An Indian Bus driver

Have just spent a few lovely days on the beach at Mangalore, which is on the west, Karnatakan coast, usually bypassed by tourists who go to either the Keralan or Goan coasts, consequently, it was blissfully empty. The sand was white, the sea was calm and the food was delicious. On one night we had a special dinner with two kinds of fish, lady fish and something else I've forgotten the name of, clams and crab, which were so fresh that I'm sure I had been swimming with them earlier in the evening. In fact, I think I trod on one of them. The clams were delicious and cooked with a spicy coconut masala which I tried to get the recipe of, but language was a slight barrier. Anyway, the chef did manage to understand that I was keen on the food, which was not difficult, owing to the enormous quantities we ate and the remants seen still clinging to my chin and clothing when trying to discuss recipes.

After the beach trip, we came back to Bangalore in order for me to meet my aunt who has come over to India for a wedding. The mode of transport booked was sleeper bus. This is, in essence, a double tiered (not decker because there is only one floor) bus with seats on the bottom row and beds on the top. The beds would have been very comfortable - if the bus had been stationary.

However, not only were these beds on a moving bus, but they were beds on a moving bus driven by an Indian bus driver, and there is enough on this blog about the habits of these particular skilled individuals for people to realise the significance of that. As if that wasn't enough, this bus driver didn't believe in gears. And the road was very windy. And the majority of the road's surface had been destroyed by overloaded mining trucks driving up and down, creating enormous potholes. And he also, clearly, had an important appointment in Bangalore for which he was determined not to be late . And, I have a very high wobble factor. Net result: it was like spending the night on a trampoline with an enthusiastic seven-year who has eaten too many sugary snacks and needs to work off his energy. And does so continuously for ten hours. Everyone else on the bus seemed oblivious and slept like babies, despite the addition of sleep-preventing, hysterical cackles of laughter coming from me every time we went round a bend and I ricocheted around the little cubicle the bed was in. I think perhaps I shan't travel on those buses anymore.

Crackers about Crackers

I had thought there was no better example of India’s disregard for health and safety issues than could be seen on the highways and byways of this generous, foolhardy land. I have almost managed to get used to the sight of two carnation and marigold bedecked TATA lorries screeching towards each other on 2 wheels in a palpably vibrating cacophony of horns, demonstrating the perfection of the Doppler effect, and then passing each other by an unmeasurably narrow breadth, usually leaving a hiroshima style dust cloud to settle, out of which emerges, like a phoenix from the flames, an upright cyclist in a lunghi, on a Hero bike, sedately and unhurriedly pedalling with his legs splayed, his knees moving up and down slowly beyond the handlebars.

However, Diwali has introduced me to an entirely new level of disregard for personal safety.
It is probably the most well-known of Hindu festivals – the festival of lights, which like most Hindu occasions celebrates the victory of good over evil, the killing of demons and ultimate triumph of one of their many colourful gods. When I asked how it was celebrated, I was told that it is usually a quiet family affair where people throw crackers. Initially I assumed that throwing crackers was a slightly eccentric Indian alternative to pulling crackers and couldn’t really see the fun in it, but I was keen to experience it, so when Arun asked me and some other friends to spend it with his family, I jumped at the chance.

Myself, Romi & Olwyn – Australian social work students - and Ture, the Swedish nurse, set off for Bangalore (again) on Friday evening. As the train left and the night deepened, we began to understand about the throwing of crackers. The night air reverberated with deafening, even subsonic bangs. Diwali, we came to learn is the festival of sound and lights, where loud sounds are believed to chase demons away and the lights leave no place for the demons to lurk. The crackers were not the tacky crepe paper tubes of Chirstmas containing novelty (useless) gifts, but H-bomb potency bangers which cause perforated eardrums at 200 yards.

When we arrived in Bangalore, it was quite late so we went to dinner at a Kashmiri restaurant serving delicious chicken tandoor and handkerchief roti and then went straight to our hotel. The explosions were continuous and occasionally there was a burst of light. This went on all through the night. As the bed was quite hard, I woke up several times and everytime I did, even if it was 3am, I could hear bangers going off.

The next day after bacon and eggs!!!!!!!!!! for breakfast, we went to Arun’s house for lunch, where his parents, who are unbelievably hospitable and lovely had prepared a delicious lunch for us all, so we stuffed our faces. We killed time in MG road – Bangalore’s equivalent of Oxford street - until we could hold our own firework and cracker Diwali celebration.

