When planning and hunches pay off...

...It is divine!! I have had the best two days ever! I didn’t get home from researching until half seven last night and then went out for dins straight away so didn’t have time for any blogging. Yes, I have been busy researching!

Yesterday I went to the volunteering organisation that I have been interested in working with here and they have been amazing! Exactly as I hoped that my org in Chennai would have been like but just soooo weren’t. These guys only deal with fisher people, and by default that means people who were affected by the Tsunami. They have their work and projects they have done all over their walls, and last night we went to see some of their work. I say ‘we’ because two other peeps, A and J, came to see about volunteering just after me and they are lovely! I am very happy! Weirdly though they are treated like VIPs because they have been referred by a US organisation that they found on the internet who funds a lot of this Indian org’s work, and I think that got lost in the translation and this organisation thinks they are actual representatives from the US NGO – rather than just peeps off the street! So I was pretty much hustled out of my meeting with them for these new volunteers from the mega-NGO ‘Vanda’ (not its real name :-b) and apparently talked at for two and a half hours! I want to be talked at for two and a half hours!! And they are always introduced as ‘from Vanda’ which is not actually true, and elicits quite a strange, sycophantic response from those who hear these immortal words. I wish they were used to introduce me but alas, this is not so. The sycophancy is in itself interesting to see though – aid-actor hierarchies, big-fish-little-fish and all that...

ANYWAY, back to my story, we went to this village in the middle of nowhere, via a very squashed bus (yes, I hung out of the door – woo!!) which we got off by a tree (of course you know, the Tree, everyone knows it is a bus stop!). We then caught a rickshaw taxi, which should seat six adults but actually seated eight and two children, for a couple of miles and got off again in the middle of nowhere. I would never make my own way there! And then we wandered down a little very tidy path until we reached a village and a teeny thatched building with a whole load of children in it at their after-school club. They sang and did maths for the people from ‘Vanda’ (and me, whatever), we were in a lot of photos (the day the ‘sponsors’ came to visit!! Eek) and were adorable as always. Then we made the long journey home on another very squashed bus. Fantastic. I have a lot of writing and thinking to do. The village wasn’t quite my target population but as an experience of aid at the very bottom level of the international food chain it was excellent to see. They also used educational kits from my last aid organisation I worked for (and summarised for marketing!) so was great to see them in action! And it joins the two experiences – what luck!

Today I had an idyllic day. I went to the volunteering org at about half eleven, after some brekky and a peruse of another room that is bigger, and cheaper than the one we have now, and worked reading their audit reports and annual reports until lunchtime. Then we all had a meeting when A and J (from ‘Vanda’!) arrived about what we could do for the org. A and J are just on holiday and love volunteering and can teach English so we are doing some of that with the adults and local teachers. On Saturday we are meeting local teachers working with the organisation and will set up a workshop to teach both English and ways of teaching English for them. I have no idea but am following J’s rather superb lead...

Then we all had lunch, they got us all a ‘meal parcel’ – takeaway lunch in the local style of rice on a banana leaf, dhal, sambar, veg, curry and a popadam – and ate on the floor with everyone in a ‘fellowship meal’. This is all what I missed in my org in Chennai – they would eat without me, and I even know everyone’s name in this office and knew none in my last. And I feel like a volunteer here, rather than as if I am on the payroll. I feel much freer. And they smile! And are keen to talk! Hurray!

After lunch I worked a bit longer on the reports (analysing focus of projects and use of language to later compare with INGO-speak, as well as learning what they did during the tsunami relief) and then left at four to go for a swim in a lovely pool at a local hotel. And then sunbathed and read for half an hour, then went back out at six to meet with A and J and talk through some teaching strategies... then ate some delicious mamos (Nepalese dumplings – heaven) for dins and now I am writing this, stuffed to the brim and really tired out! I have all sorts of pictures to annotate and thoughts to have but am so tired! Please don’t make me! I really am going to have to chill for now (is half nine) and then get some good sleep (hard here when the restaurant over the road starts setting up shop and dragging chairs all along the ground at 6.20am!) and move housey tomorrow to our new room, and start work! My days are going to get very long, but really this is GREAT! It means I am doing work! Am too tired to know what work and how it figures into anything but, it is WORK! And I have a guy at work who I can ask questions to, and he answers them and I get information! Hurrayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!

Tomorrow I will go and finish the reports I have been reading, possibly read through the parts I am not allowed copies of again, and then meet with A and J for more teaching plans, learn some Tamil with a couple of the girls from the office, and at around 5 will go out and see another project. That will probably be until about 7-8pm. Then write-up and dinner and bed!

Major problem is my lack of Tamil and also my strange accent. I sound extremely posh I have noticed on my tape recordings, and my words are very clipped and said strangely. I need to be more generic (in life too – what an annoying accent! When did I get this?!!). So I am not understood often. Arg!

Generally though, I have been here for coming up to the end of my second full day here and am feeling like I have been here or 5/6... Long may it last!

X J