Rugged, Beautiful and Wonderful

These were just some of the adjectives that have been used to describe me in some of the comments that were left for me. You are all too kind! Only joking... Anyway what am I about to prattle on about, well some of you might be thinking after some of the recent entries that I think life is a joke and that I am having something of a jolly out here!?

Well, er what can I say it has been absolutely unbelievable, but today's episode was an epic - tiring but inspirational. We got up at 0630 to go on a coach trip across India - 5 hours on a coach, to high up in the rugged mountains to the North East of Mumbai to see a project that works with people who have special needs. This journey was spectacular on the way up and some of the countryside we went through was extremely challenging for the bus driver and some of our party.

We arrived at the project to be greeted by some of the staff, who were disappointed that we were a bit later arriving than expected, who knows what time they thought I get up at! It was lunchtime for the people who live there - as part of a community supported by committed staff and volunteers! The organisation refers to the people with special needs as their special freinds and they were able to interact with our group on their terms - some organisations would not allow this. We had a lunch prepared by some of the people and they went out of their way to make us feel welcome and comfortable. I won't waffle on too much about them but would encourage you to go to their website and check it out for yourself at;

www.sadhana-village.org

The inspiring thing was that they had started out to look after adults with special needs and tried to find a suitable location for this, you can hopefully find out more about the location at

www.girivan.com

Anyway after initial difficulties settling in and establishing their presence within the valley of 3300 families they have begun to work with more and more people. The organisation has widened into doing work around social and economic education with the local community and some of the women were involved in the preparation of our lunch. One of their priority areas of concern, is to look at ways of providing clean drinking water for the people within the valley. The importance of this organisation's presence within the district was illustrated when some men from a village 10km away arrived to discuss the situation about their drinking water resource with the staff.

After lunch we sat beneath some trees in their beautiful gardens and heard some of the special freinds sing wonderful traditional Indian songs. As well as, 'We Shall Overcome' in Hindi, some of our party sang Donald Were's Yer Troosers in return and one of the special freinds gave us a stand up comedy performance. We left the community to begin the long(er) drive back to Mumbai with the sound of thunder in the valley and arrived back to the sound of the tooting horns of Mumbai. Time for bed!