Work continues apace - despite achey limbs and blisters

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For the past few days some of the group have been rather insanely getting up at 6am to go on a 2.5 miles run around Tirunelveli. They assure the rest of us that it is great fun and a fantastic way to wake up in the morning. The rest of us are unconvinced and wallow in the bliss of extra sleep.

The projects continue and we begin to really see huge improvements to both sites. Whilst the toll of 4 days of physical labour was beginning to show, the group completed some really impressive work.

At Chittenden Deaf School all the hard work scraping, sanding and smashing paid off as work began on plastering and painting. There was still some pretty tough concrete that needed smashing off the walls. Our crack destruction crew managed to complete the job successfully, much to the surprise and delight of our Indian hosts. Only minor incident was when a water pipe got cracked during the smashing. Needless to say it was one of the teachers who let the side down. The Indian builders were hugley impressed with the work and that made the pain of our bountiful blisters much easier to take.

At the local school, work on the kitchen was progressing speedily. The kitchen complex has reached 10 feet and the Indian foreman is now in a position to fit the roof. Wndows were fitted and a concrete floor was expertly laid by the group. This involved a lot of standing in the liquid cement and squishing it, much like a wine-maker would do with grapes. The majority of the brickwork has now been completed. Miss Barraclough and Miss Treagus were getting ready to tell the groups what they needed to do when they first got on site. Whilst they were talking together about this, the students had already organised themselves and had begun to get on with starting the day. It was great to see them really starting to take the initiative.

After dinner, we had a quiz against another English school. They won. But as Rob posited, the true victory is that we've completed much more work on our building projects than they have. Let's hope that this competitive edge continues and that we continue to maintain the superb work ethic demonstrated so far.

Tomorrow, a rest day at last and a chance to visit a local temple and do a bit of retail therapy.

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