Walking to Arun’s house after dark on the main Diwali night was when the true extent of recklessness became obvious. Firstly, fireworks are sold indiscriminately to anyone regardless of age or degree of responsibility. Secondly, once acquired, the fireworks are lit anywhere, and I really mean anywhere. On the way to our own display, there were boys younger than the eggs I had for breakfast, piling fireworks up in the middle of the road and lighting them as cars drove by, making, I should at least acknowledge, a vague attempt not to drive directly over the lit explosive. As they were placed on tarmac and not in any holder or anything to stabilise them, the firework usually shot out in totally unpredictable directions, at one stage, directly towards us, cowering behind some pillars in someone’s driveway. If, by some miracle the firework went upwards, then the probability of it not hitting an overhanging balcony or tree was minimal. After I expressed some concern about the careless use of firecrackers in this country, Arun said to me “You would be amazed how many injuries there are every year.” Oh no I wouldn’t.

Having said that, once we got into our own display, the seductive power of creating sound and light from little piles of paper soon overtook us. We started off being really girly about getting involved, including Ture, and refused to light any, come near any or even open the box. The first bang Arun let off to signify the beginning of the festivities for us, was so powerful and unexpected that it was like being defibrillated after a cardiac arrest. I fully expected the roof to come sliding off the building underneath which we had prudently set up our fireworks.
However, it was so much fun seeing sprays of white light like fountains, green and red rockets, enormous fat sparklers, that we became increasingly reckless. Our first rocket, lit whilst propped in an empty plastic water bottle, fell over before the fuse ran out and it shot all around the road and ended up going straight for Arun’s father. Luckily for Arun his mum was not watching at that time and even more luckily, his father was watching quite closely, and managed to dodge out of the way in time.

Flushed with the success of our exploits and sustaining only a minor fingertip burn where I forgot to let go of the taper when it burnt down, we went to dinner on the roof of a high rise hotel and watched the rest of Bangalore continue their celebrations around us. We had totally delicious food – half of us had Thai and the others had Pharsi. We went to bed with our eardrums ringing to a continuing night-time chorus of dogs barking and fireworks going off.

Here are a few pictures of our Diwali Day.

Arun's Mum and Dad joining in the fun



The Survivors


Left to right : Me, Romi, Olwyn, Arun's Mum, Ture, Arun's Dad
Front: Arun (inexplicably doing the splits),

Dinner on a rooftop terrace:

The Project

We have finalised the project proposal and sent it off to the Trustees of the Charity we are hoping will give us loads of dosh to start it up! It's been an amazingly busy week with having to analyse the data, write the report, moderate a virtual seminar for my MSc and teach medical students, so I have not had much time to write Betty, which slips down the list of priorities, fun as it is!

However, I am just off to celebrate Diwali with Arun and his family with some other friends, Romi and Olwyn, Australian Social Work students and Ture the Swedish Nurse. After that I am sliding down the alphabet to Mangalore, which is on the coast, for a few days before meeting my Aunt for a trip to Hampi. Life is soooo exotic!

Would you like me to service your mattress, Sir?

You probably won't believe me, but I spent last weekend selling mattress cleaning services at a trade fair in Bangalore. Arun asked me if I, as an "English Doctor", could enhance his friend's launch of a dust mite busting hoover in India. Now, I don't mean that this vacuum is now orbiting the earth, killing dust mites in its wake, sporting a figurehead of majestic proportions, but that this is the first time such a product has set toe in India.

Being game on for most things I have never tried, with the exception of unexpected nudity, I thought, well why not. I agree there may be a slight conflict of interest and I did feel a little bit like a hooker selling myself, but it was a real laugh. Apparently someone expressed "An Interest"but was politely put off- if I'd only known that all I have to do to get noticed is to wield a vacuum cleaner - 50y of feminism has clearly made no impact - I still wouldn't do any housework.

It will be of little surprise to many of you to learn that a country, which has not even a passing acquaintance with the principles of health and safety, whose people regularly pile all their nearest and dearest on a single moped, none of them with helmets, nor any road sense, is unlikely to be concerned about the effects of living with dust mites in their mattresses. And so it proved to be. Our descriptions of what would happen if you left your mattress un-dustmite eradicated, became more and more outrageous until, at one point Arun was trying to claim the dust mite pooed out twice as much as it ate, which is clearly an impossibility, but definitely sounds scary. People's reactions varied from wanting to see a dust mite; wanting to try out the hoover; wanting to buy the hoover and thinking, having seen the magnified picture of a dustmite, that we were selling prawns or squid.

