Project Trip #2

Picking up where I left off...after hanging out it Chennai for a couple days, I picked up 2 volunteer architects from Hong Kong at the airport and met up with Matthew & Ivy, project leaders for the trip. The next day, we met up with another eMi team from the UK office, and the 12 of us loaded up in a mini-bus and took a 4-hour road trip to our home for the next week, thus beginning project trip #2 for me.

UK-India superteam

The ministry that we partnered with is known as KIM and is run by a widow of 13 years:

KIM already has 8 ministry centers throughout the state of Tamil Nadu, all of them with various functions (church, daycare, school, and vocational training, to name a few), and all of them sharing the general mission of empowering Indian women.

The ministry has recently been given a blank piece of land that will hopefully become a children's hostel and a hospice care center for elderly folks, which is where eMi comes in to help with the design. Our team checked out the site the first day, and the second day, I surveyed the site with Adam from the UK team.

Check out that farmer's tan.

That was about the extent of my work for the KIM project. The next day, I took a train with Matthew and 2 others to work with a different ministry called Mssionary Upholders Trust (MUT), whom eMi has been working with for about 5 years. They are a fairly unique ministry that focuses on meeting the needs of Indian Christian ministry workers through various means, but primarily through providing them a place to take sabbatical and get affordable health care.

MUT Campus

Head honcho at MUT

The MUT squad

The purpose of our visit was to check up on construction around the campus, provide a gentle nudge to take care of some water & wastewater issues on the site, and discuss future development of the campus.

...and do a little manual labor.

After our 3-day visit to MUT, our mini-team reunited with the rest of the team to finish up design for the KIM project and present our design to the KIM board of trustees.

A few more snapshots from the week:

Some guys let me take a turn with the cricket bat. I swung and missed twice.

Local wildlife.

The many fruits we ate throughout the week.

The south Indian dosa, my new favorite food ever.

And now, after another 2 days of traversing the subcontinent, I am back at the office in Mussoorie, eager to stay put for a little while. I really enjoyed my 3 weeks in Tamil Nadu on many levels - getting to explore the city of Chennai, getting to know a little about south Indian culture, meeting some fellow eMi folks from the UK, and discovering an incredible number of ministries that are doing legit Kingdom-building work in south India.