The last day of our adventure was spent hard at work at a different pursuit

- chasing bargains in Madurai's markets! Devi, Jocelyn and Amayla, who all work at Children's and Girls Village, came into town to do some shopping for the kids, and to make sure we got the best possible bargain on our own souvenir lists.

We started at a fabric wholesaler, where Meredith paid for an order she had made earlier in the week. For most of the group it was their first time in that shop, so everyone walked out with some wonderful material and a great bargain by the end of the visit.

Then it was off to the temple markets, shopping for brass bells, statues and temple goods, picking up our tailored salwar kameez, and enjoying driving a hard bargain for bags, jewelry and crafts.

Lunch was back at the hotel, before one final shopping sally, and then we all headed up to the Taj Resort on the hill overlooking Madurai for our final group dinner. The Taj is a lovely 100 year old mansion, that has had luxury villas constructed throughout its gardens.

We enjoyed a drink on the veranda of the main house, and shared with each other what the adventure had meant to us. Then it was down for a candlelit dinner on the garden terrace overlooking the lights of Madurai city.

We had a chance to say our group goodbyes, and then it was back to the hotel for our last night's sleep. On Saturday our group began to make their way back to their home countries, with some choosing to stay a little longer in the country.

Once again India has been the most amazing experience - an ancient culture, completely different way of life to our home countries, but most of all it has been the children and the open hearts of the people that has touched us so deeply.

Thank you to all our supporters and donors for making our building project possible and for changing the lives of the children we met.

We left the hotel this morning for Children's Village knowing it would be our last day on the building project and spending time with the kids we have gotten to know so well.

A nasty cold has been doing the rounds of our group, but despite coughs, sneezes and sniffles, everyone was determined to be there today to finish our work on the cottage and see our new friends.

As we rolled up, our little welcoming party of toddlers was lined up to receive us. After a shy beginning, they have grown to know us well, and the minute we were off the bus we had little ones climbing all over us.

Our work today was to put the first coat of coloured paint on the outside of our cottage, and we were determined to get it finished before we left. By now, we are expert at hanging off the local scaffolding, and the cottage really began to take shape as a home as we painted the different sections.

By the time we broke for lunch, the job was done, and we lined up for photographs outside with our local builders. We had a great feeling of achievement as we stood back and reflected not only on our work for the week, but the fundraising and journey that had led us to this place.

After lunch we said a sad goodbye to our kids, and then headed off to visit another of SJDT's projects at Dindigul, targeting working children. In India there are 7 pieces of legislation that make child labour illegal, but it is estimated that there are between 40 and 110 million child labourers working in the economy.

For many poor families, it is simply a matter of survival - the parents can't earn enough as poor workers or labourers to support the family, and if the children don't go out to work they won't be able to eat.

SJDT works to identify child labourers in the area, and then talks to the parents to try to find ways to get the kids back in school. Over the last year they have successfully re-schooled 117 children, but they know of another 140 in the area still working in factories.

We visited a local leather factory that last year had employed child labourers from a poor village next door, but all of whom had now been re-schooled.

Br Jagan, the local worker in charge of the project, took us for a tour.

Outside under a thatched hut, workers cleaned goat skins with chemicals and salt, and trimmed off the tails. The smell was indescribable. This is where most of the children had worked, earning just Rs100 (about $3 - $4) for every 100 skins cleaned.

Inside the factory the floor was awash with other chemicals, and in the middle were deep vats in the floor full of chemicals used to soften the hides and make the hair easy to remove. Adult workers with only rubber gloves and light plastic aprons were submersed chest deep in the chemicals retrieving the skins.

From there, the skins went to a machine where the hair was stripped off. It has two enormous steel rollers, and the skins were hand fed through and pulled out by an adult worker. One slight slip and he would suffer a horrendous injury.

The final stage were a series of stretching machines, once again working at a terrific pace with no safety measures.

It was confronting and horrific to think of children working in such circumstances. Of course, the western world was also built on child labour in the industrial age with young children in the cotton mills of Britain and in other countries, but to see it first hand was a very emotional experience.

