For those who are interested in the possibility of adding excitement in your life, plan to join me and the ROTARY DREAM TEAM - INDIA 2013, as we launch this year's journey to India on February 14th.
From Vermont, Judith Brown will be heading to Newark Airport, and will meet up with me and with Cornelia Stockman from the Rotary Club of Kennebunk-Portside. Also coming along to meet us will be Peter and Kimberley Miller from Pennsylvania, as well as Linda Bertuzzi from Las Vegas, Ozzie and Kathryn Gilbertson, Mary Lynn Cummings, Colleen Braid and more. This year, the team members come from the United States, Australia, France and Germany - not to mention our dear friends, the Rotarians from the Rotary Club of Delhi-Megapolis, with whom we have worked and coordinated for the past several years.
The team will arrive in Delhi late on the evening of February 15th and be taken to our hotel, for a few hours of sleep and then we are up and at it. Because of the dates chosen by the authorities in India, the National Immunization Day (NID) for administering polio vaccine (February 24) we will be doing some of our travel in the beginning of the trip and some at the end.
The service work project in which we will participate is providing a check dam for a water harvesting project in Bhudleen Wala Besai Meo and Gerozpur Zhirka villages located in the Mewat District in haryana State. Over the past three years, we have funded and helped to construct three similar dams in the states of Rajasthan and Haryana. However, this year is a bit different, because the dam construction will be closer to where we have worked in administering polio vaccine over the past five or six years. It is particularly meaningful to me and other members of our team who have traveled in previous years, because of the fact that we have come to know some of the villagers and the elders in town which will benefit from the construction of this dam.
It is difficult for most of us to comprehend that people can live (or should I say exist?) in regions where there is not sufficient water for crop planting and harvesting. At our own homes, when we need to water our gardens or wash our cars, we just hook up the hose to the outside spigot and turn the handle and out comes a steady stream of water! Well, in these parts of the world, where we have and will continue to work in a cooperative effort with the Rotary India Water Conservation Trust, the terrain is hard - rocky and dusty with barely any growth at all. If it were not for the scrub growth, there would be nothing.
This past year, during a respite from our work on the dam construction, I was able to visit the project we funded and helped to construct back in 2010. I traveled to Teench Wala and when leaving my car, I wandered down the path we had taken for several days a few years back and we quite taken by the fact that the path was no longer just path of dust and dirt. There was actually some evidence of grasses and low scrub growing. I picked up my pace a bit, because I was excited to see the change and wanted to see more. When I came around the last bend in the trail, I was simply awestruck - there before me was the completed dam, complete with a plaque including all of the names of the participants from 2010. Behind the dam was a reservoir of water which stretched for several miles! WOW! What a difference. Although the monsoons had ceased some seven or eight months prior, the reservoir was about two-thirds full. Water fowl had moved into the area and now used this area as a natural habitat. The quiet of the countryside was interrupted by the sound of "one-lungers" the old single cycle gasoline engines which were sputtering and coughing as they powered water pumps. Looking around the perimeter of the reservoir, I could see several water lines going up the hillsides to the top. There the water spilled out and flooded the terraced garden spot. Then the water overflowed and flooded the next area down, and so on to the edge of the reservoir.
Imagine looking around the area where only two years prior had been virtually a wasteland, and now was flourishing with crops up and down the hillsides which created the valley. Perhaps the best experience, however, was when I walked back to my car. Along the path, an older gentleman stood, leaning against his tall walking stick. He looked at me and a minimal smile nearly shattered the craggy and leathery face, that was sun beaten beneath his turban. With my driver acting as an interpreter, I stopped to chat with the old gentleman. He took my hands and clasped them between his own. He looked at me and said a few words, in the form of a question. My driver said, "He is asking, 'Do you know what you have done?'" I hesitated a bit, because I was not sure if I was about to be reprimanded and scolded. I said, "No sir, I don't!" He went on to explain that before my group came back in 2010, there had been six drilled (artesian) wells that served the villages. They had all long since gone dry. However, after the monsoons came and were held back to become the reservoir, the water table had risen substantially and sustained and all six wells were now gushing! The old man's smile broadened, as did my own, and he embraced me as if to say, "Thank you!"
