July Fourth in India

We celebrated a joint Canada Day / Independence Day on Sunday, with a potluck supper in the big residence dining hall -- about 50 staff and children, plus 15 summer school students (a special program required of incoming middle-school students whose English is not up to snuff, this year all from Korea). The school's food service supplied "barbeque chicken" (boneless tandoori-style chicken in a spicy sauce-- to my taste, more like Buffalo wings than bbq) and cake and coffee, and the dining hall. The usual potato salad, green beans, carrots, lasagna, meat (beef? i think it was mutton) stew, rice; but also some Japanese rice-balls, and kashmiri sweet rice dessert. We brought mixed vegetables and chili con carne(ground chicken, of course).
Afterwards we sat out by the Ridgewood basketball court for fireworks -- Jeff Rollins had purchased a big bunch, Rs3000 worth (all contributed a bit to the expense), and Chris and Cole, and Dan Rollins, as the oldest kids there, helped set them off, in a suitably responsible fashion. It included a few big rocket fireworks that were impressive -- but then the rain started falling, so we had to postpone the rest of them until a later date...maybe during the staff retreat in a couple weeks.
So the group scattered, with a few staying to watch a movie on the new big 30-inch TV at Ridgewood lounge.

Monday dawned surprisingly sunny, with just a bit of rain Monday night. A couple of other families -- the Huggs and the Cookes -- invited us to join them in taxis down to the water park in Dehra Dun (about 70 minutes' drive). We at first agreed, but then cancelled in order to get Coleman checked out:
Tuesday morning I took Coleman to see the doctor (as Woodstock health center is closed for the holidays, we went to the Landour Community Hospital), first ensuring that he had donated a stool sample in the old tylenol bottle. The school nurse met us at school, to give us the paperwork to take to the hospital, and I took him there on the scooter. We signed in, and I took the stool sample to the laboratory (as I had done a few times in the past year). We waited. An hour. The nurse apologized, said the lab report wasn't ready yet. I walked to the lab, asked the technician about it, she said she couldn't get the jar open, was waiting for her assistant to get a tool to open it! I turned the cap to the arrowpoint, flipped it open for her, and she was thankful. Another fifteen minutes, and the report came back, the young doctor apologized for the delay, and said that the report showed only a few bacterial cells, a mild case that would probably go away by itself. Especially as Coleman was reporting only occasional mild discomfort, with the primary symptom simply diarrhea, we agreed to wait a couple more days -- the doctor gave me a prescription for Cipro, to start taking if it's not better by Thursday.
I think we'll wait for Barb, to go together to the water park next week, maybe with some friends of Chris and Cole's age.