Debbie's Placement in India 2018

I finally had a good sleep last night, although I think I'll need a few more before I feel totally human again. I woke up to find it had rained heavily last night, so while Alex sorted himself out and waited for breakfast, I set about trying to clean up as much water as possible (the corridor outside the bathrooms gets quite flooded) and spraying the hundreds of mosquitos which had popped up from somewhere overnight. There was no specific program for today, and so after breakfast I made a big effort to catch up on uni work, trying to minimise distractions and properly focus. On the plus side, I had done plenty of cleaning yesterday and already this morning, so there were fewer tasks for procrastination. On the minus side, I ended up listening to several hours worth of barely-audible and inaudible lectures, so I was no better off afterwards than I had been before... I had hoped to visit the village school this afternoon, as several of the girls I met at the Ganesha festival h...

After the exertions of yesterday, I had a bit of a sleep in this morning, followed by something of a lazy morning. There was a big tidy-up going on at the house at the SEDS farm, but with plenty of hands on deck I was a bit of a spare part. I therefore went back to my own building and did some tidying up there, sweeping the corridors and veranda, cleaning and tidying in my room, and doing some laundry. Not an interesting day to write about and I took no photos, so once again here is Scooby :)

I was hoping to feel better by today, but I still feel pretty bad. The fever is much reduced though, so that is a massive relief. I got up early to go and help with getting breakfast ready at about 7.30am. Mani was there, even though she was supposed to be resting! So there was not quite so much to do as we had expected. Manil dealt with the washing up and Mani was preparing the food, so I helped Saroja with whatever odd jobs needed to be done. This included some cleaning up, sweeping, disposing of the food waste and foody-but-soap-free water into the biogas unit, disposing of the cleaner grey water by using it to water the coconut palms, and other general to-ing and fro-ing. With the kitchen clean and ready and the food prepared, it was time to start cooking. Mani showed me how to make the aloo (potato) dish first, and I helped with stirring it and putting it out ready. Next, she showed me how to make the dough for the puris. I helped cut the dough to the right sized pieces, and ...

11th Sept:  I still feel so ill and now I have a fever. I have zero energy, I keep getting horrible sweats and I can't cool down. The electricity keeps cutting out so I can't even cool down under the fan all the time. It rained really heavily for quite a while in the evening and there was plenty of lightening. I have only been getting up for meals because I feel so crap, but when I tried to go to bed early the rain had been so heavy that the roof of our building had leaked. I spent some time trying to mop up the water before I felt too crap to carry on and finally went to bed. 12th Sept: Still ill with a fever. I had to spend the day in bed again, except for meals. I was feeling very sorry for myself so I took Scooby the little pug to my room with me. He sleeps all the time anyway but it still felt like company to have him snoozing under my bed. Scooby's standard pose. He's a weird little dog... It turns out that heavy rain has prompted a plague of flyi...

I woke up feeling terrible. I have laryngitis and icky sinuses, and I'm getting headaches and sweats - which is particularly crap in this hot season with no a/c and when the electricity keeps cutting out so you don't even always have a fan. Blogging will resume when I feel better and have stopped sulking. Just leave me alone to die in peace

I woke up with a bad throat and unable to talk properly today. I think I have laryngitis, which is a bit rubbish as it's second Saturday today so there will be over 100 children to deal with... I went down to the school hall to help with second Saturday, and began again by organising the ID badges so that the chaos would be reduced and finding their badges would be quicker and easier for the children. I had to get get Balaji the head teacher to help me talk to the children as my voice was so bad! The ID badges laid out in groups, instead of in one big jumble... I knew that the program for the day was due to involve the children making Christmas cards ready to send back to the sponsorship donors in Australia, but this seemed to take a while to get started and for ages the children were sitting in the hall and entertaining themselves. One of the very sweet little boys from our school asked me to sit by him, but I said no as he was sitting near the entrance and I didn't...

Unfortunately, the field trip that we had rushed back for today ended up being cancelled. This at least gave an opportunity to catch up on some uni work. I feel as though I say I do a lot of uni work, so I do want to describe some of the difficulties. There is not always a good enough internet connection to access the lecture recordings for INDH7107, so I'm currently still behind on those. I'm also never going to be able to get caught up on all of the lecture material as much of it is inaudible on the recordings. I can't download or stream any of the longer videos that are part of the module work, because there is not sufficient data allowance for that kind of thing. It can take a long time to download the readings I need to complete. I do the readings, but I'm not able to print anything so the reading is not so easy for me as reading from hard-copy is. I am behind on the assessment items, I think a big part of the reason is that not being part of the tutorials and l...