Our trip continues. Today we visited 4 wells Tajpur-Kakra;Barurbheri; Bibhishanpur; Kakra High School.(Have only project) Deb ...2 of the four villages today have more women than men on their committee. Each Village has a bank account setup with a woman and a man as co-signers. In each village the number of people using the wells is increasing as other wells in the area become defunct.(not HAVE wells but Government wells which are drilled deep enough).
I want to mention that the gardens using the excess overflow water are being developed and many look really good. This area has had no rain since August 2009. Even then the rain was far less than normal for this area. One lady told us that over 200 families or ~1000 people are using the well. She can even hear people pumping at 10PM. As always it has been a very positive response to our visits. In the past 2 days we have visited 11 wells. All in all the project is going much more smoothly than the roads. Biswajit has a Suzuki Maruti Omni mini mini van which can handle as many as 9 people on these the 4 foot wide roads into the villages. They have an excellent driver, Sanja. On the first day we saw a well being drilled with the Water Jet pumping system. In takes 5-6 days to drill down to ~700 feet. We hope to see the well installed on Tuesday. They have finish the first group of 15 wells and have all the villages setup for the next 15 wells . They have 3 teams to drill the wells and all are working at this time. We saw #16 (completed in late January) and #17 is being drilled. They hope to finish this group of 15 by the end of March. (total 30 wells).
We have taken lots of videos and pictures which I will upload when I get to a high speed system. Toos is loving most parts of the trip...I will elaborate(bathroom and traffic not so much). The food, the hospitality of Biswajit, Kalpana and all of the SGUS team is awesome.
Toos and I visited the local market ( nearly got run over by a bull) !!. We will observing a EYE clinic tomorrow night as SGUS with 25 Cataract operations planned.
The weather here is cool..10-12 at night and 20 -25 in the daytime. They have not seen it as cold in a long time. Warmer than home from what I hear.
We will keep in touch
4 comments:
It sounds like you are having a great time. Love hearing from you. Jodes
Hi Ron and Toos,
The weather sounds like it is very agreeable to a couple of Canadians. I am enjoying keeping up with your travels. I hope that the bull was not crashing through the market but just wondering the streets. I will be looking forward to seeing your pictures. I am on my own in Florida with Bob back in Montreal for a couple of weeks in the snow and ice!
Take Care - watch out for stray cattle.
Rox
Hi Ron
And I am not even the reason for it being cooler than usual!!! Glad things are going well and you can see positive progress. off on our cruise tomorrow SUN so the weather here is sure to warm up. Take care. Be safe.
It's so great to be able to read along with your journeys. It makes you trip so much more immediate to us at home.
Good luck at the eye clinic tomorrow!
Jenn
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