Settling in...

Wow. Now that was an intense first week! Well, intense in the sense that I was totally immersed in a foreign culture, eating only spicy food and relying on my internal dialogue for company... Other than that, it was pretty easy. :)

Not going to lie. I definitely woke up a few times (jet lagged at 3:00am) thinking to myself, "What have I done???" But now that I'm getting settled, three months doesn't seem quite so bad. In fact, I'm super excited about the things going on here!

I've been able to get to know the Truthseekers staff, see a bit of what their ministry is all about, and do a lot of reading and research into India and the caste system. Oh, and I've eaten an absurd amount of mind-numbingly amazing mangoes (seriously, you can eat them with a spoon).

Also, I'm getting the hang of eating all my food with my right hand (like everyone else here). A little tricky to begin with, but I'm pretty much a pro now. The most important lesson I've learned so far: when someone hands me something to eat with a big smile saying "try this, try this!", I'm about to eat something so hot it melts brain cells.

Since I last wrote, I've been able to travel around the city with the guys from the office. Pranjal and Deshpande took me to see the Red Fort and Jama Mosque, both rather stunning in their architecture and history. You can see more pictures of our trip here.

On the social justice side of things, I've been experiencing a lot. On our trip into Old Delhi, I was able to witness the crushing poverty of the inner city here, and saw many things I will not soon forget.

One of those sights was a baby, no older than two, waddling around on the side of a crowded street, totally alone. I looked and looked, and saw nobody watching out for him. Even worse, many people passed by that never gave the baby a second glance. To my horror, I have seen the same phenomenon several times since then.

I met a group of persecuted eunuchs in a slum on the east side (more on that tomorrow), visited a school for Shudra (lower caste) children who would otherwise get no education, and I've seen beggars, cripples, lepers... pretty much everything one would need to see to realize that the world is not as it should be.

So, all in all, I'm having a really significant time.

If, for some odd reason, you want to keep up with my day-to-day activities, you can follow me on Twitter. It's basically just a one or two sentence summary of what I'm up to at any given moment.

Oh, one last thing... I took this video while riding in a rickshaw. Thought you might need proof of just how crazy the driving is here...