Getting Missionarised

A long awaited saturday and I find myself playing basketball with friend cum coach justajester (he paid me for writing this line) at the medical college grounds at 8 30 in the morning. A phone call from a colleague was wat it took to remind me abt the important assignment for the day. A team visit to the missionaries of charity as part of what is called Corporate Social Responsibility.
Although the initial member influx was huge, the number narrowed down to 10 on the d day of the visit.
But the team is well bred to counter such in time assaults, why, we bear an anchor who plans every event but never really shows up.
So i was at the gates of the missionaries at 9 after a quick bath.
My team mates were already in, the serenity of the place makes it hard to believe that they house more than 50 children in there. I stepped into a room full of cribs, and cute babies, most of them months old slept peacefully on cushy blankets. Some had woke up and were looking at me with their wide button eyes, I walked up to the next room to find 7 children in beds, they lay there, never moved and some where weeping constantly as if in great pain, they were mentally disabled, mostly abandoned, and were bedridden for a lifetime. Later the nun told me that they would be taken care of till aparticular age and would be moved to a rehab centre. These children are never adopted and would spend their entire lifetime with the nuns. A serious lack of logistics for physiotherapy and treatment of these children was visible, but atleast they are getting good food and kept clean. A professional physiotherapist would be far out of range for these people and the nuns would take up the job themselves.
I could hear chitter chatter from the adjacent corridor and peeked in to find the tiny tots (most vibrant age group of 3-12) waiting there after their morning ablutions, they had seen the toys through the windows and that was the reason for the commotion. Within minutes the place was strewn with coulourful toys, balloons, inflatables.

Most of them dint have any reservations, they were used to mingling with the frequent visitors... one of my colleagues was seen with atleast 3 children hanging on to his neck. I tried to settle down with the less riskty job of inflating balloons for the children, only to find myself later in a turmoil.
The problem was the size of the balloons, the ones who had the smaller ones wanted theirs to be readjusted to match the size of the bigger ones, i had to do it and ended up hunting down new concepts in precision inflation mechanism.
In the mean time on girl walked up to me in a very brisk manner and asked me to dance, she was definitely more than 10 yrs of age and was really smart, later I came to know that her name was rajini and was from andhra, she had landed up in northern kerala and was forced to beg in bus stands . She used to have a daily target of Rs 500 and got beaten up badly if she dint make it. One day at a railway station , in the same way she walked up to a nun and told her that she was going with her who took it to be a joke and agrred, but as the train left the station, she climbed in to end up here.
One thing I noticed about thse children is that they are smart and have a lot of self respect. They dont like to be fiddled with, once i was answering rajinis smart questions and I lied to her, later when she came to know that i had given false info she was really cross and said
You are a monkey:).
But that makes me happy, next time she wouldn't face much problem in recognizing the lone monkey in the group.