Next we visited the village next door where the children had come from.

These people lived in thatched huts in very poor conditions, and as the government had recently begun widening the highway nearby, many had had their houses demolished with no compensation and were now living in even worse circumstances.

SJDT is working with them to find solutions to allow their children to remain at school, or go back to school, rather than have to go to work.

Next we visited a vocational training school in Dindigul, that is offering training as electricians, fitters, automobile mechanics, tailoring and in computer skills for former school drop outs and working children, as an alternative to traditional education.

Nearby is the hostel where twenty orphaned boys, several of who are HIV positive, are cared for by SJDT - the same twenty boys who joined us early in the week for the trip to Kodiakanal. The kids were excited to see us and we had a great time catching up with them and taking many photos.

Our last stop for the day was at Girls Village, where the older girls who had traveled with us to Kodiakanal live. The girls gave us a wonderful traditional Indian welcome, and then with many cries of "Auntie, auntie, come" we were led around the campus to see all of their cottages.

We ended up at their meeting hall, and then the girls gave us a fantastic cultural performance with singing of traditional songs, traditional dances, and some great Bollywood routines!

Just before they started, we had another surprise - a van pulled up with all of our babies from Children's Village, as well as the pre-schoolers we had played with last year on our building project, and who live in the cottages at Children's Village but we hadn't seen as they had been at pre-school during the day.

Jennifer, Esther, Katerina and the rest recognized Megan and Meredith straight away and marched over for hugs, along with the rest of our babies.

To end the evening, the older girls gave a drumming and dancing presentation outside, and then we handed out ice-creams to all of the children. Finally it was time to say one last goodbye, and it was very emotional to leave them for the last time.

Br Sebastian gave a speech after the dancing to thank our group and to let us know we were always welcome to visit, or come back and work again anytime, and already our hearts and heads were thinking of our next visit to our little families.

We left the hotel this morning for an early start on our building project, and arrived at the work site keen to push hard to finish our cottage. On arrival we spent a little time catching up with the babies, then it was back to work on the cottage, finishing the undercoat of whitewash in some places, and putting the first coat of final paint on the roof.

The work went quickly, and after an hour or so we were all called down in front for a special ceremony as the door frame was ready to go in place. In India when a house is built, a special blessing ceremony is held when the door frame is erected, to bless the house and keep bad spirits away.

The steel frame was decorated with a garland of flowers and mango leaves, and dotted with special spices. Our foreman conducted the ceremony with offerings of coconuts, sweets and bananas. He split one of the coconuts with his trowel, and then we all took turns blessing the frame and the house three times each with the coconut juice and a mango leaf.

Finally five of us lifted the door frame into place and the ceremony was complete. It had to be either five or seven people to lift the frame, and seven wouldn't fit! To finish off we shared the sweets and bananas, and our fellow workers decorated our foreheads with dots of tumeric and red spice.

The cottage walls are built of solid brick on concrete foundations, and the walls are raised before the final cement floor is laid. There was about a one to two foot cavity to be filled in the floor before the final cement could go down.

On the outside of the cottage was a really big pile of dirt and rocks, and we spent the rest of our work morning filling steel pans with dirt and rocks, and passing them along the line to fill the cottage floor space. It was hard and dirty work, and we passed some of the time singing Gloria Gaynor's "I will survive!", much to the amusement of our fellow workers.

After lunch we caught up with our babies again. We have now gained the trust of some of the more timid ones, and they sat and played quite happily in our laps. Devi dropped in for a quick lunch, telling us she had to head in to town to the local hospital to pick up another baby that had just been born. It is sad to see so much need in the area for Children's Village, but it made us glad to know how much we have been able to help through building the cottages for them to go to.

Then we headed back to town and another little adventure for the afternoon - taking our salwar kameez sets into the local tailors to have them made to size. There is an ancient temple market just outside the East Gate of the Sri Meenakshi temple, with old stone halls the same style and age as the temple itself.

One whole aisle is full of tailors and craft stalls, another full of book merchants, another with jewelry and another with brass and steel temple and cooking goods.

