Derek playing tears in heaven 2007

CXO Power Mile

My first race-CXO Power mile

Nov 30, 2008, I was drafted at the Thanksgiving dinner at the Hoda's the night before as I was distributing Cisco shirts to the runners. This race was intended to be a fun run with the CXOs around Bangalore. As with any race, most people tried their best. With no training, no proper shoes, no running shorts (I wore my tennis skirt), I gave it my best shot! This photos was taken by the Times of India photographer and was in the News Paper on December 1! I also finished first in the Women category. As you can see, there weren't many women running! But I did finish 5th overall so not bad for a tennis player with no training huh! The big race is the Bangalore Mid Night Marathon on December 13, 2008 which Cisco has now become an official sponsor! I will particpate on the relay team - will run my first 5K on that day!

Community Service - Parikrma School & Ashwini

We brought 30 kids from the Parikrma School (in green) and Ashwini (in red) to the Cisco campus for a full day of career training workshop. About 30 volunteers worked together to create the content and led the workshop. It was a great way to teach these kids how to find jobs, how to build their resume, how to interview, how to dress for success and basically how to compete with kids from the main stream.

It was very helpful and eye opening for all involved. We are making some improvements to the process and content and will get more volunteers involved to roll this workshop out to more kids who might benefit from this. A big hit for the workshop was getting them to introduce themselves over Telepresence. For many, it was the first time for them to use Telepresence and they got a big kick out of it!

Community Service-Indira Ganhdi School

One of our team member's wife owns a restaurant and his family catered lunch for 250 people! Normally these kids have a very basic meal of rice and beans and today they had all they can eat curry chicken, yogurt with cucumbers, curry lamb, Paneer with spinach, two kids of dal, chappati and Roti. Also they had an unlimited supply of these really sweet ball which the little ones loved. They just ate and ate!! We joined them and it was really satisfying to see them enjoy the food so much! Emily who normally is very picky had some chapati and roti and dipped a bit into my curry chicken.

These kids are so polite and behaved so well. I only wish that they can get a decent education and one day return home to their families. I encourage all of them to learn English as I believe they can get better jobs if they can speak Tamil and English.

This school is also in diring need of English teachers. Two of the people who came with us (Arjun and Kusong) have decided to volunteer a few days a week to teach them English. All in all, it was a really good day and my involvement with this school (like with Ashwini and the Parikrma School) will be on-going as I'm supporting Lakshmi Gopinath who is Gopi's wife and she's completely drawn to helping these kids. I feel the little contribution I make can be put to good use because I trust that Lakshmi will make maximum use of whatever I raise for this school.

I'm also so pleased that Emily has been involved with me with each of these charities. I want Emily to grow up knowing that we have a responsibility to help those in need and a little bit of our efforts can go a long way.

Community Service- Indira Ganhdi School

This is another school I sponsor. Indira Ganhdi School is a refugee school for the kids from the war torn region of Sri Lanka. Many of these kids have lost one or both of their parents and they are sent to this boarding school to get away from the war. When I started the work with this school, most of the kids don't have shoes! I started a fund raising and provisions drive to get people to donate money, shoes, clothes...etc. We ended up with enough money to buy all 234 kids new slippers, backpacks, school supplies, tennis shoes and clothes...etc. Here you can see the kids with their new backpacks, uniform and shoes!

I brought a team of folks from Cisco and Emily on November 14 to celebrate Children's day with them. They put up a lovely performance, recited poems and I delivered a speech about shoes and dreams. Basically I told them to think about shoes as a symbolic thing. I want each of them to have a dream about getting good jobs (wearing different kinds of shoes) when they grow up and encourage them to stay in school and study hard. Emily approved of the speech.

Community service

Community service - government school

One of the charities we support is the mid day school meal program for government schools. We are sponsoring 6000 kids to have a hot meal at school through an NGO. The students are mostly from the slums of Bangalore. For many of them, this is their only meal for the day. The executive team led by Wim went out to the school on November 12 to serve lunch to about 200 kids.

Kodi's First Birthday Party

We must really be bored out of our minds to celebrate Kodi's birthday!

Kodi's First Birthday Party

Kodi, our puppy's birthday

Kodi, our puppy's birthday party

Our puppy Kodi turned 1 on November 3, 2008. Emily and I organized a party for a bunch of dogs Kodi's friends with and Emily's friends. We had a total of 5 dogs and 13 kids! We played three rounds of games with the dogs at the dog park. Round 1 was tricks and Sally, Sam's dog won. Round 2 was obedience and it was a tie between Dee Dee and Kodi. Aakash was Kodi's coach and he used a treat to get Kodi to nod and shake his head to questions like 1: Do you support Obama? 2. Do you like McCain? Emily made Dee Dee stay for three palm tree lengths! Round 3 was a race and Sally won again. It was a fun day for the dogs and the kids. The dogs were all sent home with dog treats. We had all kinds of forbidden stuff, jelly beans, chocolate kisses, taffy and lollipops! I'm sure all the kids were on a sugar high for the whole week!

We had lunch outdoors - Beverly made vegetables, macaroni with fresh grated cheese and chicken drumsticks!

Derek at 15

We took this picture in Beijing the week before Derek started school in Shanghai. Derek' two weeks from turning 15.

Terrible landing

Our hot air balloon landing was very bad. We instead of the road, we landed in a corn field not far from the Temple of Hatshepsut (you can see it in the distance). There was so much commotion, the cars were chasing the balloons (as there were so many and all are landing in different places), the farmers are yelling and the tourist are just laughing and screaming.

The basket smashed up the corn field and the wind took us into the air again. There were 6 people on the ground pulling our balloon back down and we eventually landed in a different spot.

The kids all came on their donkeys and they love the skittles. We were going to rain skittles from the air but decided to hand them to the kids!

Luxor - on the way back to the ship

After the hot air balloon ride, we went back to the Crown Jubilee by a ferry across the Nile. After taking hundreds of photos, the kids have finally had it! This concluded our Dubai Egypt trip. We went shopping again, bought lots of gadgets. Emily and I each got a necklace, we bought a mummy with a baby mummy inside, a big pyramid, an obelisque and of course more camels!

We bid farewell to the Ingrams who were staying one more day, flew from Luxor to Cairo with a 5 hour layover, then to Dubai and then back to Bangalore.

It was fine as we ate our way back. We had inside out pizza, whoppers and lots of chocolate! It was a great trip by all measures. I am still amazed at the beautiful pictures and wonderful memories we've shared with our good friends. Traveling with another family is the way to go.

Hot Air Balloon Ride

We woke up at 4.30am to catch a boat to cross the Nile to head back to the Valley of the Kings to board our first hot air balloon ride. The experience was amazing and the sights wonderful. We were able to see the sun rise over the Nile on the one side and the Temple of Hatshepsut on the other. The most exciting part was the landing. Our balloon ended up landing in a corn field. The wind was too strong so our basket was dragged along quite a ways over the corn field. We smashed up a whole bunch of corn and two farmers came over to yell at us. In the mean time, local boys all came over to join the commotions. They came on donkeys as quickly as they could!

I gave them skittles while they really enjoyed!