This week, luckily, I have re-engaged with my normal profession by teaching 2nd year medical students the joys of managing diabetes in the community.

The Project Continues

In between having an amazing time at Mysore and selling the services of a mattress cleaning agency (you'll have to wait for that episode), the project has been quietly gathering pace. It started out, sometime in July with a 42 page document detailing grandiose plans to "help the most vulnerable" members in all the local villages, incuding mentally/physically impaired/elderly/widows/destitute and the poorest of the poor. Clearly the scope for this was too broad and it was impossible to make any headway into the project as it was. Consequently, the project team, which consists of RUHSA staff - experts in delivery and development of rural programs, as well as a couple of doctors and of course, myself, decided to do a pilot rehabilitation project in one of the villages. We started out with plans to gather relatively hard data about the physical presence of need, ie numbers of elderly, physically handicapped etc, and also, if possible, about mental illness, which as mentioned before is very difficult, as there are no "hard" signs/symptoms which can be used as identifiers. The RUHSA staff were sure that the villagers would know the difference between mental retardation (a word which sits uncomfortably with me, but is still in full use here) and mental illness, but that there just wasn't any mental illness in the villages. Well, clearly that's bollocks and when I asked the staff to ask the villagers what they understood to be the difference, the only thing they could come up with was that those with mental impairment drooled more. It has therefore become clear that both staff and villagers need education into mental illness before the community centre can provide a meaningful service addressing it.

As far as the data collection is concerned, it is interesting how it has evolved. Quantitative data collection methodology is set out before the data collection begins, and regardless of any flaws which come to light, is usually adhered to. Qualitative data collection is a very different beast altogether. You might remember that we started with the PRA and were going on to interview key village members, ie those identified as being most vulnerable, in order to assess the nature of their needs. However, it was clear that the PRA was too lengthy and yielded too much quantitative data and not enough qualitative data. Also it was clear that interviewing to assess need would be far too cumbersome a process because there was so much need in the village that we might end up interviewing almost all the households. Consequently, we decided to hold a "Rapid Rural Appraisal" which is essentially a village meeting, whereby the project team stated their intent to set up a community centre and asked the villagers to discuss what they think it should be used for and how they would keep it running - ie sustainable.

It was extraordinary that the overwhelming concern was for the elderly in the village who were not being takn care of by their families, through poverty. They felt that the best possible use for the community centre was to provide these vulnerable older members of the village with one meal a day, because some of them weren't even getting that. As far as the rehabilitation services were concerned, they were interested, but it fell very far down their list of priorities.

Our plan now, therefore, is to set up an elderly day care centre where they can come and get a meal, with volunteers taking food to those who can't make it to the centre. Once the centre has a relatively fixed population, we can start bringing in other services for both those who use it and their carers. So for example, physiotherapy for the elderly and training in physiotherapy for the carers; nutrition advice esp with regard to diabetes which is increasing in significance, even in the villages, with their absolute distance from a Western lifestyle. Other issues of interest which were raised included a woman who mentioned that her husband was, currently independent, but would gradually become more dependent on her and she was concerned about this as a future burden. This is a very exciting avenue, because it opens up the discussion about preventative medicine, screening, monitoring and lifestyle education in order to minimise future health risks, something which has traditionally been very hard to focus on in a society which lives a hand to mouth existence.

One idea for funding which we have been discussing in the meeting is to try and develop some "Community-to-Community" programs along the lines of person to person funding (like sponsoring a child, or paying for an individual's hospital care), where a community abroad is linked (like twinning) to a village and holds a few charity events, raises some money and then sees exactly how the community spends it. The funding needs for programs like these centres would be minimal. The cost of feeding one elerly person a day is estimated at about 20p. As our plan is to set up community centres in every one of the 100 or so villages in the KV Kuppam Block (similar to district) there would be lots of scope for this. I would be interested to know if anyone had any thoughts regarding this idea. I chucked that question in to check and see if anyone has read it to the end!

Footsore in Mysore: Part Two

The second part of the weekend was fantastic, apart from a tiny brief bout of the mandatory Delhi Belhi.

We woke really early on Sunday and were driven to see the palace in the beautiful clear morning light, before all the pollution rose up to obscure things. Then we went to Chawamundi Hill, on top of which is the temple to the goddess celebrated on the last day of Dasara. There were millions of people queuing to get in, they went around the temple inside and out in a line 5-6 people. We reckoned it probably was not worth queuing too as there were loads of other things to see. Next stop was a large statue of a bull (whose balls had been enthusiastically puja'ed by the men!).

