Day 14: Monday, June 10
Waking up this morning was one of the more pleasant awakenings I’ve had since we’ve been here. It was delightfully breezy, the 80-something degree air felt like a cool fall morning.
We had egg dosas and eggs scrambled inside onions and bell peppers--my favorite breakfast so far. If you had asked me before this trip if I liked eggs, I would’ve indignantly said no, but have since softened my opinions. I decided to eat vegetarian while in India, partly to lower my risk of getting sick, and partly because half of our team is vegetarian already and I wanted to feel loved and accepted, so eggs are one of the main sources of protein I have most days (the other main source is the box of Clif bars hidden in my bedroom.)
We got a late start to the village today, not heading over until 9am. Sarah, Ayah, and Janet stayed behind to go to the hospital to get Ayah’s ear checked out, while the rest of us went to the site. Today the workers were placing the steel reinforcement for the floor beams and floor slab, tying rebar, and building formwork for our cantilevered front porch. Kumaresan, our engineer, came by to check on the building before tomorrow’s big concrete pour.
When we got back to the house, Janet had a gift for us: wifi! She had gone into the nearest town, Chengalpattu, after the hospital visit to get a new SIM card for our WiFi hotspot. Hopefully this third SIM card would finally work. After some setup and activation, our hotspot started working! Just in case we ran out of data after an hour like last time, we quickly did high-priority Internet-related tasks first. Zia and I bought train tickets for the backpacking trip some of us are going on after this project, then once the tickets were acquired everyone else hopped on the wifi.
Between lunch/dinner and the time I started writing this post, I forgot what meals we had. The only notes I had for the rest of the food today were that it was “super good”. The only thing I distinctly remember eating is mangos, so that in and of itself explains the above average food day.
We went back to the site in the afternoon, after our sweaty afternoon naps, to help place more rebar and play with the kids. While we were playing frisbee, a procession of people holding a statue of a Hindu god and playing musical instruments walked through our construction site and gathered in front of the temple just behind our building. For nearly an hour, they danced and sang--Janet said that they were from a nearby village, and processions like this happened often.
Zia and I washed our clothes tonight. It was our second time handwashing, and we did slightly better than the first time, but the mother and daughter of the house still had to come over and point out that we had forgotten to put soap on some of our clothes, or rinse some clothes a few more times before they were soap-free and ready to be hung.
Later in the evening evening, the seven of us sat on the floor of the girls’ room, crowded around the wifi hotspot, scrolling through Instagram in silence. After two weeks (and admittedly what felt like forever), we had a reliable Internet connection. We’ve had too many nights and meals together talking and spending quality time with each other instead of staring blankly at our phones--it was time for a break.
Erica Lopez
PUC India 2019
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