Tamil Nadu - end of the first week.

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I'm not sure that the first blog of this trip managed to get a link onto Facebook, so I'll try to do it right this time.
We've been decorating the two rooms at the farming distribution centre in Thruvai and I've been doing a lot of the ceiling as I'm quite good up a ladder and I have a coverall CSI style suit which is pretty protective. Unfortunately my wrists were exposed and the lime-based whitewash burnt me a little. I had someone at the bottom of the ladder )more of a stool) as ballast, who handed me tools as required.
Other jobs we've been doing is a chain gang for cement for the floor tiles (which the workman do), transferring a pile of sand and subsoil into a trough for the base for the outside floor tiles, rubbing down the window grilles, and whitewashing the outside. The last two days we were putting the pale green top coat on the walls, and the same colour on the outside.
We work all morning and in the afternoon visit somewhere. We've been shown round the special school, where my inappropriately bared shoulders made one young boy want to keep kissing the back of my neck. The teacher training school, was all girls bar five boys sitting at the front, and the technical school was the reverse - all boys and four self conscious girls, who were, according to their teacher, all brilliant pupils.
These are at Cheranmahadevi, on the same campus as the accommodation we are in, with tree-studded areas where the students sit in groups at lunchtime.
One afternoon we went to Tirunelveli the local town, and bought some things at the department store, and ate a dhosa at a restaurant - a huge thin crispy pancake, rolled up and served with different dips, yellow marsala, red tomato, green coriander and white coconut. The food here is marvelous, tasty and not too spicy. One wonderful pudding we had was made with cinnamon and other good things that I can't remember, but being made of tapioca and vermicelli looked like frogspawn and skinny worms.
We asked for a Tamil lesson, which the English teacher at the teacher training school gave us, so we learned a few expressions and a lot of numbers. Charles, the SCAD representative had asked her to teach us some numbers thinking it would be helpful for us when handling the money (at 80 rupees to the pound we are using thousand rupee notes quite often) but when she had got to 300 we asked for more phrases instead. Tamil has 247 sounds, and has borrowed a few more from Sanskrit as well.
We went to a village where handmade saris are woven from silk and cotton, and SCAD helps with the marketing as machine made saris are so much cheaper there is only a niche market for the handmade ones.
The houses are painted in bright Loveheart colours, freshly painted at the moment from a festival similar to harvest festival called Pongal. Sometimes the outside area has a rush mating fence, but there seem to be fewer tarpaulin shacks compared with the cities in the north I saw ten years ago.
Some of us were concerned about the apparent wealth of SCAD so Steve and Charles explained the difference between the educational business of SCAD which provides the funding and the charitable arm of rural development.

We visited a group for elders held monthly at the school. SCAD provides a monthly pension, medicines, and a chance for the elders to meet and chat.
We also visited a gypsy school that AidCamps had built ten years ago. They gave us a dance display and the teacher showed us a national award they had won for dancing. The village makes necklaces that they sell at temples and after visiting the school we ran the gamut of the village street with everyone selling necklaces. I bought four and gave out tic-tacs to a lot of small grubby hands. Some of the families prefer to live in tents still, while others choose to build houses and are helped with SCAD and government loans.
The excitability of the gypsy village was contrasted by the calm of the leper village that we visited next. There are few cases of leprosy in this area now but the stigma remains. If a child from a leper’s family goes to a local school, other families withdraw their children. So the children are at a primary school in the village and if they go to secondary school they go away and are advised not to tell people they live in a leper village.
On Friday evening Steve went back home and Bryan carries on as co-ordinator, with Charles as the SCAD representative.
Saturday we went back to the town of Tirunelveli to go to the Hindu temple which was built between the 7th and 10th century. It is dedicated to Shiva and is huge, about 15 acres. By special arrangement we were allowed into the inner sanctum, where we could buy some ash to put on the forehead.
This was followed by another trip to Pothy’s where Toni and I bought some more equipment for the schools. Most things are a lot cheaper here than in the UK.
Crossing the road in the town is stressful; traffic cones from all directions but none of it takes you by surprise as everything drives on the horn. Apparently one can drive without brakes in India, but not without a horn. Driving out of the towns there are sheep, cattle and goats strolling across the road, but everything seems to give way to them more than to human road users. They aren't that many cars here, but hundreds of motorbikes and tuk-tuks, bikes, trucks and buses weave in and out, and overtake randomly.
The monsoon season will start soon, although there have been a couple of showers at night which reduced the humidity considerably.

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