The highlight of the day was the stunning Keshava Vishnu temple of Somnathpur, which is one of the finest example of Hoysala Architecture built in the 13th century and is, unusually amongst other Dravidian styles, star shaped.

Interestingly, the temple was used for teachings as well as worship and one of the classes available to pilgrims in the 13th century was the Karma Sutra. I expect it was quite a popular module and early registration was recommended. I can’t quite imagine the Rector of East & West Clandon offering a similar subject. Anyway, the temple, as you can see from the pictures, is covered in exquisitely well preserved and crisp carvings, apart from the ones depicting lectures from the Karma Sutra which have, unsurprisingly, quite a worn look. All are the work of a single artist, Malitamba. The carvings are in strips and depict scenes from various Hindu texts, including the Ramayana, Bhagavata Purana and Mahabharata. They are read walking clockwise around the temple.

Inside, the ceiling is in multiple bell shapes with more carvings deep into the roof space of the towers which surmount each of the three shrines inside. The whole effect is beautiful, peaceful and delicate.

Unfortunately for me, that was the end of my site-seeing for the day, as I spent the rest of the time in the car concentrating very hard on not throwing up (I succeeded) before spending an intimate evening with my lovely, lovely, lovely, non-squat loo at the hotel. If the rest of Mysore had been a disaster, the sheer joy of not having to squat over a hole in the ground where other people’s early morning poos emerge if I “flush” too vigorously (ie pour water down the hole from a bucket), whilst having frequent, pointless bowel movements, would have made it worth the trip anyway. As it happened, I had magic curds for supper with a roti and was right as rain the next day. In fact, as everyone else was extremely exhausted by the previous day’s vigorous site-seeing, and I had had an early night, I was bouncing around like Tigger at Eeyore’s party. Which was perfect for the Jumbo Savari - the elephant parade.

The wonderful Arun had managed to get us last minute tickets for the parade and they were great tickets too. They were right in front of the palace amongst some minor bigwigs. In order to get a better look at the elephants as they passed, I wove my way right to the front, noting as I did so how many uniformed policemen, including a few women in Khaki saris, lined either side of the parade. After a while, it became clear that the enthusiasm was for the uniform rather than the duty and there was lots of the usual Indian exuberance to give weight to the theory. Myself and Krithika, throwing caution to the winds, joined in and ducked under the fence into the parade ground, crossed across the two lines of policeman and stood facing our other friends in the stand, while mingling amongst the TV cameras, politicians, elephants and, as previously mentioned, khakied policemen. Heady with success, I wolf-whistled to the others to attract their attention. They were about 100y away. The many, many policemen standing less then 5 yards away, in a manoeuvre truly worthy of their uniforms, turned, as one, towards me. I looked down sheepishly, briefly, and when I looked up, I caught the eye of one. He looked fiercely at me and said.

“One more time, please, Madame”.

I obliged and a wave of happy grins illuminated the Khaki sea.

The parade was wonderful. There were uniforms with hats of all shapes and sizes - made the British Army headgear look almost reasonable. There were dancers, acrobats, children painted as tigers, fire eaters, brass bands playing the Indian version of Colonal Bogie and drummers playing fast and furious primal rhythms. There were some truly inventive floats, including one with a temple, complete with genuine “tourists” taking pretend photos. They were the only white people in the parade!

The elephants were beautiful. I don’t know why they make me want to cry whenever I see them, but they are so lovely. We got up really close and stroked the leader carrying the Goddess Chawamundi. We were even allowed to take each other's photos in front of them. The official photographers, kindly paused to let us do that.

This is a photo of the prize winning costume as far as I am concerned. We thought maybe they were a group of house-proud house-husbands.

After the parade finished, we had to get back to Bangalore in order to catch a bus and so missed the torchlight parade in the evening, sadly, but we set off, 6 of us, in a car the size of a Ford Fiesta. It was quite a hair-raising trip, especially as Arun was concerned we wouldn't make the bus. We didn’t, in fact, because it was so overbooked that people were actually throwing their children into it as it was driving into the bus station, to ensure their family’s places. The husbands hurled the smallest child through the open windows, whilst the wives screeched “Don’t forget the luggage!”. Disappointed, but secretly relieved not to be spending 5 hours on a bus were people were prepared to risk injury to their most vulnerable family members in order to get on, we went back to the car park. There we found that we had been boxed in. Someone had parked in the opening of the bay, blocking our exit. Having walked through crowds of thousands, we felt it unlikely we would track down whoever owned the keys to the offending vehicle. Luckily for us, but foolishly for him, the driver had parked using the hand brake but leaving it in neutral. It took a concerted effort, but we managed to bump the car back into the bay where our car was, enabling us to drive out. As we did, we noticed another car driving into the “space” we had kindly created for it and parking. I still occasionally wonder what the driver of the first car thought when he found his car cunningly contained in a fence of other cars: where he had most emphatically not left it himself.

