Fizz, Fizz, What a relief retirement is!

Hello Friends

A very happy new year to all of you! It has been a long time since I wrote to you- my move to Coimbatore has been the best since my relocation to India. I love the simple lifestyle, quiet surroundings, enjoying the natural beauty of trees, flowers, birds that keep me enthralled and aware of how wonderful it is to be home again.

My greatest pleasure right now is my retirement from corporate life as of December 31, 2013. It is such a relief to be out of the rat race although in India it wasn't as bad. Now I can focus on my next phase of life - finding some property, building a home for myself and a training centre for village women. My dream of "Paying it Forward" has been delayed but not quashed yet. The series of events over the last three years in India has taught me to develop a lot of patience, learned to deal with a greater level of ambiguity, understanding that people don't always respond in a timely manner or at all and that ‘what's meant to be will be’... These are not easy lessons especially for a highly energetic and hot headed woman like me! Perhaps the universe is helping me learn to live in harmony with and incorporate some of the simplistic and relationship oriented values of village life.

I have started using my free time engaging in activities that help me build on my long term desire to support the underprivileged community. I have volunteered to provide spoken English classes on Saturdays at a middle school not far from my current home. I had 40 students from 6^th to 8^th grade with very varying levels of understanding and speech fluency. I bought posters with pictures and started with a number of questions that are possibly so very basic for us but incredibly helpful for these students. They love to scream out their responses and I had to raise my voice to discipline them about side talk! They were not familiar with nursery rhymes- so I had a little fun with a poster that had a few of them. I have recommended to the headmistress that I need to meet each grade separately in order to make this meaningful to them.

I am also providing customer service modules for a hospitality course run by an NGO called Unnati. They train students for 70 days preparing them for careers in hospitality, para-medical and retail sales. So hotels, hospitals and retail companies provide the sponsorship and Unnati engages volunteers to provide the training for 4 days of the week and they work as interns at the respective sponsor locations for 3 days a week. Then these ‘graduates’ get placed in the company

The biggest challenge here is that most of the students have only completed their high school in the local medium of instruction and are expected to be able to converse in English as well! So I use signs and slow talk in English to get them to understand my communication- then I have them role play various customer interactions. I am amused at my own pronunciation of words that seem to be familiar to their ears and gets them to smile at my efforts! They seem to be engaged and interested in learning to speak even if it is a faltering speech- after all we all started somewhere and practice gets us to a greater level of confidence!

I am also providing customer service training at a friend’s resort outside Chennai in a tourist town called Mahabalipuram also called Mamalapuram- she moved from Vancouver back to India after selling her popular Indian restaurant and has created a great restaurant L’Attitude 49 that features global cuisine. Check out her web site www.grandebayresort.in

I am still working out the bureaucracy around getting some property and hope to have some positive response in a month or so. I have learned so much about doing business in India- I had so many unanswered questions about what a person who is a citizen of the US but with an overseas citizenship of India allowed to do in terms of land ownership- interestingly, I found a free legal forum www.pathlegal.in where you can post your question and lawyers from all over the country will attempt to give you a legal opinion- if you pay a minimal amount like $6 you will get even more opinions and can keep asking additional questions on the topic for 48 hours! You can then rate the lawyers’ opinions and if you paid for the service, your payment is divided among them!

I have been reading about the extreme weather conditions in the US and hope that all of you are managing well. We have a mild climate right now with temps in the upper 80s- 90s during the day and in the 60s at night. I will be attending a family reunion in March in Kochi where my sister lives- the remaining siblings from my family (6 of us) will get an opportunity to catch up on life, reminisce and share about our past and enjoy some great Kerala cooking since my sister is a wonderful cook.

I am slowly getting better movement of my shoulder after rotator cuff repair surgery- physiotherapy is not easy- but absolutely necessary to regain my use of the right arm! So I try to get to the Ortho Centre at least every other day to get scolded by the physiotherapist for not doing all the exercises and he makes me stay there for supervised attention for an hour!

Hope to hear from you when you get a chance- in the meantime have a great Valentine’s Day!