Day 5

Everyone in the Habitat group is up and on time. For those who hadn't met the day before intros are done and after breakfast we load up the bus and head to Pondicherry. About two hours in we stop for a few minutes to visit a village built by Habitat after the Tsunami. We are in awe and hope that we can have a similar effect in Pondicherry. PC is not the quaint seaside town the guidebooks describe. It is just as noisy and chaotic as every other town in India.

[And the entry ends....here's some reflection on that day not in the journal...]

Pics from the site we visited...



Everyone seems very eager to get started and I think some of the team would have ventured out to the build site today and happily started to sling mud so to speak. As it is we check in at the hotel, unpack, settle in and some of us do some wandering. The top of the list is to find an interenet cafe. It is Sunday and almost everything is closed so we wander the streets searching...not even sure which direction we are headed in...but walking none the less. Crossing the streets is an adventure and we feel that one or more of us will surely die just trying to do this simple thing. The traffic is coming the opposite way of what we are used to and there don't seem to be many rules of the road.

We will look back upon this excursion a few days later as easy and simple...the roads were basically empty compared to what we will experience.

The group meets before supper and we get an orientation to India and to the build site. I've actually read all the material they sent ahead of time so most of it isn't a surprise to me. But apparently not everyone did. One person keeps asking questions that seem pretty obvious to me...and after chatting with a number of other builders....obvious to them as well. Oh well. We are all too excited to be starting work in the morning that we just shrug our shoulders and dig into our supper.