wedding

We experienced our first Indian wedding last night!! It was kind of a spur of the moment thing, but we put on our indian clothes, well tried to, and got in the car. We didn't actually go to the ceremony part of the wedding, we went to the groom's reception (the groom's mother goes to the church we are going to.)  A normal wedding sometimes lasts up to 7 days. They have all the before the wedding ceremonies like putting henna on the bride's hands and feet, and then they have the actual ceremony which normally takes place in their home state, and then they come back to Delhi for the receptions. The bride has one first, and then on another night the groom has his. We didn't get there until 9:30, but the party was just getting started. As we were walking in there were people dancing like CRAZY!!!! And the bride and groom had to sit and watch everything go on and take a bazillion pictures, neither of them looked very happy. The guy we were with said the bride has probably sat for seven days, they are not allowed to do anything but sit there. Doesn't seem very fun to me. After taking pictures with the bride and groom even though we didn't know them, we went into the back tent to eat, and the food was so spicy but good..! There were street kids who were sneaking in under the sides of the tent and trying to get some free food, the workers were trying to catch them and kick them out. But most of them got away with a good amount of food. As we were eating Kate and I started to hear some familiar music, they were playing reggaeton and 50 cent, but remix's of every song, so after hearing that we decided that we needed to join in on the dancing crazyness, and we did. We walked out onto the dance floor and everyone was watching us, probably thinking what are these white girls doing dressed in Indian clothes on the dance floor. But we made friends with these younger girls, and they taught us how to dance Indian! We had so much fun, it was an amazing experience. They had a video camera man and a photographer, and they were capturing all of our dance moves!!! Hah.

We are getting introduced to the idea of arranged marriage, it sounds like torture to me. The wedding we went to was an arranged one, and neither bride nor groom looked excited, we didn't see them even crack a smile. It is like getting married to a complete stranger...scary. Most families here marry their kids off at a very young age. I am so glad that we get the chance to chose who we want to spend the rest of our lives with... 

Before the wedding we had gone to church, which we were 45 minutes late to but the service still hadn't started yet. It reminded us of being in Africa and arriving 3 hours late to a college graduation and it still hadn't started. I guess that's how they do it in other countries!! :)  In church we got to see our first healing!!! It was amazing. 

Today we taught again at the Mahavier Enclave school, and we took the older kids, and in the classroom we had it was a small room but there was no lights, so we taught in complete darkness with the help of a small candle that burned out quickly and actually caught paper on fire (we almost burned down the whole place.) It was an interesting day...