India 2

The Dog is Mightier than the Monkey


Bangalore still


Writing Friday, September 28, 2007, but reporting matters of Thursday...

I was visiting schools and a clinic that my company is supporting for (very) poor children in India.

The workshop project we are involved in is making cable assemblies and low voltage switches which we use in our products in a factory a few km down the road. More India photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamroscoe/sets/72157602230328682

The girls are all orphans and disabled and are looked after in a hostel and do paid work for us. They have a 100 percent quality record and we pay them the going rate for the work! A real win-win and a proper good sustainability project, in my view - giving people wages and self-respect.

The pic of the guy and the dog is amusing - mainly because the minute i saw the dog on the roof of the school i started to back away as I had been told to avoid dogs because of rabies...(Please see: Pink Panther, Peter Sellers scene: Does your dog bite? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXn2QVipK2o) I checked my jabs...and it was a good job I avoided the dog.

Anyway - the guy in the pic is the school principal and explained that they liked this dog, because as long as he was lounging around under the tree, it stopped the monkeys coming into the school...

Never a problem at my school - there again, 50 to a class and having to take lessons sitting on the floor wasn't a problem there either. :-(

Doctor Anand Jain (pictured) works for free, but has a clinic in the hotel where i am (you can get a facelift or eye-bags eliminated here in a full operating theatre) and also works in one of the city hospitals. Top guy. He had just diagnosed one woman with TB and arranged for her to go to hospital.... I checked my jabs.

India

Greetings from Bangalore

Let's just say, I am just trying to get used to the idea that I will never get used to India...
I flew to Mimbai Friday morning, arriving here 10pm, then off for Vadodara by plane Saturday morning, overnight in Vadodara, then flights to Mumbai Sunday morning and then immediately off to Bangalore for lunch with my host's family.

So here I am in a proper nice 'otel and on the route here there were families living under blue plastic sheeting and begging in the street, cows in the street chewing on cardboard boxes; dirt and filth everywhere. Difficult for me really – but not 1% as difficult as it is for them. I cannot believe we live on the same planet as these poor, poor souls.

My company is supporting some schools in Vadodara; some of the pics show the school and kids - only about one in 10 had shoes... :-(

The kids’s parents are day labourers and if they weren’t at school, these children would be begging on the street - the older girls of about 12 or 13 may well be prostitutes by now.

The school is the one place they can get one decent meal a day, so it was really moving to be there. I was asked to inaugurate their renovated building (that we had funded) on Saturday and I did a traditional ‘ribbon-cutting’ and they sang and danced for the ‘honoured guests’ – apparently I was one of them. And they gave me a little gift of Genasha on a tin plate that they had painted. Was there a tear in my eye? I leave you to wonder... On a lighter note, there was a fantastic collection of bats in the rafters of the school which i noticed swaying to the rhythm of the kids' singing during the ceremony

Monday:

I left Bangalore in rush hour today - normally i should report 'near misses' in terms of health and safety...but after 255 near misses in the first hour on the road, I gave up. The driving here is horrendous, but luckily, moving so slowly that accidents seem to be just 'bumps'....even with pedestrians.

I visited two sites today - one a substation, which was replacing one built during the rule of the Prince in 1932 and the other a rural electrification scheme where the guys are stringing new wires. They get GBPounds2 a day as a labourer and GBPounds3 a day if they are skilled.

This is a living wage here. The women's hats have flat tops to allow them to carry baskets of stone on their heads for making up the roads and paths on the site.

I was also honoured (constantly) with fresh coconut juice, but my host told me not to drink too much as it will turn my stomach. (I think he meant it will give me the shits, but was too polite to say).

Lunch was served off banana leaves at a roadside cafe was absolutely wonderful. Rice steamed in banana leaves and superb chutneys and relishes.

And everyone is so fascinated to see a white person in the middle of nowhere in a funny white safety hat. I was also asked to give away some prizes to those who were showing 'safety leadership' in their teams.