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.