Welcome Miracle Foundation Supporters!

If you're coming to The Miracle Foundation blog for the first time, we want to give you a big Thank You! and welcome you.

The most recent posts we've made are on the right side of the web site so that's probably a good place to get started.

Look around and let us know what you think about our new online digs. We plan on posting video, pictures and even a bit of news here as we move along.

If you have any questions or comments, please e-mail me at Chris@MiracleFoundation.org.

Thanks again for visiting!

Dancing at Rourkela

Here is a clip of the kids at Rourkela dancing away a hot afternoon. Every time I watch this video, I become much more relaxed. Plus, since I was filming, I didn't have to dance! I suspect that is a big motivation for a lot of the photographers out there.

The Miracle Foundation Blog Phase 2

Sorry for the delay in posting. Jet lag kicked my butt last week and I only recovered after about four days.

So, I've done my best to document our most recent IMPACT travel trip to India and I still have lots more to post here from that trip. I wanted to post this note to let you know that the blog is going to be active hopefully everyday from now but I know that won't always be the case.

We plan on giving you updates on what's going on around the office, making announcements and filling you in on events in and outside of Austin, TX. It will be ever-evolving around here and hopefully interesting.

Thanks for reading!

An Afternoon At Bhawani

Another time lapse for you this evening. I slowed this one down but I'm still not satisfied with the quality. This was shot over three hours last week, with one picture taken every ten seconds.

If you sponsor a child at Bhawani, look close and you may catch your kid posing for the camera.

Beijing v. India

Major generalizations follow...

I'm sitting here watching NBC's coverage of the Olympics and they're following a group of University of Iowa Olympic volunteers around. The camera crew followed one student who enjoys going off the beaten path and checking out the neighborhoods and side streets of Beijing.

The NBC reporter, in the usual somber voice-over tone, describes these Chinese that live in poverty (her word, not mine). I watched the clip with a decidedly different perspective:

Woh! Are those concrete gutters in that clip? And concrete sidewalks? That's high living. In fact, I don't think I saw a sidewalk during my entire trip in India. There must be some sort of cooperation and organization in that Beijing neighborhood beyond anything Indians are capable of.

Where is the open sewage?

Why aren't people honking at every single man, woman, child, cow, goat, dog and car on the road?

No diseased villagers or rail thin children literally hanging on your legs? I laugh at you Beijing.

Why aren't cars passing each other in the oncoming lane? Things run so much faster that way I've found out. Why wait for the rickshaw in front of you to get over 10 MPH when you can play chicken with a 4,000 LB truck?

You get stared and smiled at Iowa students? Your tourist stares aren't met with even deeper, more intense stares right back at you making almost every public movement uncomfortable?

Of course, China has parts of it that most certainly rival Indian poverty. But, after seeing what I saw over the last two weeks, I found NBC's interpretation of poverty in Beijing to be quite laughable.

The Kids Love the Camera

Here is what happens when you set up a laptop at the Bhawani orphanage and record a picture every 60 seconds for about 45 minutes. The kids had just gotten done taking a dip in an antibacterial bath so they were busy combing their hair by looking at the video of themselves on the laptop.

I'm still experimenting with the video (slowing it down for one) and the next trip should yield even better clips.

Breaking Ground on the New Bhawani Orphanage

Here is a shot of Mukesh breaking ground on the new building, which is behind the old Bhawani orphanage. The new home will house 150 children and be completed in about a year. You can see a bit of me on the right with the video camera.

Funny story about that. I was filming the priest (You can see him in the white on the left side) blessing the grounds when I realized that directly behind him, right where I was filming, a young boy's zipper was down and you could see straight into his pants. I had strained my arm for at least 20 minutes getting that blessing recorded.

So much for uploading that ground breaking ceremony video to the web site.

On My Way Home

It's Saturday at 8 AM and I'm currently at London-Heathrow airport. I've been traveling since 7 AMish Friday morning, when we took the first rail ride from JSG, Orissa, India to Ranchi, Jharkand, India.

After a short weather delay, we made our way to Delhi and I got on a British Airways flight at 2:10 AM. I somehow managed to sleep for the first eight hours of the trip and woke up with just over an hour left on the flight. I started Primary Colors on my headset television, ate a vegetarian breakfast and we landed in London.

London-Heathrow is by far the busiest airport I've been to on this trip. There is a ton of activity going on and I can actually understand most of the language being spoken. That hasn't happened in about two weeks. I couldn't even tell what language my fellow travelers the American college girls were speaking half the time. Can I feel that old at age 25?

