Vanakum! Namaska-ra from India Romeo 3!

After the resounding success of our welcome party, we have since been hard at work organizing a range of events and laying the foundations for our project to move forward with continued success. Firstly, we successfully organized and ran a health camp, collaborating with two of our fellow teams of volunteers, to provide a health and dental care camp for 262 people, coming from 22 villages in the surrounding area. Our group organized the critical elements, including the way the camp was run, the registration and the supremely important statistics gathering. As one of the Doctors told us afterwards that it was the most efficient camp he had been to in some time, we feel we were particularly successful, and look forward to carrying forward some of the lessons learned to the upcoming veterinarian camps.

The team has also been working very hard to ensure the beneficiaries for the construction work have been selected, and these were confirmed recently. Now we can begin to plan the building work that we are looking forward to starting. We are to be building cow sheds, azola pits, and vermi-compost units for 14 families. With these, they will be able to maximize their agricultural output, and to move away from chemical based farming. It will also open up new avenues of revenue, giving these families the freedom to choose how they utilize these versatile constructions, improve their standard of living, and increase their livelihood potential.

In conjunction with this, very soon we will be starting our awareness raising programmes, designed to share with the farmers the knowledge to best utilize the equipment we will be helping to provide. The whole team has been hard at work, and the in country volunteers have been invaluable in translating the material, and in providing great insight in to how to best present the information to these experienced and hard working agriculturalists.

Finally, we have also been releasing tension with the odd game of cricket, and it is with great pleasure that we can report that we have even won a couple, much to the locals’ dismay. We are confident that this trend will continue throughout the project, despite insistence to the contrary.

Thanks for reading, and please keep in touch via the message board!

The Hosur Team.