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Day 25: Z is for Zesty Selfies

bluelabmetro

Updated: Sep 3, 2021

cout << “Hello World, it’s Kabir”;

Breakfast, chai, the whole shebang. We told Sabirbhai to come pick us up at 8:30 so relative to the 7:45’s we have been telling him for the past several days, we were able to “sleep in”. As soon as we got to the office the guard stopped our car and asked if there was a “Sarah Rogers”. What we didn’t put together was that the previous day we had ordered for a representative to collect a water sample with us in Dolatpura for toilets validation and had given them Sarah’s contact information. The water testers were 30 minutes early and we started scrambling to get Sarah and Natalia ready for the day ahead of them.

From there on it was smooth sailing. Sarah and Natalia were able to go and collect the water sample with Vidhi by their side and record the whole process for the future. For Nisha and me, it could have gone far better… We had planned to go with Salmaben to meet with Barola’s Sarpanch (head of local government). We had already met with the Panchayat member (right hand man to the Sarpanch) Tinabhai. As soon as we got in the car and went the opposite direction of where the Sarpanch is supposed to live, I knew something was about to go wrong. I turned to Nisha and told her, “We are meeting Tinabhai again”. The whole protocol we wrote to inform the Sarpanch about our plan for the future with the needs assessment was instantly scrapped and a new protocol was to be drafted in the five minute car ride. I sat there and pondered the best course of action while Nisha was attacking me with questions like “What are we gonna do?”, “Why are you sitting there in silence?”, “Why are you curled up into fetal position?”. It was wonderful. We had a very brief meeting, and met back up with the other two at the office.

The magnitude of work left to do forced Nisha, Natalia, and me to stay at the foundation while Sarah went to see the Medapur stove build. Sarah wasn’t able to attend the whole event but the few moments she captured were amazing. The three of us were able to finish the preliminary of the preliminary round of needs filtering and draft a new interview protocol for community members focusing specifically on the needs we filtered down to. We grabbed some lunch and headed off to Barola to conduct some interviews.

After interviews, Salmaben graciously invited us to dinner at Mirch Masala in InOrbit. The meal was amazing and I was forced by an individual who remains to be anonymous….Sarah…. to eat far more jalebi than my body could handle. But the icing on the cake was Rajeshbhai asking me to take a selfie in front of a painting of a woman that I have never seen. It was comedy gold.

Afterwards I asked the group if we could get McDonalds and got yelled at. All in all it was a great day. We attempted to do work after dinner but we were all so tuckered out from the amount of food we were fed we decided to go straight to bed and start work early in the morning.

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