I know life is hard for them.  I've seen where they live and how large their families are. They struggle to exist on meager wages; a lot on less than $1 a day.  

I'm praying for her.  I'm praying that she will have a wonderful marriage and that she is blessed with many children.  That's all she has.  Will you pray for her, too?

The Soul of India

I should have several more blog posts coming soon. Lots of new subject matter. We just got back from 6 days out in the villages of India.  I'm not going to lie.  I didn't think I could do 6 days, but I did and enjoyed every minute of it.  Well, maybe not EVERY minute, but you get the idea.  


First, I should define what exactly a village is.  Hyderabad is a city.  Estimates vary (like everything else in India), but it has around 8 million people. In contrast, villages are smaller than cities.  The size of these villages vary considerably, but some "villages" have a million people in them. 

Ghandi once said, "The soul of India lives in its villages."  Most of India's 1.2 billion population live in villages.  Each village has its leaders.  Just like anywhere, these leaders can be good or bad.  But, "bad" in India is usually really bad. Think mafia. Fortunately, we have only encountered good ones.  If the leader of a village likes you, then you pretty much have free reign. Out of respect, we try to meet at least one of the leaders when we go to a new village. They appreciate it and are always very gracious. In fact, we have been given unbelievable access to a lot of these villages. 

We had several men from the US come over and go out with us.  It was an awesome time!  I experienced several "firsts" on this trip that I want to tell you about. More to come….

Singapore

We spent a long weekend in Singapore in November.  Had a great time!  It's clean with lots of shopping, good food and photo opportunities everywhere I turned!  We even found a church to go to on Sunday morning!  What more could we ask for?  

View of the Singapore financial district from our hotel room.  

I blew the next two photos, but I thought I would post them anyway.  Below is a picture of the rooftop pool at our hotel.  Beautiful view, but a little too cold for this southern girl to get in!   

Another view of the rooftop pool for all of my friends who are afraid of heights.  Just a little intimidating! 

We must have a sign on our backs that says, "We are suckers and don't ask the price up front." We took a bicycle rickshaw a distance of about 1.5 miles.  Most expensive taxi we've ever taken! Notice us smiling in this picture.  It was taken right before he told us how much we owed.  Oh well, you only live once.  Cross this off the bucket list. 

Everyone told us we had to try the chili crab while we were in Singapore.  Kind of like how you must have BBQ when you go to Memphis or cream pie when you go to Boston. (HA! Just kidding. Checking to see if you're still reading or not.)  Chili crab is on the left and black pepper crab is on the right.  That is a single crab on each plate!  The chili crab was wonderful, but both of us liked the black pepper crab better. 

I knew it was going to be good when they gave me an apron! They gave us utensils to eat the crab with but using our hands was much more productive! It was messy, but oh so delicious!

One of the landmark hotels in Singapore.  The Fullerton Hotel sits on the river within walking distance to a lot of restaurants and attractions.  We didn't stay here.  I just thought it was pretty all lit up at night.

Singapore is home to largest ferris wheel in the world.  The Singapore Flyer is 42 stories tall (541').  It takes 30 minutes for it to make one full rotation. I thought about going up…..for about 5 seconds. Then, my fear of heights won out.

While we were there, I practiced taking long exposure photos.  This is the Clarke Quay area of Singapore.  Lots of restaurants and things to do here.  The lights in the center of the river is a bumboat.  

Singapore skyline in the background.  Notice the big smiles.  This was after a great steak dinner at Morton's!

I took this photo of the Singapore financial district skyline and had it mounted on canvas and framed to give to Weston for Christmas.

We had a great visit to Singapore.  There are so many things to do.  There was no way to do it all in our short time there.  I guess another trip is in order!