Day 3: Thursday, May 30
Today we are Sirupinayur-bound!
During our last breakfast at the Ramada hotel in Chennai, we did a quick rundown of the previous night. Turns out, everyone but Ayah and me had felt sick in the past twelve hours (is it because we are young and invincible? probably), with Fennel Jane getting the worst of it—she couldn’t make it to breakfast since she had been hovering over the bathroom toilet since 3am.
We waited until Jane felt a little better, then we checked out of the Ramada hotel and hit the road to Sirupinayur. About 1 1/2 hours into the 2-hour drive, I was staring out the window when I heard Jane make a funny noise. In the half second it took for me to look up at her, I saw her grab her purse, open it, and proceed to throw up on everything inside that bag. We pulled over to manage the fennel-wrecked havoc, then got through the last bit of the car ride incident free.
The house we are staying at is in the Kanchipuram district, 5 kilometers from the construction site and village. It belongs to Mr. Mani, a local politician, his wife, and their three kids—they’re living on the first floor of the house and we’re staying on the second floor of the house.
That afternoon, we had lunch, claimed our bedrooms and cots, and took naps under the fans in an (unsuccessful and sweaty) attempt to escape the 115-degree heat index. When the day had cooled down a bit, we drove over to the village for the very first time.
All of the pictures and Skype footage that we’ve seen of the construction site over the past year finally began to make spatial sense as we first laid eyes on the site.
The building was completed up to grade level—the footers were completed and the steel rebar for the first story of columns was sticking out of the ground. We had originally planned for the entire first story of the building to be completed, including footers, grade beams, columns, and our elevated floor slab, but we recently found out that the construction had been delayed several days due to a sand shortage in India. Sand is a large and important part of concrete.
After surveying the site, we walked across the street to the village. Poul, our CASA contact, and Shanmugam, a CASA representative, gathered a number of members from the community for somewhat of an opening ceremony. They spoke about the help CASA provided to them during the floods a few years ago, and reminded the community that we are here to help them build a disaster relief shelter for future floods. As an act of gratitude and welcome, members from the community came up to each of us and placed white shawls around our shoulders.
When we got home, some of the team went to a little store down the road to get some crackers for Fennel Fever Jane. They came back with crackers and a 2-liter bottle of cold 7-Up—the familiar face we didn’t know we needed.
While waiting for dinner, the seven of us sat side by side in the breezeway, passing the bottle of soda down the line. We talked about how we were in the place we’ve been looking forward to since we all met nine months ago. We also discussed our first impressions of India and spending the next few weeks perpetually sweaty and with no A/C.
That night, we took our first bucket baths (pouring buckets of water over our heads), strung up our mosquito nets (Zia and I were about to brave it through the night without a net until a beetle(?) landed on Jane and Ayah’s net), and called it a day. We’re sweaty and half a world away from home, but we made it to Sirupinayur.
Up next: Zia’s take on our first day of construction & our first full day at the village!
Erica Lopez
PUC Team India 2019
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