• Thanks ...

Team Reports
• Tom Belton
• Jeff McDougall
• Kathy Greiner
• Kristein Johnson
• Mary-Jo Lang
• Andy Greiner

You can also download a PDF version of this report from our Distributions page.

Time Out

Mary-Jo Lang — Sarnia, ON

From Chennai Photo Album 2009

Not all the time on a distribution is spent in actually giving out bedkits. Following that task each day the volunteers have free time to do what they will.

Perhaps I will start with today and go backwards. Today is Sunday, Feb 16, and at the moment I am sitting under a palm umbrella on Havelock Island in the Andamans, looking at mangrove trees (which are exactly as described by Amitav Ghosch in The Glass Palace) and the beautiful waters of the Bay of Bengal.

The breeze is gently blowing. The bay waters are azure blue and I can see another of the Andamans in the near distance. This morning I walked the beach thinking I had landed somehow in Valhalla, Elysium, Paradise. It is perfect.

Yesterday about this time we arrived to do two distributions and several of us had a much longed-for swim - and looked down through the clear waters to crab mouths and coral. The water was warm - we were actually chilly (a little) when we came out of the water - a lovely coolness in the 30 degree temperatures. The Andamans - Perfection, Peace, and though diminished in beauty and in population by the 2004 tsunami, still outstanding. A highlight.

In a blog posted last week I wrote about Kristein's and my adventures in the alleys of Sivakasi. We had distributed our "slumber kits" (as some of our gentle Rotarian cohorts call the bedkits) and had a few free hours in the afternoon. We ended up in an alley.

The town of Sivikasi is known for its manufacture of fireworks and for match box and match making. And as I reported in the blog, the whole alley full of houses got involved in explaining to us the home industries involved in that firecracker business. People hung out of their second floor windows adding their own two cents' worth to the strange English/Tamil conversation. Neither they nor we spoke the other's language but they clearly described how the women of that particular alley made the ingnition devices that are used in certain types of crackers. It was loud and funny and fun for all of us.

From Chennai Photo Album 2009

The same afternoon: another alley.

This time the children took us in hand and had us tour their alley home. Moms, grandmothers, people passing through, all got into the act. The children worked their English on us and laughed hard when we tried to pronounce their names. Kristein received an invitation to dinner from a child and mom.

A few times, while going to or from a distribution in Chennai, we passed a strange-looking house made of concrete with curvy sides, windows of odd shapes, and doors deeply recessed behind interestingly shaped entries. The afternoon after distributing 500 bedkits children at T Nagar School in Ambattur, three of us set out on foot from our hotel in search of this interesting “wave house,” but the sights along the way were just as interesting:

From Chennai Photo Album 2009

• An apothecary and a healthy nut and seed store assured our health.
• When your garments need a press you can call the travelling ironing man and, for a slight fee, he will set himself up on your street where he irons, folds, and returns the goods to you. Then on he goes by bicycle cart to his next client.
• Three youngsters on their way home from school entertained us. We had been following them and enjoying their girlish antics, but they ended up walking with us and practicing their English vocabulary.
• A young woman was carrying home Bristol board for her daughter to do the family tree as a school assignment — a scene and topic familiar to Canadian parents.
• A family was making bamboo curtains right on the street. One woman would untwine cord and hang it from an iron fence, another would weaving the bamboo through the cord, and a man painted the finished product, drying it on the sidewalk, and, I guess, selling it from there. Time consuming work from start to finish.
• A beautifully landscaped doctor’s home had a glassed waiting room facing the street which was filled to the gills at 8 pm. A sign outside proclaimed “The Immaculate-spoken English.”

Oh, the people you meet, the things you see — only in India — amazing, incredible India.