Seems like just about every post is about animals or traffic, how about both at one time? Tonight I watched a monkey attempt to cross a busy road. He stopped, looked both ways, then raced across the street so fast that I couldn’t catch him on film. I was impressed because he looked both ways, like my mother taught me.
I had my own brush with traffic. While on a walk with Carole and Vince, I decided I needed more photos of traffic so I raced across three lanes (lanes, by the way, are problematic in Ahmedabad – the road may stretch across two or three marked lanes, but traffic may be five or six vehicles across, depending on the kind of vehicle). So here I was happily taking traffic shots, including the one above of an intersection, when I decided to rejoin the saner two on the safety of a sidewalk. I waited until traffic slowed down a bit, I thought, then ventured forth. Immediately the path I was planning, behind a rickshaw and between scooters and cycles, was blocked by a new batch of vehicles coming around the bend. So I took the safest way – walking in front of a bus. I figured it was bigger and thus slower and probably had brakes. It worked, although I had to take a lot of grief from my companions.
This was toward the end of another long day as our students race to finish their projects. There are only two days left before they present their projects in front of invited guests like the principal (that’s what the call the head of St. Xavier’s) and a deputy editor from the Times of India as well as the faculty and guests from the community. Each of the eight teams will have 10 minutes to present their project, all the projects will be posted to a website so the world can see (I’ll put up the URL when we are closer to presentation time). Our two webmasters are busily designing the site. I think it looks pretty good, at least in design. We will see how it looks with stories and photos included.
And the thing to remember is that none of these students had worked with digital media before last week. I’m very impressed.
Immediately following the presentations our team will be racing for the airport to catch a plane, which was moved up nearly five hours. After an hour and a half flight to Hyderabad Airport, where we get to wait 10 hours until 3:30 in the morning before catching another 10 hour flight to Amsterdam where, after a 4 hour layover, we get to take an 8½ hour flight to Chicago, then a bus to Milwaukee. That’s gonna be fun, you betcha.
As is usual, we packed two other activities into the day – a visit to the first ever magazine written in Gujarati for the tribes in the state, more than six million people. It was celebrating its sixth issue. The magazine was the dream of Father Vinayak, who designed its business plan while studying at Marquette. I told the staff my belief in the value of magazines like this, which enable groups like India’s tribals to maintain their cultural cohesiveness while adjusting to the modern world. This is a worthy publication and Father Vinayak should be very proud of it.
We then went to visit Loyola school, which has 4,000 students in its 12 grades.
Finally, a very tired group of Marquette representatives came back to crash, once we made sure the squirrel had left Carole’s room. It had invaded the room through an open window shortly before we left for the night’s activities. Still, she thought it was preferable to the lizard that had visited Ashley’s bathroom a couple of days ago.
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