A nice day for a motorcycle ride

We have received a brief respite from the monsoon only to pummeled by the brutal Indian sun. After a day spent riding to remote villages on the back of a motorcycle I now sport the most wicked of tan necks. We start of early in the morning around 11:00 am heading toward the market area so that we can fill the hog up in preparation for the days journey. Weaving through traffic I hug my knees in toward the bike as images of my knee catching on the bumper of an oncoming truck fill my head. After filling up we are soon out of the city and I spend the next fifteen kilometers winding up a surprisingly smooth road to the village of Jaituchiwadi. The social workers that I am with drop off some papers and we all sit down and visit for a while in the shade before taking off to the next village Ghote, which has a population of about three hundred and is fairly close to Jaituchiwadi. Upon getting arrival the social worker that has been driving me around shows me around the village, which is a tribal Thakur community, and then we go to the big house of the man in charge. He is described to me as the "lord" of the village. One of the strangest things I have noticed about these remote villages is that a surprising number of houses have satellite television usually attached to a thatched or tiled roof of some kind. This mans house is no exception and we hang out for a while watching tv and drinking tea. After a while we head back to the CFI offices for lunch. Overall a very productive afternoon.

I have moved on from Sadhana village and said goodbye to the many friends that I made there. I am now working for an organization called Children's Future India in a decent sized town called Pen. It has been really good to get to a new place and do something fresh. I tried to attach my final report on the SHG that we had been working with but can't seem to figure it out so if anyone is interested just let me know and I can email it to you. A warning though it is about fifteen pages single spaced but I think it presents a pretty good picture of the life that these women live and the challenges they face.