Tuesday 7 June 2016

Today was our first day of volunteering! Most of the projects are based at the same complex so we headed there with Kranti in the morning. We saw the slum school, clinic and women empowerment programme which I am volunteering at. It was so nice to see them working hard to make things and everyone was so friendly!

After a while kranti asked if we would like to come to a fabric shop with her as she needed to buy some fabric for the women. We went and it was amazing! I ended up buying a sari! Its beautiful and the women are making me a blouse to go with it. I got some cushion covers too and then we headed back to the project for a while before going to the other volunteers' accommodation with Vishy for some lunch and to discuss our travel plans for our time here.

We got a tuk tuk back to our accommodation and then went to our local market for a juice. For some reason the poverty in India hasn't affected me as much as I had expected; people seem blissfully unaware that their slum homes are far from ideal and the sight of tiny slum children shouting "hi I love you" is just way less depressing than seeing a teenage drug addict lying on the streets of britain. However at the market some boys who were begging followed us for a bit before a local man told them to leave us alone. It was undoubtedly because we're clearly tourists, and Daniela, one of the other volunteers got followed for ages by a woman speaking Hindi so she bought her a juice which got rid of her!

We headed back to our accommodation and at 5 got picked up by a tuk tuk to visit monkey temple. It was a very bumpy journey and we stopped to buy bananas (50p's worth- 12) and then arrived. We walked around and fed the bananas out of our hands which was funny! They're all so greedy! People kept asking for photos with us and the bulk of our time there was spent smiling next to various members of a large family before going back in time for dinner.

We had a quiet evening after a busy day, playing cards with some medic volunteers (a big group are here from Abderdeen university) and then went to bed.

Laura x

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