May 15, 2010

Our beds. A little height restrictive, but fairly comfortable.


The past few days have had some high highs. Mostly record high times and temps. We’ve got to wake up around 4-5am two days in a row as well as high temperatures of around 45 degrees Celsius again. That is 113 degrees people. 113. That’s not even acknowledging our friend, mr. humidity. I’m pretty sure the weatherman would agree that it feels like 150 degrees outside. Regrettably, outside weather comes inside. We moved into our place Thursday and got some of our furniture delivered. I found a room, brought in my air cooler (basically a glorified air humidifier), opened my window and fell asleep. I then began the most uncomfortable night sleep in the history of mankind. I was a sweating mess, tossing and turning all. Night. Long. At four a.m. I took this photo:

and couldn’t wait until 5am so we could wake up and take the train for a meeting. We left at 5am and got home at 6:30pm. We had a 2.5 hour train ride out to Kijara (?) it’s about 75km east of Hyderabad.

In kijara we met with this guy who was really nice but took 4 hours to eventually explain that he wants a lot of money from us to support his staff. It was a total waste of time except that he explained some nuances with working in India, mostly discouraging comments, but realistic as well. So, we were really anxious to leave by the time our looong meeting adjourned. We got out at 1pm after being fed again. I was really agitated and when our host sent out for ice cream after I told him we needed to be home in an hour 3 times. Then I kind of loved the ice cream. It was butterscotch and tasted like it had crushed up werthers originals inside. So naturally, I was full of conflicted emotions at that point. We left around 1:15 and didn’t get on our 2:40 train til 3:45. There was a monkey and it’s baby on the train tracks and lots of beggars, who kept breaking my heart each time I saw them. We finally boarded and paid extra for A/C again and the sleeper cart. It is completely worth the extra money for AC and I took a solid powernap during the travels.
Today we also woke up at 4am to pick up two of our volunteers. Kiira and Marie. They are really cool girls so it’s going to be a lot of fun for the next month setting the program up with them.