It's been a little while, and I know many of you are sitting in front of your computer screens dying in anticipation of my next blog post, so here you go.
I'm starting my 3rd week of work here, and things are just now starting to pick up. The first two weeks have been fairly slow; I designed septic systems for a couple of our ongoing projects, but other than that there wasn't much to work on. This week I am mostly just preparing for our 2-week project trip to the northern state of Punjab (near the Pakistan border), which begins on Friday.
A little background on how things work around here: all of our design projects begin with a 1-2 week trip to meet with the client (usually another ministry in south Asia) to hear about their ministry, figure out the programming needs for their new facility (school, hospital, orphanage, etc.), survey the site, and develop an initial master plan for the site. Then we return to our office and spend the next 2 months developing the architectural and civil design, finalizing the master plan, and writing a final report to hand over to the client, who goes on to build their facility using our plans. My role for the upcoming project will be to help with the civil design – water supply and wastewater systems – for a new school. I'm really looking forward to meeting face-to-face with the ministry directors and hearing how G-d is working in India, and also just to get some good field experience as a civil engineer.
This past weekend, I went on a little jaunt to Delhi with my roommate and fellow intern Pavan for a conference on science and faith hosted by India’s equivalent of Intervarsity. We planned on taking the 1-hour taxi ride and 6-hour train ride to arrive late Thursday night, but for the first 12 hours of our trip, just about everything went wrong. We missed our train due to a little confusion about how military time works…Pavan lost his iPod in the taxi (but recovered it a few days later)…we arrived at 4 AM in Delhi only to find that a terrorist threat had blocked off the street where our hotel was, so we had to pay an absurd amount of money for a few hours at a different hotel…we again had confusion about the difference between “AM” and “PM” and set our alarms wrong, woke up late and missed the first couple sessions of the conference…and nobody at the conference hotel seemed to know a thing about the conference. It was a ridiculous series of events.
BUT, the rest of the weekend was amazing. Pavan and I were the only Americans among a group of about 40 young Indians, many of whom I got to know pretty well. Two Cambrige professors led the conference along with an Indian professor, an Indian engineer, and an American professor. They mainly discussed the origins of life and addressed the topic from a variety of perspectives – historical, biblical, theological, biological, cosmological, and sociological. It was really intellectually stimulating and over my head at times, but I came away with a lot of answers, and even more questions. More than anything, I learned how much I don’t know.
One highlight of the weekend was practicing with the Delhi ultimate frisbee team on Saturday. Pavan discovered the team recently, played with them once, and is now the captain, so I tagged along. They don’t come close to the best collegiate teams in the U.S. in terms of talent (after all, it’s an American sport), so I was able to hang with them. They even semi-asked me to join them for a tournament in March in southern India, which I’m considering going to.
In case you forgot what I look like, on the right is a picture of me halfway through FebuHairy, a month-long holiday celebrated by eMi interns all over the world. (If you squint your eyes and look really close, you’ll notice my manly blond beard.)