Devi had told us the price we should pay - around 90 rupees ($3) to have our salwar kameez made to order, and we found a good tailor up front and negotiated him down to Rs100 from Rs150. At that stage we figured paying the extra Rs10 was worth not having to haggle another half hour!

Our salwar kameez will be ready for us to pick up on Friday. After placing our orders we had a quick look around the market, then back to the hotel for dinner.

All along the street there were flags in the colours of the ruling political party, with banana tree trunks and leaves tied to them. Our driver told us there was a big wedding around the corner, and one of the top politicians was attending - so the decorations were for him, not the happy couple! Sure enough, we saw huge billboards advertising the wedding, with a small picture of the bride and groom, and huge picture of the smiling politician.

Tomorrow will be our last work day at the Children's Village, and also our last day to meet with the children and visit projects.

This morning we left the hotel early to make a special stop en route. In 2004, SJDT established a special program, New Dawn Village, for intellectually disabled children right next door to Girls Village.

In traditional rural areas, having a disabled child is seen as karma and a punishment from the Gods for the parents' sins. Many of these children are hidden away in their houses, or abandoned on the streets.

New Dawn Village was built as a hostel and rehabilitation centre, that currently supports 49 children with intellectual disabilities. The centre has a physiotherapy centre, as well as sensory stimulation room, class rooms and vocational training.

Since our first visit at its opening, it has been amazing to see how the children have progressed. When we arrived they ran forward to greet us, and were so outgoing and polite in leading us around the village that one of our group asked, "Are these the disabled kids??"

After an hours' visit we were back on the road to Children's Village and the start of our working day. We checked in on our babies to say good morning, then it was back to finishing the first coat of whitewash on the walls of our two cottages, while Christine and Shelley started on the top coat on the roof.

As we worked on scaffolding and up ladders, the local women workers held the bottom for us, filled our buckets, and had great fun grading our painting skill and teaching us to say their names.

Over lunch Br Sebastian joined us and explained more about how the caste system worked in traditional areas. In the cities, different castes live, work and interact side by side on a daily basis, because the nature of the city makes it impossible to remain separate.

In the villages, the Dalit or untouchable caste, will still live in a separate area on the outskirts of the village, and Dalits will not walk through a high caste area without encountering trouble.

Dalit families have traditional vocations and relationships with higher caste families. In one Dalit family there may be a carpenter, or an undertaker, and their family will have provided those services to the same 5 or 6 higher caste families for decades. The higher caste family is bound to use those same lower caste families and can't shop around for another tradesperson.

He also explained a sign we had seen on the back of many taxis and buses - "We 2, Ours 1". It was the slogan of a local birth control campaign encouraging people to have only one child. It has been very successful in Tamil Nadu, although it also has had an impact on female infanticide, as families who do want to have fewer children in the rural areas, are more likely to only want a boy.

Br Sebastian also explained how SJDT's micro-credit scheme for women in the villages works. A local staff member, or animator, will go into the village and identify who the key women leaders are, and then educate them about the advantages of the micro-credit scheme.

When a group is established, they go through 5 modules of training in areas like accounting, running meetings, small business skills. Each woman in the group commits to saving a certain amount each month, and the group also meets monthly to chart their progress.

After 6 months of savings, the group is given a loan from SJDT, and they begin by making small business loans to one third of the group. Once that first group has successfully repaid their loans, the next third can borrow.

The final group can't borrow until the first two have paid off their loans, so the peer pressure from those waiting ensures that the first two groups have a high success rate.

Br Sebastian said his groups have a 99.93% success rate, and the only failures they have encountered are due to his staff's shortcomings, not the women. Once the groups have successfully completed their first loan round, they can apply for more loan money, and they also receive further training in women's rights and advocacy. In some areas, a number of the women's groups have joined together to form Federations, to give them greater advocacy and borrowing power.

SJDT now has more than 30,000 women involved in its micro-credit schemes.

As a result of the training programs, they now have more than 315 members who have successful stood for local government elections and been elected to represent their people.