From London, it's a ten hour flight to Dallas and then a short hop to Austin. After waking up at 4:30 AM India time on Friday, I will get back into Austin just after 6 PM on Saturday.

I'm a bit tired and needing a shower. Since people watching in the airport is what I'll be doing for the rest of this trip, I'm a bit angry I had to leave the country with the most beautiful women in the world to come to, ahem, London. Let's just say they're...uhhh...different looking here than Indian women.

Maybe it's the high beer intake here in England?

Random Observations about My Trip

It’s not fair to generalize all of India based on the few states I’ve been to but for the purposes of this post, that’s what I’m going to do.

I have not seen a bathtub so far. Every bathroom has just a shower head with a slightly slanted bathroom floor leading to a drain. I’ve been showering directly next to my toilet.

The under estimating of time, or “Indian time”, definitely exists. When we traveled to a village outside of the Bhawani orphanage, the locals and our drivers said it was 20 minutes away. It ended up being an hour and a half away. This happens quite constantly.

Sometimes, it ends up just being chance if you get what you want when you order food. You can say exactly what you want, your waiter or room service hotel staff guy can look you in the face and say, “Yes” but you still may end up getting tomato soup with French fries in it.

I’m currently on the fourth floor of the Hotel Yogendra and at the end of the hall, there is a balcony overlooking the street. The hotel staff will dry laundry out there and sleep out there. I just looked down the hall and I can see two guys sleeping on cardboard on that balcony.

We get stared at all the time. I have not seen another Westerner in a long, long time. We’ve run across a few Europeans but that’s about it.

The man who works at the liquor store down the road may be the most articulate Indian on the street of JSG.

Including the bathroom, I have 22 switches in my room for the lights, fans and outlets. Also, at this particular hotel, my room key is a skeleton key with a plastic rectangle attached to it. When you get into the room, you put the rectangle into a slot by the door and that’s allows the power to run. Not a bad idea to conserve power if you ask me, because guests have to take their key to lock the door.

Many of the trash cans on the street and in our rooms say “Use me” on them and the trash cans at Sooch Village say they are “100% virgin plastic” and have pictures of Sumo wrestlers on them.

Speaking of plastic, Rourkela is a big steel town and I caught the local steel television channel while we were there. It was a public access type format but at the bottom of the screen it said, “Say no to plastics.” The steel industry here really despises plastics apparently.

It's common for men to walk around with their arms around other men. It's an expression of friendship here.

While driving to the Bhawani orphanage, there were a couple of interesting road signs telling people to drive slow – “If you are married, divource the speed” and “Speed thrills but kills”.

Since it’s monsoon season, rain is constantly threatening here and it rains at least a couple of times a day. Sometimes it rains just a touch and other times, like now at 6 AM on Thursday, it’s absolutely soaking this already drenched city of JSG.
The kids at our orphanages are by far the most well behaved children I have ever seen. It’s not even a contest between America and the orphanages. One mention by a house mother to get into the classroom or to eat and those kids are immediately on it. It’s amazing. I had my computer on a table for three hours shooting a time lapse video and even though there were dozens of children within inches of the computer, not a single one ever touched it. For whatever reason, none of the kids ever gets so excited that he or she won’t listen to the house mothers. Ha, try to imagine that in America. I have yet to see a temper tantrum here. I’m not saying they don’t happen. I just haven’t seen one.

The kids also love, love digital cameras. You can find the one kid in the orphanage who won’t smile for anything and show him or her his picture and they’ll crack a smile.

All of the men are called Uncle and the women are called Auntie. “Good morning Uncle!” they’ll say to me. I still love it even after the thousandth time.

The vast majority of men wear either long sleeved button up shirts or collered polo type shits. T-shirts are very few and far between. The contrast between the men and women’s dress is amazing. The women wear fantastically bright colors and the men generally wear rather drab, dull colors compared to the women.

The mustache has not gone out of style in India.

Peeing on the side of the road is very common. And it’s not behind a tree or anything. You just go.

The journey home starts this morning. There will be so much more to come once I get back to America.

And a gecko just jumped on the curtain in my hotel room. I forgot to mention that geckos are everywhere here.

I Finally Cracked

Tonight, Thursday the 14th, we left the Bhawani orphanage after spending three days there.

Up until tonight, I was able to rationalize the conditions I’d seen in India with a very cold, logical sense of reason. This is the way it’s always been here, I would tell myself. I’m just another privileged white guy coming to the third world and doing my best to help out for two weeks. How cliché is that?

Tonight, all that changed.

I didn’t let myself go too much because I didn’t want to appear to be culturally arrogant. Sure, if you compare almost any other country to America, especially the orphanage conditions here, you’re going to be mad about what you see. Why isn’t this that way, you keep telling yourself.

