Thursday, June 26th, 2008
5:45 am: wake up, grab toast and tea and throw up a kourta and long leggings – four of us are off to a nearby Muslim slum to do water quality testing. We have to do it this early in the morning because water only comes for about 2 hours a day, typically early in the morning.
6:30 am: we just got dropped off by a taxi at the train station near our flat – normally it’s lined with people selling produce and juices and umbrellas and clothes, but this early, it’s pretty quiet except for a wholesale parsely market. The train is pretty empty, but I still end up standing by the door because you get a refreshing breeze and it’s cool to look out as we hurtle by. This morning, because it’s so early, we spot a row of men and boys on the tracks, squatting over them to poop. It’s pretty crazy.
7:00 am: we arrive in the community and try to find the specific households that the other girls had tagged earlier – they’re part of a pilot for our epi survey to measure the effectiveness of our education interventions. None of us speak hindi though and it’s kind of difficult to find some of the people we’re looking for. Even when we find the right households, it takes all four of awhile to figure out how to hold everything to test the water and package our test samples without contaminating them. It starts sprinkling while we’re working. Walking through the slum, several things stand out: it’s really dark, even though the sky’s getting brighter, because the slums are built up to about 3 stories and the passageways are narrow.
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We have to leave to catch our train to goa – will be continued soon!
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