After no more and no less than 4 hours sleep, we get woken up by powerful kicks in the car window. The driver, all rested, wants to start unloading as fast as posible so he could return to Bangalore. Slightly confused, we start doing te work, and alongside the curious villagers we unload the computers. They all want to be a part of the action and touch the new machines brought to their village, just to convince themselves that they are actually there.
The IT Lab and the computers, since Saturday became the most interesting news around the village and everyone is eager to know more and see what will happen next. Funnily enough, we are just as curious as them as the plans we made at home don’t seem to match the reality of this world.
As soon as we are done unloading, we are invited in and told that due to a family problem they couldn’t find us a host, but the mayor would be more than happy to have us staying in his house. Their hospitality doesn’t end there as we didn’t even get a chance to accept their invitation that a breakfast made of rice, spiced sauces, curry and chilli seemed to materialise on the table. It just seemed that thousands of new aromas delighted and intoxicated my senses in the same time, expecting for even my finger tips to burn from the hotness of the food. Everyone around the table seemed to pay attention to every movement, word and grimace we exchanged, in order to deliberate if the food is to our liking. The simple approval to their question: ‘’Utta, Good?’’ seemed to provoke a general state of happiness and laughter around us. We are most probably the first foreigners to visit this village- lost within plantations and banana cultures, and they seem to truly wish to impress with their hospitality as they were taught to be by their ancestors. The question ‘Utta, Good?’ kept repeating a few times and the news of our positive answer propagated around our curious public starting comments and spreading a feeling of pride to the thought that their simple food is very much enjoyed by foreigners too.
They are BADELADAKU, the earth, food and customs of this place are an inherint part of them.The Gods overlooking form the modest temple of the village are theirs and they don’t feel like a group of people but they are a community, they are one, and as one they are proud of everything they’ve accomplished and of their history. These moments are so very precious for the village, cause today Badeladaku is not just a forgotten place, ignored by authorities or written off by the big cities, but it’s actually appreciated by two foreigners who enjoy their food, love their little streets filled by happy, energetic children and hard working women who seem to never stop working from break till dawn and they also appreciate the broken skin on the hands of the hard working men who work the land.
After breakfast, we start taking our first steps in setting up the IT Lab. Having chosen the place, we start taking measurements. The whole process is followed by ten people who comment on every step and result, starting an absolute chaos in a few minutes where nobody knows anymore who’s measuring what and or what was even decided. As we had no plan of the building to start with, we decided to abandon the Indian way and try and do a drawing of this place, adnotated with the needed measurements. However, that took a turn for the worse when they started measuring in inches and write in centimetres one wall, as for the next to be measured in feet and written in metres. The drawing makes no sense, so one of the teachers sends a student to bring another piece a paper and a crayon. We decide to start again and just keep to inches, and the plan finally starts to shape up. We organise the tables and the chairs, the position of the power sockets and after quickly marking the wall as well, the council decides to change things around so we mark the walls again, managing to complete something that looks more like a Picasso painting from which nobody could understand a thing, but at least it was on everyones liking.
I’m starting to believe that at some point in time an Indian philosopher must have been best friends with a Spanish thinker, otherwise I can’t explain the similar style of working, where after each hour of work we take a tea break, at noon the electrician goes to have his meal and comes back only after a two hour break, in order to finish work at 4.30 so he could catch the sunset and have his dinner.
We haven’t managed to do much in our first day, as we have only mounted a few metres of cable PVC rack for the electrical installation and installed the fuse box on the wall. Part of this is owed to the fact that we don’t have the necessary equipment as we can only use a manual drill, plyers that are ready for retirement and a hammer that falls apart everytime you try to use it.
We decided to continue this process tomorrow, Wednesday, at 8:00, and the day ends just as it started sharing a meal with the familly, enjoying the spicy sauces under their vigillent eyes and the mother’s continous questioning of ‚Utta, Good?!’ and the repeated answer of ‚Yes, very good’ – which started everytime a wave of giggles and happiness within our audience.
You can see the rest of the photos of this day here : https://picasaweb.google.
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