Day 13 – Saturday 2 October

What a relief – another clear blue sky to start the day – and incredibly hot even at 09:00; Just the job when needing to shift over 30 boxes of clothes for distribution later in the day!  We arrived back at the school at around 09:30 (ok we were late) to find the same group of dedicated volunteers hard at it... they had even already applied the first coat inside the school.  Work continued throughout the morning and the new blue pillars were looking good against the new white walls.  We wanted to create a brighter environment for the kids to learn in and that’s certainly what has been done.  The outside too now looks much smarter and the kids will repaint murals on the wall when the weather eases up.

This project has been a hard one physically but it has been extremely useful in allowing us to work together with teachers and parents and show what we can achieve working together as a team.  By the end of the afternoon, we’d pretty done as much as we’d can just as it started raining.  But we still needed to hand out the clothes to the villagers so we headed off to the heart of the village to start that operation.  

Coming from far and wide...

The rain started hammering down and by the time we had walked the short distance from the Village School to Udaya’s house on the railway line, a small crowd had begun to gather.  As the first box was opened, word had spread quickly and despite the hammering rain now, the queue of people was over 6 deep but remained orderly.  T-shirts, poloshirts, ladies clothes and caps were all handed out and we were told that people from as far as 9 km along the railway track had come in the driving rain.  It’s great that the “Don’t ditch, donate” collection at the offices of Nature had been so successful and had it not been for the appalling weather, we probably would have seen families in matching nature.com outfits parading along the tracks that evening.