Jenny's Singing and Dancing Class ...

Hi again,

One of the great things about Habitiat builds is the opportunity to get to know and to get involved with the whole community and not just the one family we build with. No one embodies this better than Jenny .. here she is with her new friends. She taught the children some singing and dancing and they performed for us by the busses today, where they had an audience. They absolutely loved it and so did we !

Today I was back at house 4 with my original team, as we were ready to build the rows of bricks above the lintel. We had a new team member today, Harry, the Finance Director from Habitiat in Chennai. Harry is from Bangalore and his family still live here, but for the past 5 years he's been in Chennai helping to organise Habitat's response to the tsumani. Habitat, along with their partner organisation have done remarkable work and built 14,000 new homes. Harry told us that for many familes, it was in fact a blessing in disguise, as their new Habitat homes are far better than their previous accomodation .. so there is a small silver lining in the whole affair !

The work today was all heavy lifting and there was an endless pile of concrete blocks on the street outside that had to be brought into the yard. We got our chain gang going and by lunch time we managed to complete the pile .. we were very happy to see the back of them ! After lunch there was a lot of carrying sand, cement and mortar and mixing. We carried and Sonara, our home owner mixed. I've never seen anyone work so hard. He's a real power house. The concrete mix then had to be passed up to fill and seal the lintel ready for laying blocks on top tomorrow. It was fun to watch the local lads shifting the pans and basins of mix .. like it was a feather .... whereas we were struggling .. a really good fun day, where we had great craic with the family and the other local helpers, but still worked hard and managed to achieve what we needed to.
After work today, there was a visit to a local orphanage, which was wonderful but heartbreaking at the same time. The children were delighted to see us and we talked and played with them for a while. Some of the older ones were coming back from school in their immaculate uniforms. And here's Emily having fun with some of the youngsters.

It was a great opportunity to meet the children but left us quite subdued and a bit sad.

Another great day and more to come tomorrow !