I had met a German woman on my travels, who knows a German woman, who knows another German woman, who has volunteered in a Slum NGO in India, whose director knows the director of a children’s hospital. And indeed I found myself on the way to that children hospital in Baroda, Gujarat, having organised a bouncy castle day on Good Friday. I was driving towards Baroda right on the day of the Holi festival. On this particular day, people throw colors at each other, everybody gets really colourful and freaks out a bit. What a wonderful opportunity to escape my gray day-to-day life ;)

The problem was, I had had some problems with my car engine in the morning, so I feared the engine would not start again if I switched it off. Sadly, I passed all the colourful people dancing to blasting music, knowing that I could not stop to take part. The bouncy castle was more important though! I arrived at the hospital, parked my car and indeed, the engine would not start again. My sacrifice had been for a reason! And at least the bouncy castle had arrived at its destination.

Fixing my battery

The hospital staff offered me a free room to stay, and I have never slept so good in a hospital, nor ate better cantine food. Just delicious!
In the morning, we pushed the car for 100 meters to the designated bouncy area and set up the castle. The kids from the physio-therapy lesson gathered on the castle, and were soon joined by the kids from the hospital’s special school for children with all kinds of disabilities.
As everything was quite relaxed, I took the time and started to look into my car battery problem. The hospital’s driver showed up and fixed everything in an eye-blink. Yeah!

After lunch break, the children from a nearby slum had arrived and were quite happy when I plugged the cable in and the bouncy castle began to rise again. And on top, the nurses had heard about my misfortunate Holi, and had brought some leftover colors. So I got colorful a bit as well finally!

The rest of the day was very relaxed, some hospitalized kids showed up, I gave a little interview to a newspaper journalist. I enjoyed once more the delicious cantine food and left Baroda for the next bouncy destination: Rishikesh!