From Vermont, Judith Brown will be heading to Newark Airport, and will meet up with me and with Cornelia Stockman from the Rotary Club of Kennebunk-Portside. Also coming along to meet us will be Peter and Kimberley Miller from Pennsylvania, as well as Linda Bertuzzi from Las Vegas, Ozzie and Kathryn Gilbertson, Mary Lynn Cummings, Colleen Braid and more. This year, the team members come from the United States, Australia, France and Germany - not to mention our dear friends, the Rotarians from the Rotary Club of Delhi-Megapolis, with whom we have worked and coordinated for the past several years.
The team will arrive in Delhi late on the evening of February 15th and be taken to our hotel, for a few hours of sleep and then we are up and at it. Because of the dates chosen by the authorities in India, the National Immunization Day (NID) for administering polio vaccine (February 24) we will be doing some of our travel in the beginning of the trip and some at the end.
The service work project in which we will participate is providing a check dam for a water harvesting project in Bhudleen Wala Besai Meo and Gerozpur Zhirka villages located in the Mewat District in haryana State. Over the past three years, we have funded and helped to construct three similar dams in the states of Rajasthan and Haryana. However, this year is a bit different, because the dam construction will be closer to where we have worked in administering polio vaccine over the past five or six years. It is particularly meaningful to me and other members of our team who have traveled in previous years, because of the fact that we have come to know some of the villagers and the elders in town which will benefit from the construction of this dam.
It is difficult for most of us to comprehend that people can live (or should I say exist?) in regions where there is not sufficient water for crop planting and harvesting. At our own homes, when we need to water our gardens or wash our cars, we just hook up the hose to the outside spigot and turn the handle and out comes a steady stream of water! Well, in these parts of the world, where we have and will continue to work in a cooperative effort with the Rotary India Water Conservation Trust, the terrain is hard - rocky and dusty with barely any growth at all. If it were not for the scrub growth, there would be nothing.
This past year, during a respite from our work on the dam construction, I was able to visit the project we funded and helped to construct back in 2010. I traveled to Teench Wala and when leaving my car, I wandered down the path we had taken for several days a few years back and we quite taken by the fact that the path was no longer just path of dust and dirt. There was actually some evidence of grasses and low scrub growing. I picked up my pace a bit, because I was excited to see the change and wanted to see more. When I came around the last bend in the trail, I was simply awestruck - there before me was the completed dam, complete with a plaque including all of the names of the participants from 2010. Behind the dam was a reservoir of water which stretched for several miles! WOW! What a difference. Although the monsoons had ceased some seven or eight months prior, the reservoir was about two-thirds full. Water fowl had moved into the area and now used this area as a natural habitat. The quiet of the countryside was interrupted by the sound of "one-lungers" the old single cycle gasoline engines which were sputtering and coughing as they powered water pumps. Looking around the perimeter of the reservoir, I could see several water lines going up the hillsides to the top. There the water spilled out and flooded the terraced garden spot. Then the water overflowed and flooded the next area down, and so on to the edge of the reservoir.
Imagine looking around the area where only two years prior had been virtually a wasteland, and now was flourishing with crops up and down the hillsides which created the valley. Perhaps the best experience, however, was when I walked back to my car. Along the path, an older gentleman stood, leaning against his tall walking stick. He looked at me and a minimal smile nearly shattered the craggy and leathery face, that was sun beaten beneath his turban. With my driver acting as an interpreter, I stopped to chat with the old gentleman. He took my hands and clasped them between his own. He looked at me and said a few words, in the form of a question. My driver said, "He is asking, 'Do you know what you have done?'" I hesitated a bit, because I was not sure if I was about to be reprimanded and scolded. I said, "No sir, I don't!" He went on to explain that before my group came back in 2010, there had been six drilled (artesian) wells that served the villages. They had all long since gone dry. However, after the monsoons came and were held back to become the reservoir, the water table had risen substantially and sustained and all six wells were now gushing! The old man's smile broadened, as did my own, and he embraced me as if to say, "Thank you!"
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