Cycle India 2010

Wednesday 9 January

Our first leisurely start to a day! Breakfast at 8.30 and ready to get on our coach at 9 to go shopping. Close – the coach arrived at 10.15! There had been a whip round amongst us to buy some presents to give to the children at the Village. Canvassing amongst the children and teachers had given us a wish list of a DVD player, some printers and sports equipment.

The idea was for us to shop for this little lot before we went back to the Village for a relaxed time exploring the grounds and maybe having a game of cricket or football with the kids. The girls also wanted to buy some saris to wear later in the day, so off we all went into the town, accompanied by some teachers from the school to assist the ladies.

On the way to the shops, there was a diversion to take in the house initially donated by Dr Prasad. The house is now home to older children that have finished High School and are continuing with higher education. It was a real pleasure to meet some of the delightful young women that HEAL was ‘producing’ and there was the added bonus of some of us joining in an impromptu game of cricket with some local lads on a nearby piece of wasteland.

What followed in the town was agonising. Fifteen ladies managed to buy saris in about a third of the time that it took fifteen blokes to haggle over the price of printers, DVD players and sports equipment in a succession of shops, with each bloke knowing more about what was the best spec for a DVD, and what was a good price for a printer, than everyone else.

This was the first time that we had been in a town on foot and it meant that we were standing around outside shops and so experienced small children tugging at our clothes and begging at close quarters. We also saw amusing sights such as apparently unclaimed cattle wandering amongst insanely busy traffic, and stood still in parking spaces.

Our dreadful shopping technique, combined with the horrendous traffic in the town (and the task of carrying out a succession of U-turns in a coach with no turning circle), and not knowing what shops were where in relation to the others or to the hotel, meant that we didn’t get to the Village until 3pm, which was when our Valedictory Concert was due to start.

Always time for food though, so we downed another meal on arrival, while the start of the afternoon activities was delayed. There then followed various speeches and then another fantastic show of song and dance from the children.

Unfortunately, all the rushing meant that there was no time for mixing with the kids or for the girls to put their saris on and show them off on the stage.  However, they did manage to get them on after the concert and show them off around the Village before we handed over the presents, said our goodbyes, and headed back for our second night at the hotel in Guntur.

The attention we, as a group, had received from everyone at the Children’s Village and the school, and the effort that they had all put in to the shows and the hospitality that they had shown us over the day and a half we had been there, was absolutely overwhelming.

It was a very emotional time and I think most people got a bit choked up at one point or another.