After leaving Churachandpur a few weeks ago, my group flew to Guwahati, the largest city here in Northeast India and then took a four hour taxi ride to Shillong, a beautiful city in the state of Meghalaya. We made a lot of friends in Shillong during our last visit there in 2008, and we received a warm welcome back from them. We arrived in Shillong on a Thursday evening and spent the next few days relaxing and hanging out with our friends there.
On Monday morning, my brother, Marv, Mahlon, and I went back to the airport in Guwahati and flew to Delhi. The next day, the three of us went to Chingrawli, a remote village a few hours from Delhi. Bibles For The World runs a school there, the only one they run outside of Northeast India. Ruth, a former India Children’s Choir leader, is a teacher there, and we went mostly to visit her. That evening, back in Delhi, we went to TGI Friday’s with some of our friends from Delhi. I really like Indian food, but it was great to have some good old American food again.
That evening Marv and Mahlon flew out of Delhi and two other guys flew in. Those two guys came to help out with our work project in Hmarkhawlien (more on that in a little bit).
I spent the next day taking the guys to do some sightseeing and shopping in Delhi and then we flew out that evening to Calcutta. We spent one night there in Calcutta and then flew to Silchar early the next morning. Silchar is a town in the Northeast Indian state of Assam. Our destination was a village about an hour from Silchar called Hmarkhawlien.
Hmarkhawlien is the home of the second largest school that is run by Bibles For The World. The school has almost six hundred students in Kindergarten through Class Ten. They are in the process of adding Classes Eleven and Twelve and for that they need expanded facilities, so my team went there to help with the building project for a few weeks.
The other three guys in the group had traveled directly to Hmarkhawlien from Shillong and had already been working for a few days before I arrived with the other two guys. We spent the next ten days working on the new building together with a crew of local guys. We even found some time to mix in some fun stuff like my group playing volleyball against some of the school teachers. We had a great time there in Hmarkhawlien.
From there, all of the guys except for me, left India and went on to Thailand. I flew back to Manipur, and after spending one night in the capital city of Imphal, went back to Churachandpur, my home away from home.
That will be all for now... I will let you know about my time in Churachandpur in my next post.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
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