Namaste. Kahamda. Kamon Acho. Hello.
These are just a few greetings in the many different languages that we were welcomed with here in Agartala. And what a warm welcome it was, as well as continues to be. Fact is, we finally made it to India. For me, this journey started on a beautiful friday back in April when I was walking through the sheep pasture near Stonehill with two of my closest friends. Kris (our lovely program director), called offering me the position to be part of Extension India 2012.
I can’t believe more than eight months have passed since the good news. After a short orientation back at Stonehill, preparing us for our year abroad, we departed at 6.30 am on Friday, the 13th of January. In retrospect, we should have been more suspicious of that date… Our flights from Boston to New York and then to Delhi occurred without complications although I wouldn’t really call being stuck in an airplane for 14 hours an easy task. Yet this also passed and Tom, Lucy, Iain, Charlotte (more about these amazing individuals later) and I found ourselves setting up camp in the Delhi airport, in anticipation of our five-hour-long layover. I knew that we were still in an airport full of tourist traps, but I started to feel my feet tingle in excitement thanks to the friendly faces and many colors everywhere.
And then disaster struck. Well, maybe not that bad
but it was definitely the beginning of a lot of frustration and uncertainty.
Our flight to Kolkata had been cancelled, so after many misleading directions
by Indian officials we were able to pick up our luggage. Oh wait, we wanted to
but four pieces were missing. Lucy, Tom, Charlotte and I got to leave the
airport with fewer pieces of luggage than we had intended to. It took quite
some time to figure out where to have our luggage sent to especially because we
weren’t sure how long we would be at the Delhi airport. In addition, nobody really knew what to tell us or where to send
us, so we were running around the airport like headless chickens. Having left the terminal, we tried to talk to somebody from Air India, but
they were completely understaffed and the other passengers were yelling at
them, what we only could imagine as being the angry Indian style. After too
long of a wait, we booked a flight on a different airline straight to Agartala.
At 6am in the morning. So... a long and cold night at the airport awaited us. But
we survived and were even greeted on the plane by Father Joe Paul, one of the
priests at Holy Cross. He was going to pick us up at the airport in Kolkata,
but when we called him about our plans, he changed his as well and gave us our
first warm welcome to our new home.
