India 2.0

It is amazing how quickly we fell into a routine that became our new normal! Eat breakfast at the hotel (either an omelette with onions or curry-ish soup with potatoes) and have our morning tea (chai chai chai!) and then pile into a few tuk-tuks to head off to the school. (Some photos below stolen from fellow team members - thanks, guys!)

There was always more bamboo to cut!

On our way to a new bamboo field. 

This day was by far the hardest, as the field we harvested bamboo from also served as the toilet for the people of that village. Not the cows, not the buffalo, the human toilet. It was not pleasant. And we weren't able to get any help from the local villagers (we even offered to pay!) because there were women working, and men wouldn't work alongside us. That was a loooong morning. 

When you pile all of the bamboo on the tractor-trailer how do you get back to the school? Like this. 

Other projects include:

Building desks and benches. John (our resident Irish carpenter) works in front of a crowd. There was always a crowd. He also taught some local men how to make them also, so they can continue to make more into the future.

Digging a fish pond. At first it had to be 5 feet deep, and then 6. And then we were told to dig until we found water. The men did the lion's share of work at the end - I was by no means strong enough to throw shovels of sand up and out of that hole!

Yup, that entire thing was dug by hand!

The teacher will live at the school and the teacher's quarters was being built on the second floor (cool design!). That called for a staircase (out of bamboo, of course), and some corrugated metal for the roof (brought up via the bamboo staircase).

 

We had lunch every day at the school and it was good, and FRESH!

Sometimes there was Thums Up Cola for dessert :)

And sometimes there was a nap.

And every afternoon there was chai. Made with milk fresh from the goat, nonetheless!