Blogs from Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, India, Asia

27th Dec 2019 Yesterday was a day for rest. Took rest at Tanjore. My train 12637 Nagarcoil Express starts from Egmore Chennai and expected to reach Trichi by 20 minutes past midnight came 1 hour late. Reached Tirunelveli by 6 am today (Scheduled time 5.40 am) It is difficult to cover Tirulveli temples by bus as to many temple routes bus is not available frequently so engaged autorickshaw Nellaiappar Temple & Gandhimathi Amman Temple (http://www.kanthimathinellaiappar.tnhrce.in/) (https://tirunelveli.nic.in/arulmigu-nellaiyappar-arultharum-gandhimathi-amman-temple-tirunelveli-town/) Nellaiappar Temple is a Hindu temple dedicated to the deity Shiva, located in Tirunelveli, a city in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Shiva is worshipped as Nellaiappar (also called Venuvananathar) represented by the lingam and his consort Parvati is depicted as Kanthima... read more

Second week Saturday evening we were invited to a women's festival being held in the women's hall of residence on the campus. The building was lit up with strings of coloured lights, and there was a stage for the dancers. There were Bollywood style dancers, and modern dancing, and one girl who did robotic style body popping to rapturous applause. The audience tended to scream and cheer through the performances more than at the end. We were invited, fairly forcefully, up on to the stage, and it seemed churlish to refuse, so we went up there thinking we could do the twist (we are mostly that generation), but the music they played didn't lend itself to twisting so we all did our individual thing and the audience send to like it. Luckily the lights were in ... read more

Aidcamps trip to Tamil Nadu. I'm doing another charity build in Tamil Nadu in southern India. For two weeks we're helping to finish off the building of a distribution and information centre in a farming area, and do some sightseeing in the final week. aidcamps is the organisation that works with charities in developing countries on building projects that benefit struggling communities. There are 17 of us volunteers; aged 39 to 82; eight of us were together on the Nepal trip in 2013. We are working with SCAD (Social Change and Development) which is a charity set up in 1985 by a priest who, when reprimanded by his bishop for spending more time in helping his parishioners than preparing his sermons, decided to leave the ministry and set up SCAD. The charity now has a wealth ... read more

Just to let you know we are all back from the trek and in one piece (almost!). We are off out for the day today but hopefully will have time to update the blog this evening.... read more

We're sure you're all wondering how your delightful offspring/relatives/friends/donation-pesterers are doing in India and so the staff have compiled the following report for your delectation. Collectively they've been superb all trip and been an absolute credit to you all. They've embraced the endless pit-digging with aplomb; have eaten the varied curried dishes with delight; have danced as if they haven't got 2 left feet and have embraced Indian life with open minds. As such, they've been very easy for the staff to look out for and there's a great collective spirit in the group. Whilst that's all lovely, we're sure you're more interested in how the students are doing individually, so there's a few words below on each of them. In no particular order, we'll start with Naomi. Despite injuring her knee, she has been impressing ... read more