Debbie's Placement in India 2018

Monday began with a bit of excitement for Alex and me as Alex spotted our first Indian snake! I wasn't quick enough with my camera to get a decent photo, but it was very beautiful. Alex managed to get a better picture with his phone, which is on his blog here . After breakfast, we headed out to the field again with Manni, and Ronny also joined us. Manni took us first to Somandepalli village, where we met up with Radha, another of the SEDS fieldworkers who lives in Somandepalli. Manni had brilliantly organised for Radha to arrange a visit to the machine looms , just a couple of hundred metres from Radha's home, and where her husband works.  This is the final part of the silk process, so it was very interesting to see this work having previously seen the sericulture. The only part we haven't now seen is the processing of the raw silk into silk threads, and the dying process. As all of the workers were men, so I was the only other female, Radha took my ba...

Unfortunately a couple of my kurti tops had shrunk in the wash, despite me only using a cold hand wash to clean them. It turns out that the fabric they were stitched from does shrink a lot, so ideally it should soaked overnight before being measured and cut to make garments. The tailors who sewed my outfit obviously didn't do this however, and so the kurtis have shrunk significantly and are now quite difficult to put on and take off, and quite restrictive to wear!! I therefore arranged with Basha the tailor, from the SEDS production centre, to meet up with him in Penukonda so that he could show me which were good shops to buy some outfits from, so that he could help to translate so that I could ask for what I wanted, and so that he could tell me if it was good fabric or not. Alex asked if he could come along too and see if he could organise to get some shirts made for him, and so on Sunday we had an early-for-SEDS start to the day so that we could finish breakfast, catch the loc...

Saturday we worked in the school again, as the children attend a half day of school on a Saturday morning. Not all of the teachers were in attendance, and so I took the children by myself for a few lessons of English and Science. Because of the extended time for the science lesson, we finished a topic with about 10 minutes to spare before the end of school. The children asked if they could play with my camera again after Alex had shown them how to use it, and so I agreed to give them 5 minutes with it if they helped tidy up the classroom first. The kids enjoyed taking photos of each other and practicing selfies, then took a whole series of wobbly pictures of each other shaking hands with me (apparently shaking hands is an exotic thing to do here, and that’s why the children enjoy doing it so much!) and then a few portraits of another teacher who walked past… The 5 minutes went by very quickly, and it was time for the children to go home. The s...