At Shanti Bhavan(and throughout India as well), the clothes are from donations. Thus, the fashion of India and the children here is often quite interesting. The girls wear a lot of "80s" and "90s" clothes. All their dresses are those awful dresses that our mothers made us wear back in day...the poofy sleeves, the petticoats underneath, the lace, the flower patterns, etc. The clothes are such an eclectic mix of things with random sayings/words on them. For example, I saw a little girl wearing a pair of sweats that said, "Flight me, I'm Irish," not quite sure what that means. You also see a lot a sports teams, past school sweatshirts(embroidered with other people's names), the occasional sorority/fraternity tshirt, and some costumes(one girl wears a Halloween cheerleading outfit). The older girls and boys dress nicer and many of the boys have button down shirts and the older girls wear jeans.
They obviously do not have many clothes or a choice, so I have come to learn the children's names by their clothes. One little girl has a dress that looks like its from West Side Story and her name is Maria, so it's perfect! Most of their clothes are not in bad shape...its the shoes that are beaten up badly. Soles are falling off, holes in the toes, etc. are often what their shoes look like. I was thinking about contacting Toms and seeing if a "shoe drop" is possibly at Shanti Bhavan.
The fashion outside of Shanti Bhavan is the same...lots of bedazzled jeans(boys are the ones wearing them). Females often only wear Indian clothes while the men are in "Western" clothes.
Funny Story: The other day I was walking back to my dorm at night and saw a 12th grader wearing a shirt that looked awfully familiar. As I got closer I realized it was the shirt from my sophomore year Dance Composition class at Santa Clara University! I was the one that designed that shirt and my cousin George did the silkscreening! There have been a lot of Santa Clara alums that come here, but none of them were in the class. It was really weird to see him wearing the shirt I designed...I almost brought that shirt and we could've be twins. haha This incident reminded me of when I went to a small town in Austria called St. Johann in 2006. I was eating lunch at one of the cafes and I saw a man wearing the volunteer shirt from South Pasadena's Summer Reading Program. I was a volunteer at the library and could not believe he had the same shirt as me. Turns out he got it at a thrift store in LA. How weird that the same thing has happened to me twice!
