An Allred's Adventure

At the end of some weeks, all you can really say is "We survived!" But as in all challenging weeks, after the darkest hours comes the greatest moments of light. We have two volunteers hospitalized, one only stayed for a few hours, got the correct medicine and went home. Her recovery has been speedy! Another volunteer had to stay for two nights... Braxton was in charge of making sure everything was okay with him so I basically didn't see him for several days while he was at the hospital with them. We were all very relieved when that volunteer made it home on Thursday afternoon looking way better and getting better every second. Our healthy volunteers managed to pull through (although everyone was feeling a bit under the weather this past week) and get a lot of awesome work done! They finished painting an entire preschool and building a playground at the same preschool. They taught more nutrition classes, english classes, and planned a new environmental awareness cla...

Every single week surprises us... without fail. Here are some of our main surprises and successes (and challenges) this week! 1) Although we expected 5 new volunteers to arrive on Wednesday of last week, we only got 3. But they are a solid 3 and they dove in head first. We picked them up at 11:55pm on Wednesday, and got home from the airport at 2am, and then woke up at 6:15am on Thursday to head out the HELP India's first ever team outreach in a village about 3 hours outside of Hyderabad. This village is in a province of Telangana called Warangal. It was shaping up to be an awesome weekend, full of nutrition, hydration, and exercise workshops at two impoverished government schools in the area, as a pre-accompaniment to the water filtration systems we will be providing for them in coming weeks. We were also going to be hosting a field day at both schools! That's right... tug of war, relay races, wheelbarrow racing, and ball tosses. 2) Not so surprisingly, throwing ...

"Women development centre...a place to interact with each other on various social, cultural and economic issues, a centre of privacy to discuss issues concerning abuse and domestic violence. A roof to have trainings and health camps; the women of Nandamuri Nagar considers this centre has their second home. Thank you Help international." These are the words of our amazing partner of 9 years, Meera, who posted about the inaguration ceremony held in the newly painted Women's Center this past Wednesday. I'd be lying if I said that seeing the look on all of those women's faces and receiving their applause and garlands of flowers as a token of honor and thanks wasn't rewarding! We held a nutrition class at the new center to kick off the use of that important place, followed by the ceremony which the women of the community insisted on having. Braxton and I were able to say a few words after receiving flowers and we emphasized the importance of finding ref...