India Charlie 5...
Let me catch up with the last couple of weeks. Firstly, the volunteers arrived. My group, India Charlie 5, was formed. They are all great people, and enthusiastic about our project! We have 8 x UK volunteers and 4 x Indian - consisting of 10 girls and 2 boys; the lucky things. We spent 4 days at field base training them on all the things we had learnt over the previous couple of weeks. The team leaders got split in to 2 teams, as there are too many volunteers to run all the projects at once. I'm in the first team, so it was a bit sad to say goodbye to the second team until the day before we fly in September when we will meet again...
Anyway, India Charlie 5...here we are, all packed and ready to head to our village, a mere 5 hour road trip across some windy roads and up some steep tracks to reach Kokkal.
Upon reaching our village midday the following day, we were met with a sea of people dressed in white. As we approached them they started banging their drums and leading us up in to the village. They then sat us down on plastic chairs and performed a welcome ceremony for us. It was really quite amazing and hard to explain what it was like.
One of our first tasks in the village was to build ourselves a long drop. This took a little longer than we had anticipated but luckily everyone managed to cross the legs for the duration, so no accidents were had - other than me accidentally kneeling in some actual human diarrhea (a villagers, not one of the volunteers). Oh yeah, that was a good moment. This is long drop #1 - we are now on our #3...the more improved and larger model.
In Kokkal, the women start to wear their traditional dress when they reach the age of 20. They also start to do their hair in a traditional style at the same time. In the first week we spent a lot of time visiting the locals and getting to know them, drinking chai with them and performing for them at their will. My dancing skills (or lack of pride) have come in handy for such situations. One of the ladies demonstrated the hair style for me too...
Our village is in a beautiful location. In between the rain and wind we have managed to take some time to explore the area. A few of the locals took us on a trek one morning up to a viewpoint. Along the way we saw wild monkeys and met a herd of buffalo who almost trampled us.
The first phase of the project so far has been mainly based around getting to know the village and the villagers, finding out about the history of Kokkal and conducting some Participatory Rural Appraisals (PRA) to find out what the greatest needs in the village are and what we can do whilst we are here to help. We have found out lots of information and already started teaching English for 10 - 14 year olds in the local school and planned some sports clubs and a toothbrush club to start when we return back to the village in a couple of days. The building part of the project will also begin soon. This week we had an architect visit to come and draw up plans for the new building and we should get a copy of the completed plan this week so we can start ordering materials and getting ready for the demolition of the existing building.
Generally all has been well in Charlie 5, but we have had a few medical incidents, one of which involved me spending a night in a local hospital with a volunteer. Drinking water is not my biggest skill, but here I am trying my best to be a good example as we have had at least 4 volunteers ill and puking from dehydration - we can't all be blessed with such hardy bodies as mine.
One of the other exciting events from our village has been a wedding. Last weekend a girl in our village got married to a man from one of the other Kota tribes in our village and our team was invited. It was a really hot day and was interesting to see the rituals and traditions they follow in their wedding ceremonies. The first 'tradition' we noticed was that the house that the bride was from hooked up a massive speaker 24 hours before the wedding ceremony and blasted out Indian music at top volume across the village the whole day/night before the event.
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| The Bride and Groom |
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| Some of the local kids dancing to the music at the wedding, on the roof |
We are now back at field base for a couple of days before we head back to the village on Monday. Yesterday we had the day off in Mysore and the next couple of days there is some training for the volunteers.
During the second phase, as well as starting the construction of the Mense House, we will also be setting up some more activities for the children in the village, holding a general health camp, an eye camp and a vet camp and hopefully organising some home stays for the volunteers. It's all very busy, but a 'good' busy. The weather is generally raining and windy, interspersed with the odd hot day sent to dehydrate the volunteers.
Here are a few pictures from the last 3 weeks...
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| This is where we are staying, the girls upstairs and the kitchen and boys room is downstairs. We shower in the blue tarpaulin area and wash our clothes and hair in the stream behind the building. |
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| Chillis drying in the sun |
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| Remya enjoying the wedding meal |
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| It's tradition to draw black spots on small children's faces. The local people believe that is bad luck for people to say their children are beautiful, so they draw spots on them so they are not. |
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| The stream where we wash our hair |
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| Local women doing their washing in the stream |
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| Learning how to make chappattis with the local women |
