LETTER FROM INDIA: HELPING TO BUILD HOPE IN A COMMUNITY

A group from LYIT has travelled to India with Habitat for Humanity to build homes for those less well off than ourselves.

Those who arrived in India yesterday are lecturer Mary Dunnion, lecturer Dr Kevin O’Brien and students Tony Mc Gilloway, Shaun Gallagher, Elaine Coleman, Siobhan Carty, Niamh Fleming and Fiona Sammon. All the students travelling are part of the nursing degree programme at LYIT.

Tony McGilloway is sending regular letters from India on their work. Here’s his first dispatch.

Hi Folks,

Yesterday was a good day, we were joined by two other Habitat teams, one from the Netherlands the other from Northern Irelands Queens University, one of their team is a Donegal woman from, Cranford, Clenagh Harkin. It took every member of all three teams to get the concrete roof finished, there was a small cement mixer there but everything else was done by hand. The family that were taking ownership of the house helped and they were delighted to get this part of their house completed as according to the group leaders the roof cost about a third of the complete house because it has to be reinforced to protect the family from as mentioned in the last letter, cyclones, floods and earthquakes. Shaun, Mary and myself, want to thank all those who sponsored us, especially those from our individual communities of Dungloe, Castlefinn and Dunfanaghy for their help as it would not have been possible for us to be here without their help.

Today we spent the day with village school children. Charly, our Habitat coordinator felt that because our team specialise in health, that the children would benefit from health education. So we presented a lesson based on hygiene, fitness and diet. The girls on the team took the girls of the school and the boys took the boys. We had interpreters who translated our lesson. The children were very attentive and seemed to really enjoy the lesson. One thing that we all found interesting was that the children had in many of their pencil cases cut-outs of the graphic warnings of cigarette smoking that are on tobacco products and they traded them. When we allowed them to ask us a few questions, we were amazed by their scientific knowledge and rather than ask us about Ireland, they seemed more concerned about the health of their parents. They wanted to know things like what the bad effects of working at night time are and how they could help their parents stop smoking. So all in all, today was a very good day and we hope that we provided the children with knowledge that may empower them into making healthy choices. Tomorrow we are back on the building site; let’s hope the heat drops slightly from the relentless 40 degrees we have experienced so far.

Shaun and Tony

Pondicherry, India.

 

 

 

 

 

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