Some of us set out to work on the walls, some painting the exterior of the soon-to-be computer and vocational training center, others worked on the mural, others passing bricks our to the street area where the watering trough was well underway.
Tom Hanna, Chris King, Don MacGarry, Peter Ivy and a few others chose to take on this project as their own. The group created quite a spectacle for the men who sat on litter-type beds and smoked their hookahs, as they basked in the sun and “observed”. 
“It’s a cultural thing, and we should not let it bother us”. It is our hope that eventually men, women and children will take enough interest in what we are doing to actually offer to lend a helping hand, rather than to be the official sidewalk observers, and Saturday morning quarterbacks!Kjell-Ake was pleased for me to take him around the entire site, seeing what we had accomplished with our small but devoted team of 2007, but then, he immediately joined the brick line,
passing several hundred bricks along to those working outside the wall. It did not take too long before Judith Reardon (our official cheer-leading, HIGH-FIVE GORGEOUS GRANDMA) had cajoled some of the young boys and teenagers to join in the brick line, and it was good to see that Kjell-Ake had one young lad on each side of him, passing on the bricks. Mark Little from Norwich, England and Audrey Athavale, joined by Liam Dunne teetered on bamboo ladders up against the outside walls, wielding their paintbrushes and rollers (many of which were brought to our project by Mark Little and Susan Wischhusen) to bathe the exterior in a warm yellow-orange finish. The outside areas, where we were building the walls, is to be landscaped and made a special “green” area, where upon entering, the students, as well as the tiny tots, will be able to experience something very special – again boosting their morale and self-esteem and possibly acting as an encouragement to remain in school and to strive to take classes in this training center or to have the mothers of tiny children to bring them to the day-care center where they will enjoy tender, loving care. In the meanwhile, the moms will be able to learn stitchery, weaving and cosmetology, thereby being able to augment the family income. Little by little, our team seems to be making connections with the villagers, and when some have wanted to take a break from their labor, a few at a time have wandered up the main street (?) of Chahalka, stopping at the local tailor shop – the young man has a treadle sewing machine, a few bolts of cloth, but from those basics is able to stitch just about anything from the traditional salwar kameez to a proper dress shirt for men. Next to the tailor’s shop is another gentleman who sells table cloths and head coverings. On the other side of the tailor shop is the local medical dispensary, which is tended to by someone who comes by twice each week, and then is visited by a physician once a week. Upstairs over the dispensary, three of us climbed very steep and uneven stairs, to get to another shop – more of a storage room for one of the other shops below, where we found some scarves to purchase. I noticed a young woman - possibly a girl of fifteen or sixteen, who was nursing her baby. 
She sat serenely on a bed, her head covering lightly draped over her shoulder and just covering the baby’s face. She seemed oblivious to the bit of commotion we caused by invading her private space and the shop of her family. The baby had fallen asleep and she passed him on to one of her younger sisters. I walked out onto the balcony of this room, and had a bird’s eye view of our project below and across the road. Carefully draped over the railing of the balcony was a POLIO PLUS banner, announcing the National Immunization Day scheduled for February 10th.We departed this shop and descended the stairs, where the shopkeeper on the other side of the tailor’s space (these are all ten feet by fifteen feet in size) had been found and had opened his shop. I had purchased a woven square cloth the previous year (white with red design) and was looking to purchase another similar cloth this year. Last year, two of the men had attempted to instruct me in the way to create a headdress from the cloth, but I had failed miserably. I was hoping for another more successful attempt this year. He showed me cloth after cloth, each time taking one down from a rudimentary clothing rack, created by suspending a bamboo stick from two pieces of twine from eye bolts in the ceiling, then displaying his wares from hangars hooked over this bamboo pole. One after another was NOT what I was hoping to find. One of the ladies who was walking along with me – Aruna Khoushik, is a native of India, now living in Ontario, and she was very helpful by providing interpretation and translation between the shopkeeper and me. I described the cloth as one similar to what Yassar Arafat often wore as a head covering. Ahhhhhhhhh…. Now he understood. Just as he was looking, I spied what appeared to be a similar cloth, only woven in green rather than red. When I pointed it out to the shopkeeper, he smiled, took it down from the hangar and shook it with a snap or two, creating a dust cloud which would put the cartoon character Pigpen from Charlie Brown to shame! We haggled over the price for a few minutes, with me telling him that I had paid seventy-five rupees for the red and white cloth the year before, while he wanted two hundred rupees. Finally, he looked as if he actually may have recognized me or remembered my purchase from the previous year. He said to Aruna in Hindi, “He paid seventy-five rupees last year because he purchased THREE such cloths and I gave him a discount!” He HAD remembered. We “discussed” price for a few more minutes and finally settled on the seventy-five rupees. Such a bargain!
From that shop, we wandered up the road and at the top of the hill was a man about twenty-five years of age, tending to his cart with a stack of egg crates (each holding three dozen eggs) and perhaps eight layers high. He was cooking an omelet and we stopped to watch him.
He had chopped up some red onion, cilantro, green peppers and some chili peppers, and stirred that into the egg mixture. He was cooking in an iron skillet over a flame produced by a sort of camp-stove contraption, fueled by bottled propane. The omelet appeared to be half-cooked, when he placed two pieces of toasted bread into the middle of the pan, allowing the concoction to fry a bit longer, and then he folded each side in toward the center, folded the entire thing in half creating what he called “omelet sandwich”. If I had not recently eaten my lunch, I would have been happy to purchase one of these sandwiches.We walked further along, peeking inside the open entrances of the various homes, watching the tiny children who were either playing in the street – some pushing tiny carts on long sticks, crashing them into one another, as all kids will do. Add to that the sheer fascination and amazement with us, exhibited on the faces of women and children (the men were all down at the work site, sitting on the wall and observing us) and we almost created a parade, with me leading the group as the Pied Piper of Chahalka!
After about an hour, we returned back to the work site to pass more bricks in the brick line and to work on building the wall around the outside of the training center and the day-care center. The team worked for the remainder of the morning and piled back onto the six small buses for a ride back to Sanjiv’s farm for lunch. Overall, we had accomplished a substantial amount of work – raising the wall several score of bricks, establishing better relations with some of the villagers, and contributing a bit to the local economy.
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