An Allred's Adventure

I am currently sitting in the Delhi airport, it is 2:30am Monday morning, and I am waiting to catch a flight to Kathmandu for our two week Nepal outreach program... Needless to say, I can hardly remember what happened this week because my brain is a little foggy. But I'm taking advantage of the free AC and popping out a quick blogpost before I fall asleep on the airport floor! Disclaimer: the rainy season was somehow put on pause and it hasn't rained in Hyderabad in a few weeks, so dust, mosquitos, and heat are back on the nightly menu. This also means that it is so dusty in our house that my computer keyboard gets filled with dust! Not covered in dust, FILLED with dust, like my keys stick and have stopped working. My poor little computer can't handle India anymore! So if there are an inordinate amount of typos in this post, it has nothing to do with the fact that I haven't slept in a looooong time and everything to do with a dusty keyboard. My very first blogp...

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 ...