Monday 24th - Monday 31st March

Our last week in the camp! Where has the time gone?

Monday school was fun, which was weird as I helped Michael with the maths class and we didn't do much English. I felt I was failing at teaching them anything, but this was to change by the end of the week. In the evening we were treated to a load of electric fireworks - the transformer on a powerline shorted out, just outside the camp perimeter, and as the roofs are made of straw, the manager was a bit concerned about the sparks. However everything was OK and the only thing that happened was that we lost all electricity for the evening. We could sit round the fire though, in total darkness and enjoy the starry night sky before the moon came up!

Tuesday we had no hot water whatsoever!!, just the cold water coming out of the standpipe in our "bathrooms" (that is a posh word for a room, 4 ft wide, 8 ft long, concrete on the floor and a straw thatch, shared with lizards, a mouse, a grasshopper and spiders of various sizes and speeds). However the "cold" water was very refreshing as the heat in the mornings is really high already and the cold water feels good on the skin.

At school, I failed in my lesson giving - the kids didn't understand what I was trying to tell them and their interest wandered. This set the tone for the rest of the day - I felt a real failure, even when I plan a lesson it all goes wrong, what can I get right these days?!?

In the afternoon I just HAD to get away from the camp and my hut so I walked around the bare dusty area behind the compound and listened to music from home on the MP3, which reminded me of C and all the adventures we had had before I left. The devastating homesickness I felt in NZ returned and I went back into my hut and shut the door on the world. Yvonne came in to see me and we talked for some time, which really helped to put a bit of perspective on my so-called failure. She implied that we are still all feeling our way, getting things right or not, and so I should not blame myself for "failure". Even us just being on the project is a good thing, and a lot more rewarding than just lying on a beach or similarly non-productive holidays. I also voiced my missing people at home - J, J, M, C, and how I wish to see them all again after so long away.

Wednesday: forgot to say for yesterday, I had a visitation from "the mouse"!!. He literally fell out of the straw thatch onto my mosquito net and when I pinged the netting, he bounced off onto the floor, scuttled away into the bathroom and I haven't seen him since. He must have climbed the walls again tho, as I could hear him munching away again in the thatch!! A wonderful pic opportunity today was to see the sun rising over the desert - a red/orange orb rising very quickly through the stand of trees, changing to a deep yellow and then blinding colour and in a matter of minutes the sky changed from deep blue to reddish pink, orange and then yellow. It was quite brassy by the time I stopped taking pics, and that indicated the heat of the day to come - overwhelmingly hot, even the wind coming in through the barred and netted windows of the school was hot.

At school I did opposite words, and this was a hit. I playacted things like in, on, under, up, down, hot/cold, wet/dry, and illustrated them through items and actions. We went out to the school water tap and played with the water and sprayed little Usha with water, which she loved. Right at the end we made paper planes and had fun throwing them around the concrete block of a classroom

Thursday: the kids rewarded me today by quoting back at me the names of parts of the body and the opposite words. At last a success in my teaching - perhaps the playacting helped them remember stuff. The trouble was I had a HUMUNGOUS headache today and so ironically was not in the mood for playing with them! When we got back for lunch, I missed the meal as I just had to sleep for the afternoon. The heat was overpowering and despite loving the sun, even in the evening I could not sit out in it.

Friday: last teaching day. Up with the mouse today, which sounded like SuperMouse, and had to deal with a hot desert wind blowing very strongly. We gave presents to the kids today - pens, pencils, rubbers, cloths from the wet/dry lessons and they all loved them. A couple of the girls were crying as we left the classroom, and I hope that we made a different to their lives even for a short time.

Party time in the evening. Some of the white girls in the camp borrowed saris and dressed up in them. Michael wore his light blue scarf that he picked up in Jaisalmer and Chris borrowed a red piece of cloth to wrap round his head. Unfortunately I was feeling extremely off colour still and had to sit out the dancing, and only drank water all night.

Saturday: the threatening illness came out today. I don't know what it was but I overslept till 9.30, therefore missing breakfast, and when I did move it felt like my whole body was full of lead, and I was utterly exhausted. I spent all day on my bed, totally exhausted, mostly sleeping, no power in any limbs at all, and feeling like I was sickening for flu. The heat was again overpowering, but I couldn't go out in it anyway. I eventually got up at 4.30ish and just had to pack my bags. As I did so, I did a little bit (about 10 mins) and then had to sit down again for 20 mins to get any strength back. So frustrating and right at the end of the project - grrr. I did manage some dinner, and we ate it out in the dusty courtyard as the heat was huge even late at night. Our group was back down to 8 people (as the rest of the camp had gone on tiger safari) and so we had quite a nostalgic night, recalling our highs and low, successes and failures, lessons learned, funny things that the kids had said in classes, shopping in Jaipur, the Taj Mahal, the Amber Fort.

Sunday: we had to be up by 0330 as we were on the road by 0400. There was no electric power, as they also didn't put on the generator, so I had a cold face wash from the standpipe again. We were driven to Dausa and got the train to Delhi from there. It came steaming into the station and huge clouds of black smoke poured out of its stack - pollution!! As the train came in, Manoj realised we were nowhere near our carriage and so we had to hare down the platform, pulling our really heavy cases and rucksacks behind us, and literally shove everything and everyone onto the train through an open metal doorway, and bundle in. We only just got on as the train moved off and we said our last goodbyes to Manoj and to southern Rajasthan.

The journey to Delhi took us 7 hours, as it stopped for about 1/2 hour for a breakdown ahead of us on the track. Viv and Graziella slept in the bunks above the main seats, and poor Michael was suffering from Delhi belly (again right at the end of his trip which really spoiled the last days for him). I had to brave the Indian loos - literally a hole in the floor of the toilet room, and I could see the tracks moving underneath the train as it barrelled along! On the outskirts of Delhi we went through terrible shanty towns, enormous piles of rubbish and squalor, worse than we have ever seen anywhere. When we got to Delhi main station, we had to bundle off again as we only had 2 minutes to get off, and the platform was terribly slippery and shiny. We played cat and mouse with the traffic to get back to the Hotel Perfect, but I managed to get some great pics of street scenes, people, vehicles and buildings.

For our final night we had dinner on a rooftop restaurant - a variety of dishes and tastes. It was very humid in town but all of us enjoyed the meal and we were all very quiet, thinking of the achievements we had had in our time in the camp, and I was thinking how weird it was to be at the end of all my travelling days (so far). Where did the time go - 4.5 months seems to have gone in a flash, and yet I have all those pics and all those flashes of memories to keep me going for a long time yet.