I let go of my cold sense of reason and could not help but feel something beyond what my rational mind would allow. I felt something that was strictly a human connection. Something that extended beyond any previous notions or limits my mind had set before. Something beyond, “This is India, deal with it.”

I walked out of dinner tonight at the Bhawani orphanage and strolled down the main hall. As I walked, I passed the classrooms/bedrooms on my right. I came up on a three-year-old child, leaning against the door of his communal room, with tears in his eyes. The look on his face didn’t express sadness over us, the ambassadors, leaving – he hadn’t smiled all trip – but it spoke to something much deeper. He missed his mother. It was an undeniable human emotion I could sense.

Other children had cried over us leaving but this was different. This wasn’t about us.

I walked up to him and tried to cheer him up. Nothing. No reaction. He looked at me and then his eyes went back to that long stare you’ll sometimes see in the kids hurting the most.

He was hurting so bad. He missed his mother. He missed something that he knew he couldn’t have right then. Or possibly ever again.

I immediately grabbed my computer and ran back to him to show him the digital pictures that the Indian kids loved so much. Surely, this would cheer him up.

Nope. Nothing. This kid was too sad to be cheered up.

Unfortunately, the time this was happening was the time we were leaving. It would be a long, long time before I would see this child again.

Over the next five minutes, I said goodbye to a lot of other children and I checked on this boy probably three times. The last time I checked, he had gone back into his bedroom/classroom and was sitting against the wall, with his hands on his head. His head was down. He was crying.

Here was a three-year old child, quietly sobbing by himself. He was completely alone. I kept waving to him to no avail. I grabbed a few older kids and asked them to cheer him up and watch after him. They agreed but to leave a child like that in that condition, almost nothing will make you feel better.

This feeling of helpless was overwhelming. And it had just hit me for the first time five minutes before we left our final orphanage.

I didn’t intensely miss all of the kids I had seen. This morbid feeling of helplessness arose inside of me when I saw this three-year old quietly crying by himself in the doorway. He was totally alone. Physically. Emotionally.

He wasn’t crying for attention. He wasn’t making any noise. No other child was comforting him. The house mothers simply weren’t in that room to help. You had to go out of your way to notice him. He was just sad.

I had to leave that boy crying by himself against the wall.

I was so busy earlier that day that I wasn’t able to get especially close to any one child. But today, when we arrived at 4 PM, one young boy took to me right away. Not the same boy who I had seen that night but another. I hadn’t spent much time with him but, for some reason, from the time I arrived today, he clung to me.

When I sat down, he came right up to me and put his arm around me. For the next five hours, he wasn’t more than ten feet from me. Whenever I sat down, he came up and looked me in the eye and I just knew I had to put my arm around him. He would put his arm around me and we would just sit. No conversation. Just the bond of two people, one of whom needed love so badly.

After seeing the lonely three-year old right before we were to leave, I jumped in the car and rolled the window down to say goodbye to everyone. I sat there for a few minutes while my fellow travelers loaded into the cars, waving to children and saying goodbye.

The boy that had attached himself to me came right up to the car and we held hands the entire time I was shaking hands with everyone else.

Now, this boy hadn’t said much to me before. We had pretty much hugged and held hands and that was the extent of our very silent relationship. In the ten minutes or so it had taken us to leave, he hugged me at least three times. He really, really wanted to be near me.

As we pulled away in the car, I’m still holding this boy’s hand. He grabs my hand even tighter, kisses it twice, looks up at me and says “I love you.” As we drive away, all I can manage is an “I love you!” back. I hope that was enough.

I had not said that to any other child on this trip.

We turn on to the main road of JSG, the small movie screen between the passenger seat and the driver comes down and the girls in the back start watching Indian music videos. I throw my dark sunglasses on (it’s 9 PM mind you) and the tears start to come down.

I’m not a crier by any means. Like I said, until tonight, my rationality and reason helped me avoid getting too close to the kids. Make no mistake, I felt genuine feelings for these children. It was fun playing with them and they sure were cute. I understood the monumental task before us to help these children and I was 100% motivated to accomplish that task.

But it hadn’t truly “hit me” yet.

Until a child looked me in the eyes and said, “I love you” as I drove away from him. Until I had to leave a three-year-old crying by himself.

Think about it. I’m a 25-year old guy who doesn’t even really like children. But on the final day of this trip, I cracked. I genuinely cried for two boys I had met three days before.

Oh my gosh, I never thought this would happen. Ever. The power of this place is absolutely amazing. Those of you who have travelled here know exactly what I mean.