We have left SGUS and arrived in Vellore with SUCHI.

It has been a few days with no blog. So here goes. All is well !!! We finished up at SGUS on Thursday. What a wonderful week or is that awesome. They had a gathering of children dancing and villagers to wish us farewell..to Mr Ron and Mrs Toos. Actually I thought they had arranged all of this to celebrate my birthday. Happy 80th Nick !!(Feb 5). We saw all of the wells at SGUS ..22 drilled wells 2 in progress and 2 Village Meeting completed. They have assured me that the last 6 wells will be completed by the end of March. Joanna, Biswajit promised all of the data to you by the time we return. We flew down to Chennai on Friday and Paul and Glory Vijayakumar picked us up. They explained the SUCHI program to us on Friday. They have completed 30 CIDA-HAVE wells and 1 HAVE only well. Today, Saturday we visited 7 villages where we had saw Tubewells and visited with many villages near Chittoor..where their program centre is located. Traffic is still crazy but seems to be more civilized than West Bengal. Glory and Paul have a somewhat different philosopy. They use water as a stepping stone to total village development is areas of health, hygiene, education and economic improvements. They teach villagers in all of these areas and then encourage the villagers to take ownership by contributing to these new resources they have received. They have a team of field staff that work with the villagers over a 5-7 year period to inprove their quality of life. One of the major highlights was our final stop today where we visted a village where we have supported a new well and EcoSan Toilets for each home. The first toilets this village has ever had. All villages of this lower class do not have toilet facilities. It was exciting to see the enthusiasm of these villagers. The next two villages where Toilets will be installed are already in process ( several mmetings have already taken place). We receive Coconut milk direct from the coconut from each of the villages we visited and we determined that 7 cups of Coconut milk in one day is more than enough. We are both well and enjoying our stay with Paul and Glory. Toos was most exited about a hot shower this morning..the first since leaving Canada. Jenn W ..we have over 3 hours of videos on this computer so editting and making a HAVE video will take some work.
We pray all is well with each of you and we'll write again
the video is installing the Pipe in a tubewell in West Bengal
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