Jai Ho: Project Trip #1

As of Sunday night, I am back “home” in Mussoorie after more than 3 weeks of working on projects in southern India. As you can tell by the lack of updates, internet access was hard to come by while I was away, so I'll try to recap with words and pictures my life over the past few weeks...and I think it will take a few blog posts.

After 2 days of travel by train and taxi, our team of 2 engineers and 2 architects arrived in Chennai, the largest city in the state of Tamil Nadu. We spent a night there and met up with an Indian engineer and an Indian architect, who served as volunteers for our project trip, before heading out to the Kings and Queens School, where we stayed for a week. The school is run by an Indian man and his wife, and they currently provide housing and K-10 education to 264 kids, most of whom are children of Indian Christian ministry workers serving all over India.

Currently, classes are held in temporary structures, in the dorms where kids sleep, or on top of piles of sand (see below), but they will need new, permanent classrooms within 2 years to keep their government registration. They are also hoping to build a new community center that will provide vocational training for people in nearby villages. Hence the need for EMI's help with planning and design.

My 1^st day there was spent expelling all my food from the previous few days (both ends), but I was feeling much better by the 2^nd day. Most of my week on site was spent working on the survey, taking lots of pictures of the site, and figuring out civil design issues - how to get enough drinking water to the site and how to deal with the wastewater. Meanwhile, the architects were busy talking with the principal and his wife, planning the location of future buildings and the details of each building. At the end of the week, we gave a presentation of our design work to that point, and now the rest of the project drawings and report will be completed back at our office.

One of the highlights of the week for me was having 264 kiddos running around the site while we were working. I played soccer with the older boys almost every day, and by the end of the week, they were waking me up at 5:30 AM to play with them.

Towards the end of the week, once we had finished most of our design work, we spent half a day playing games with the kids – duck-duck-goose, sharks and minnows, red-light-green-light, spud, soccer, etc. The boys were split up from the girls, and most of the boys' games deteriorated into wrestle-mania, which isn't too surprising. Everyone seemed to enjoy it quite a bit.

Also, on our last day at the school, a Sunday, our team was asked to plan and lead the worship service for all the students and staff. So our brave project leader Graham did the preaching, and I helped lead worship with some backing vocals.

I obviously don't have a lot of experience with microphones.

We also gave a short presentation to all the students about what architects and engineers do, and I'm pretty sure I convinced more than a few kids to become engineers when they grow up.