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.

Chillin in Chennai

After my comrades from project trip #1 left to go back to our office in Mussoorie, I had a couple days to hang out in Chennai by myself while waiting for the next project team to arrive. Here is a brief pictorial summary of my activities for the 2 days:

Sight-seeing:

(From top to bottom: Santhome Cathedral, where Saint Thomas is supposedly buried; statue of the great Mahatma Gandhi-ji; and a large Hindu temple)

Golfing:

The course wasn't nearly as nice as it looks, but the novelty of golfing in India was easily worth the $7 I spent on it.

Making friends with my blond hair and blue eyes:

This guy was quite the comedian and made me take his picture.

Going to the beach:

This was people-watching paradise, and probably my favorite activity of the two days. I liked it so much I went 3 times.

Riding in rickshaws:

This was my least favorite activity, mainly because of the extravagant fares I had to pay and the hassle of negotiating prices. On this particular ride, the driver insisted he take my picture in front of his rickshaw.

That's my mini-vacation in a nutshell. I found it pretty enjoyable trying to navigate a big new city by myself, figuring out where to go and what to do, and it was a nice break between projects. Stay tuned for an update on project trip #2.

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.

Some other pics from the week:

The whole school meets for morning assembly every day before class. Poor kid forgot his uniform.

Our team, plus the principal and his wife on the left.