Echo Three – ‘A Day in The Life’ and Greetings From All

In the previous blog, Hinesh provided a wonderfully graphic description of Echo Three’s ‘home from home’ basha camp.

Now, in case you were wondering what the team does apart from luxuriate in it, here’s a guest blog kindly written by Carline on ‘A Day in the Life of an Echo Three Venturer.’ Thanks, Carline.

Carline being serenaded and watched by teammates - hoping she'll pull out more Parle Gs? 

 '‘Echo 3 here again. Rise and shine for a new day of digging.’ After our personal wake-up call arranged by the day leader, we start our day with ('expletive deleted') porridge. After Shivam brushes his teeth perfectly and Fabian just gets up out of the basha, we start our morning stretches. 

Then with bandales and mamptis in hand we head off to the houses, and the digging begins… 

Instead of using real machines to dig, we transform ourselves into machines. We may not have spinach to make us stronger, but we’ve got Carrot!

Working on one of the four biogas holes - using mampti, mandales and harri pole

Thankfully our hard work never goes unnoticed and we’ve at least ten children watching us all the time. They always keep us smiling by asking, ‘Hi! What’s your name?’ about twenty times a day.

After a couple of hours of hard work, we have a break for our second breakfast of the day – something significantly more tasty than porridge. The lovely families have been cooking us a lovely variety of traditional Indian dishes, not to mention the delicious sweet chai that we are constantly being supplied with. This all gives us renewed energy for some more digging.

At lunchtime we head back to our ‘pimped out’ camp, where the two housewives / househusbands will have prepared a rice, noodles or pasta lunch for us. Thanks to these lovely housewives/househusbands, our lunchtimes become very lazy, but luckily we’ve got Dan and his jokes to keep us going.

After a couple of hours of more hard digging, it is once again back to camp. Sarah keeps us all motivated so that digging won’t become too hard for us. On the way back home Emma loves the children knowing our names and following us.

When we get to camp we all take a shower, some people in the reservoir and other people in our self-built shower. When everyone has washed off all the dirt off his/herself, we sit down, chill and have a lovely evening meal. 

At half past six the sun is gone, and that means ('expletive deleted') bugs – and not only bugs but rain, thunder and lightning as well. But that won’t stop us from smiling. While Pauline, Jocelyn and Carline are joking around, Mangesh entertains the rest with some good card tricks.

After a good stormy evening, everyone goes to bed except Hinesh, who always stays up the latest. When everyone is finally sleeping, some in dry and others in wet bashas, Pauline has a busy night sleeptalking, which gives us a good morning laugh.

As you can read, we’re working hard but also having a lot of fun.

Big kisses to home from all of us.'

Last but certainly not least, in just in case Hinesh’s description of ‘chez Echo Three’ left any gaps in your mind’s eye, or you’re wondering about the welfare of those you care about, take a look at this short video filmed by Ruth during her, Gemma's and Teija's visit last week!

An update on Tango Five will follow very soon.

All four project teams return to Fieldbase for 'first changeover' on Monday. They'll enjoy a brief tourist visit to Mysore, a spot of relaxation and merriment, and be allocated into new teams for Phase 2, which starts on Wednesday. Stay tuned!