Three Weeks to Go

Well, I'm currenlty in Mumbai awaiting Mikes arrival later tonight. I flew in early this morning and unfortuntatly the rains have kept me hotel bound all day. The rains in Mumbai and the accompanying state Maharashta have been heavier than normanal and the flooding going on has been rather severe. There have been quite a few deaths from capsized boats, overflowing rivers and ineffectual dams. Further inland in some areas they are evacuating people by the thousands.

Many of the streets are water logged here, as I was coming from the airport this morning people were tromping around in water that reached almost to your knees. The airport are is largely slums and weathly distracts mingled together. There was a whole community that I passed where people lived in tarp tents on the medium of the road, luckily they were not flooded out when I passed. The heavy rains are expected to continue for the next 48 hours. Mike and I are supposed to catch a train out tommorrow so we will hope that the train is running. I say on T.V. that the station was waterlogged, but that many of the long distance trains were still running.
When we get on the train we have a 27 hour trip on which to look forward.

I only have one week left of work, and can say that I feel that we accomplished a fair amount. Not all that we have wanted, but isn't that always the case. The last two days the org wanted us to visit some areas farter away from where we are so we went and visited with another self help group. This group was amazing and had taken in upon themselves to confront the drunkards in the village to get them help. They also were taking in and assisting women who were expereining dowry troubles. Here in India the dowry system is in full effect. Before the wedding the families arrange a price and if the brides family doesn't follow through, or the grooms family changes their mind, the bride is suffered great injustice and abuse. In the north, and I've seen women in the south, in may be as severe to through acid on the bride, or sometimes kill in order to get a new bride. Similary the same applys if the women is unable to produce a son. In fact more so in the north, (in fact Kerala is the only state in India with out this problem), the male:female ration is steadily declining. In some parts its as low as 800 females to 1000 males (in unaffected fertily there should be slighly more women.) Many are projected in the, albeit illeaga, increase in sex-slective abortions. Unfortunalty though, a women is worth nothing the family is she doesn't produce a son.

After meeting the SHG group we traveled and spent the night with a father and visited a school in the morning. There were 290 children clammering around. Later in the afternoon we visisted an boarding school for the poorest children in the area, run by a kind family. The funding has run out and so they are scraping by the run the only English medium available for poor children. It was heartbreaking to see the reality of school rooms with only benches, two to three classes of children and only a chalkboard. No toys, no posters, no crayons, no scissors, no construction paper, no computers. The children slept in crammed, dark rooms in an unfinished building. Amazingly though it was situated on what must me the most bueatiful piece of property I'd ever seen. High, high, high up on the Mountain top, overlooking the most lush and stunnng tropical river vally. So high you were in the clouds.

It was a great two days.