Mission Accomplished!

Well, we have finished at last! Two days work completed in just two weeks. Only in India!

In the end we did not have to change the faulty switch. It turned out that it had been sitting around so long (I really wouldn't be surprised if it were 50 years old) that the contacts had corroded and were not passing current. A little sandpaper solved the problem and the entire system is now functional. The clinic now has a reliable electricity supply. I just hope they get the monkey barrier up soon.

There is just one other item I would like to attend to. As I have mentioned before, the equipment available in India is often dodgy to say the least. The Solar Regulators which came with the Indian solar panels and which control the flow of power to the batteries are cheap and fragile. I don't expect them to last the distance. When I return to Australia I will purchase a proper regulator and send it to the clinic.

We have experimented with solar cookers in the last couple of weeks. The main use for these would be to cook rice and unfortunately the winter sun is not sufficient to bring the water to boiling. However I expect that in summer the cooker will work well. The clinic now has the design and will test it in a few months and if successful will train villagers to utilise this cheap and envirnmentally freindly form of heating food.

Another project we have left for the clinic is to reduce the internal temperature of the building. It apparently gets in to the mid 40's in summer here and they have a long western wall which would really cause the building to bake in the heat. By putting up a bamboo frame about a metre from the wall and running vines up it, they could drop the internal temperature significantly. If it were an edible vine such as passionfruit then all the better.

When we arrived we noticed that although they had numerous plantings around the clinic, none of it was mulched and everything had to be hand watered daily. We introduced them to the wonders of rice straw mulch and now the plants only need watering every 5 days or so. However it has created another problem: Termites love the moist conditions and there has been a population explosion. When I get home I will be asking my Permaculture contacts what might be done about this.

One of the pleasures of living here has been using cold buckets of water to bathe in. I've designed a solar water heater which will work well all year round and give as much hot water as the clinic requires. If you ever visit you will be able to have a hot shower! We don't have time to build this but it will be done in our absence.

A young patient came into the clinic today - yet another victim of ignorance. This was a little girl perhaps two years old. She has had diarrhea for two weeks and is suffering severe dehydration. The doctor here has given her two days to live if left untreated. The parents seem completely oblivious to the seriousness of the situation and apparently unconcerned when it is explained to them. This child has been saved for now but many in a similar situation are not. Again it all comes back to education of the villagers which the clinic considers to be it's most important task.
Because the clinic is chronically short on supplies we have donated all of our oral rehydration packs. Hopefully we will not need them ourselves before we come home.

Today we visited the village of one of the workers here. He lives in a two room mud hut with his wife, his mother, his brother and his wife. That's five people in two small rooms, one of which is used for rice storage and has just enough room for two people to lie down in - a perfectly normal living situation. He earns about 80 cents a day from the clinic (a normal wage) which supplements the farming income the family earns.

We are now making preparations to leave. It's been a great adventure here and we are sad to be leaving the wonderful friends we have made. We have booked an overnight train to Varanasi (also known as Benares) which is a holy city on the banks of the Ganges river. We will be spending a couple of weeks being tourists before we return to Australia.

That's all for now!

Anton