Blogs from East Godavari District, Andhra Pradesh, India, Asia

After spending nearly eight hours yesterday in this very internet cafe struggling ineptly (and typically) to upload photos from our two months in India, i swore it would be at least another couple of months before i went in one again. But then I didn´t know that today I´d walk past a Caribbean sea-view bar (we´re currently on 'R&R´ in an overcast Panama) to see the last twenty mins of Spurs winning away at Villa and find out that England had just thumped France in the Six Nations. Clearly i needed to know the details. Just looking again at those photos I´m struck by just how little we managed to capture of what daily life at Hebron Children´s Home is like. By and large, all we have are pictures of happy kids with beaming smiles. On ... read more

Lean rickshaw pullers wait for passengers on dusty alleys illuminated by the evening sun. Loud women in front of vegetable baskets bargain with customers in the small market square. Children in school uniform gather for another round of games before returning home. Peddapuram is just another island of houses in the vast paddy-field green on the way from Rajahmundry to Samalkot, until Parimala Jyothi tells me there are more than 1250 commercial sex workers in the 10-square kilometer town. The counselor with CHANGES (Community Health Awareness and Natural Green Environment Society), an NGO creating awareness on HIV/AIDS since 1999, also told me that 200 odd women carry the dreaded virus and many suffer from sexually-transmitted diseases - a byproduct of the pleasure industry of Peddapuram. Though there is no marked red-light district in the town, lascivious ... read more