Today we traveled back to Girls Village for the start of our construction project!  Girls Village is a residential complex for 118 girls between the ages of 5 and 18.  Some are orphans, some have been abandoned by their families, and some come from very loving, but very poor families who are unable to feed or educate them.  The girls live at the Village in cottages of 25 girls, and attend the local school. 

Over the last 2 years, Girls Village has started to receive a number of babies and now has 15 young children, mostly girls, under the age of 5.  As with the older children some are orphaned, some have been abandoned, and sadly in several cases the babies are survivors of female infanticide attempts.  One of these children arrived at the village only 18 hours old, and still had not been cleaned after birth.

Although the babies are loved and well cared for at Name Girls Village, the number of children and noise and bustle means that they do not always get the individual attention they need at this age.  For this reason, Br Sebastian, the Executive Director of St Joseph’s Development Trust (SJDT) who run Girls Village asked us for help to build a small, purpose designed babies cottage to become part of a new Children’s Village facility.

The new Children’s Village and Babies Cottage are being constructed about half an hour down the road from Girls Village, just past the Boys Village residential complex.

Our small group has done a fantastic job raising enough money to pay for one of the new babies cottages!  As the new Children’s Village complex is still under construction, there are no children there at present.  Rather than work on our Babies Cottage away from the children, we have chosen to spend most of this week on another construction project right at Girls Village, so we can spend time with the babies we have come to help, and also to make an extra contribution above our Babies Cottage by lending our labour to another needed project.

Today and for the next two days we will work at Girls Village helping to renovate the existing kitchen, and to build an extension. 

Although we arrived today on a school day, we found not only the babies at home – a number of the girls had the day off school for a study day as their exams are approaching.  While we are sure some study took place, we certainly were a welcome distraction for them and for most of the day we had groups of girls watching and helping us work!

We started the day by moving rubble from some demolition inside the old kitchen, to form part of the foundations of the new extension.  After clearing most of that out, the form work was then read for us to help pour concrete for the footings of the building.  The concrete components were carefully measured by hand in tin pans, then mixed on the ground.  We then formed a human chain with the local men and women building labourers to move the concrete in the tin pans one by one and pour them into the footing.

While most of us passed and poured the concrete, one of our group would take turns using a spike to pound out any airholes in the concrete we had poured.  After half of the footings were poured we took a break while more form work was built, and changed jobs to moving piles of sand and rocks to make new concrete and provide the rest of the fill for the foundations.

Moving the rock was hard work!  The local women had an advantage with padded cushions for their heads and serenely walked each pan full of rock to the building site perfectly balanced on their heads.  We had neither the padding or the balance to move it that way, and so we did the best we could carrying the pans or balancing them on our shoulders.

At 12.30 pm we stopped for a much needed lunch break and some time to cool off.  The weather has been perfect really – although it is hot there has been a cool breeze all day and occasional clouds to break the sun.  We lunched with two young volunteers from Denmark who have come out for 6 months to live at Girls Village and work with the children.

We had a fantastic vegetarian Indian lunch prepared by one of the staff, then it was back to work moving the rest of the rocks.  By this stage the babies had found us and we had several toddlers watching us work while they played in the construction sand.

Our final job for the day was to pour the rest of the concrete into the last of the footings.  That done we headed back to the hotel tired, covered in dirt, but pleased with our day’s efforts!  The women who worked side by side with us wore beautiful saris and somehow, although they were doing the same work, finished the day immaculate, while we looked like complete mud puppies!  We don’t know whether it’s a more practical wardrobe they wear, or if we are just messier workers!