We flew into Madurai at 9.00 pm last night, after a two day journey to reach this part of India. Although the distance itself is significant, it's the layovers on the way that make the journey really long - overnight in Singapore in order to make the right flights, then a 7 hour stop in Chennai.

Our old friend Samy who took such good care of us last year was waiting for us at the airport and there was much smiling and waving from both sides as we waited for our luggage to come out. Madurai is a small airport with just one runway, and we grinned to see that on the tarmac side of the very modern baggage turntable there was a very low tech single baggage handler tossing the luggage on the belt from a hand trolley that he'd wheeled over from the plane.

Driving in through Madurai at dark still held all the magical chaotic street scenes of the city, but we missed the distant views of beautiful coconut groves, banana plantations and rice fields, with misty mountains in the background. This is Megan's third visit to India, and my fourth, and we feel so connected to this part of the world that every time it feels like coming home.

We had a great time catching up with Samy in the car and before we knew it we were at our hotel, the Germanus, and headed to bed to try to catch up on time zones.

This morning our driver met us to take us out to the Children's Village where we will be working the coming week. After so many trips to India we thought there was nothing new that you could see on the roads, but today was the first time we'd seen someone riding a motorcycle with a goat on his lap.

The goat seemed quite placid and enjoying the ride, which given the kamikaze traffic was quite a feat!

We met up with Samy just a minute or two down the road from the Children's Village at the head office of St Joseph's Development Trust (SJDT). SJDT is the development agency that is building the Children's Village, and also runs micro-credit schemes for women, other children's orphanages and refuges, child labour programs and more across Tamil Nadu.

We met with Br Sebastian, the Executive Director of SJDT to plan our weeks schedule, and also catch up on the latest developments in the year we've been gone. We also met our old friend Devi Bala, who along with Samy will be taking care of us this week, and who is in charge of the new Children's Village.

Then it was off to visit the Village and see how the cottage we built last year is faring! Last year our little group of four women raised enough money to pay for one cottage, and although we worked on other projects with the children during the week, we spent our last day painting the cottage we had paid for.

It was wonderful to see the cottage fully finished and occupied, and to see how well our painting had turned out! There are now three finished cottages in use at the Children's Village site, with three more under construction.

Two of these have been paid for by this year's group's fundraising, and we will be working on them over the next week finishing the rendering and then painting them.

SJDT currently cares for over 350 children in four nearby locations - Boys Village, which cares for boys aged 5 - 15, Girls Village, which cares for girls in the same age group, New Dawn Village which cares for intellectually disabled children, and the new Children's Village.

The first three are typical residential facilities for kids in this area who are either orphaned, abandoned, or who may have parents who care about them, but are too poor to raise or educate them. The children live in small communities of about 100 children at each location, with 15 - 20 children living in the one large dorm style house with a house mother to take care of them.

Children's Village was created after SJDT started to receive a number of babies in recent years who were either abandoned, or orphaned. Br Sebastian was concerned that the larger style Boys and Girls Village programs were too big for the babies and they were not receiving the individual attention they needed.

He was also aware that sometimes there were tensions between the orphaned and abandoned kids in the villages, and those who still had parents who visited them and who could go home on holidays. The children who were complete orphans or abandoned felt left out and jealous of those kids who still had families and were connected to them.

To deal with both these issues, he created the Children's Village, which is built of smaller family sized cottages. In each cottage, a house mother is employed, who may have one or two children of her own, and she is paid housekeeping and a salary to raise three or four abandoned children as a family unit. One or two babies and one or two older orphaned children are brought together in the one cottage in a typical family age range.

The village is being established gradually with three families set up in the last year, and three planned for the coming year, which allows the children to settle in slowly.

Already all of the babies and toddlers from last year's program at Girls Village are settled in the new cottage, and there are others on the waiting list for the new cottages. There are also still older orphaned children in Boys and Girls Village who will move across to the new cottages once they are complete.

We spent a wonderful hour looking at the cottages and catching up with some of the babies from last year. Jennifer, Esther, Katrina and the other toddlers are now at school during the day so we won't get to see them again until the weekend.

We met all the local builders we will be working with this week - most of them women - and they were very excited to say hello and are looking forward to meeting the rest of the girls and bossing us around in the coming days!

The Children's Village site is also the location for the new headquarters of SJDT, which has outgrown its old office down the road. The new building is due to be opened in 10 days time so there is frantic building going on to meet the deadline.

After sharing lunch with Br Sebastian, we headed back to Madurai and our hotel - about 1.5 hours down the road, excited to start meeting the rest of the girls as they arrive tomorrow and with the activities we have planned for the coming week!