After lunch we cleaned up and then went out to visit the women's groups themselves. We drove to a large Dalit settlement, where there were 22 women's groups operating, running businesses ranging from candle making, food products, spice packaging and rope making. One of the women's groups had become the distributor for the largest soap and detergent manufacturer in the country for the surrounding villages.

We met the head of the local women's Federation, as well as one of the elected women members and saw a demonstration of how to make rope. At one stage we followed the Federation leader into a side room to see how they feed the raw rope fibre from coconut husks through a machine that refines the fibre.

Unfortunately when she turned it on to demonstrate, the machine was facing the wrong way and we were all covered in an explosion of dust and fibres!

All of us, including the local women, ran from the room coughing up the dust and in peals of laughter.

Next we visited a local tuition centre. In 17 local villages, SJDT has set up after school tuition for the local kids. Many of the school children have illiterate parents who can't help them with their homework, and no electricity at home to study.

The tuition centres are staffed by trained teachers, and the children go there after school for time to play, as well as study. In each tuition centre, the children elect their own representative council that deals with their issues in the same way that Girls Village does.

The children in this tuition centre had noticed that there was a broken tap in the village that no-one had fixed, so they wrote a petition to the village leader and had the repairs made. They were currently writing a second petition to ask for more trash bins around the school.

The children's council was also active in local issues, and had organized a child rights rally with the support of the local women's groups. The children were involved at a grassroots level as well, identifying local children who had dropped out of school, and the reasons why, and supporting them in getting back to school.

After saying goodbye to the kids, we headed off to visit another women's group who had received a loan to buy a turkey incubator, and had greatly increased their profitability in raising and selling turkeys.

The achievements of the women and the children, and their passion and commitment to making their village life better was incredibly inspiring.

Today our work began on our two babies cottages at Children's Village! We headed off early out towards the project site, and were excited to roll up and see the two buildings built from the donations of our wonderful supporters.

A special reception awaited us - four of the two year olds from the cottages built last year, trotted out to wait for us in a line, and were full of smiles, waves and the familiar catch cry of "Auntie, auntie!". After some time getting to know the little ones in each cottage, we moved over to the new buildings and began our work.

The locals had already finished most of the construction work on the two houses, and our first task was painting the outside of both, and inside of some rooms with whitewash. We had the fun of climbing local scaffolding made of bamboo and rope, with an eager group of workers holding us steady as we climbed.

Christine, Meredith, Megan and Shelley made it all the way on to the concrete roof of the cottages to paint, while the rest of the gang worked on scaffolding or at ground level painting the walls.

The scenery here is just stunning - views of the lake, mountains and coconut groves, and a lovely breeze kept us from overheating in the midday sun.

At 12.30 pm we broke for lunch, and the house mothers had prepared an amazing feast that we could not do justice to. Fortunately with 28 kids already in residence in the completed cottages, there would be plenty of hungry mouths that night to finish the leftovers!

After a leisurely lunch, we played with the kids some more, while some of our group chatted to the local workers. After exchanging names, one of the men asked who of our group was still single, and after learning at least two of our women were still on the market, made a great show of preening himself and hoping for the best!

Our foreman told us they had not expected that we would work so hard and fast, and by the time we had finished the second set of whitewashing, they had come up with more plans for other work for us for the rest of the week - laying foundations, rendering (plastering) the brick walls and doing the final coat of whitewash.

After a good day's work, we headed back into Madurai and had a quick clean up at the hotel before heading out to shop. After several days in the country, everyone wanted the opportunity to buy material for a salwar kameez, one of the local dress costumes, to wear out at night over the coming week.

Our trusty driver, Vira, took us to a great store in town, and we all bought salwar kameez sets and some of the girls bought cloth by the metre. Madurai is famous for its cotton - exported by the British for years under the name Madras Cotton. Cotton and silk that would sell for $10 to $50 a metre at home was only $1 to $2 a metre here.

After completing our purchases we headed back to the hotel for dinner on the rooftop again, and fireworks across the city.