As if that wasn’t enough entertainment for the day, we then were, very briefly introduced to a famous Kannadan film actor. As each state has it’s own language, it has it’s own film industry and Bangalore and Mysore are in Karnataka, the language of which is Kannada. He was very shy of being amongst so many gorgeous English speaking Flowers, and stayed only for a couple of minutes, but he too was impressed by my whistle and requested a repeat performance.

Arun, pretended to be looking for a hotel for us to spend the night but was secretly phoning his mum who instantly said that we must stay with her, as he knew she would. So we spent the night with the Diwakar family and black cocker spaniel puppy called Streaky. So named owing to his habit of streaking around the apartment like, well, like a streak. Sound familiar? He was noticeably less grubby than the other cocker spaniel some of you may know, which may be due to the fact that they never let him off the lead outside, he doesn’t have a water trough for a drinking bowl and they tie his ears back with a scrunchie when he has his dinner.

Footsore in Mysore : Part One

We have just had a fantasic weekend in Mysore celebrating Dasara with approximately 2 million Indians and several elephants. We went with our New Best Friend, Arun, who looked after us so well, that we became like helpless puppies and just followed him around whilst he did everything for us. The trip this time consisted of three students, one Singaporian, one Australian and one American, and myself. In fact, Krithika and Priya (Oz and SP respectively) are both Tamil, which was handy for the brief moments when Arun went to the loo or something and I felt a wave of anxiety about how I would cope in his absence.

The Dasara festival is celebrated all over South India in slightly different ways. In Mysore it is a royal festival celebraing the victory of Truth over Evil. Apparently, the Goddess Chamundeshwari,also known as Durga, who has a temple in her honour on a hill overlooking the city, slew the demon Mahishasura on the tenth day, or Vijayadashami. The festival culminates in the Jambu Savari which is a procession, lead by 3 Dasara elephants, who would have originally carried the Maharajah but now carry an effigy of the Goddess, the start of which is marked by a 12-gun salute. This year was exceptional as the Vijayadashmi also fell on Ghandi's birthday, a national holiday, which also represents, to India, the triumph of Truth over Evil.

The long and the short of this is that there is a 9 or 10 day festival in South India, celebrated most enthusuastically in Mysore. Every day of the festival, Hindus celebrate different pujas, where different aspects of their life and work are decorated with flowers, paint and tinsel in order to ask the Gods to bless them. The tenth day is the culmination and considered highly auspicious so everything is puja-ed, especially vehicles. Buses pound by with an impenetrable network of marigold flower garlands, often obscuring the windscreen; people sit upright on hero bicycles with banana leaves arrangements and jasmine tied to the handlebars; streaks of red, yellow and white paint adorn the paintwork of lorries carting gravel and workmen in lungis to the various postholes for filling. Even our car had a catfish-like moustache of banana leaves and a calendula smile, which remained pretty intact for the whole weekend.

The tone of the trip was set pretty early on when we stopped at a roadside Dharba. I had a garlic masala dosai and a vadai with coconut and coriander chutney. Everyone agreed the food was delicious, right up until the last mouthful of potato masala when I found a toenail. Unfortunately, I found it on my tongue. When we told the waiter, he disagreed with our assessment of the situation and refused to budge from his opinion that it was a piece of onion. It wasn't.

We arrived at Mysore and went straight to Arun's office where a) we found out it was his birthday and b) we watched the puja ceremony for the computers done by the local priest. Everything had a marigold and red paint on it, even the box of loose wires inexpertly stuck on the wall - I guess maybe that needed puja-ing more than anything.

Having discovered it was Arun's birthday, Krithika quickly found an ally to find, buy and decorate a cake in the next 90 minutes. All without his finding out. Meanwhile, we went to wander through the grounds of Mysore Palace which is beautiful at the best of times but it quite stunning when lit up at night.

It is now a museum but was built as the official seat of the Wodeyar Maharajahs of Mysore, by a British Architect, Henry Irwin, who started it in 1897 and finished it in 1912. It is spectacular and although we sadly couldn't see inside as it was shut for the festival, the outside is beautiful enough. As the festival was in full swing, it was quite a heady experience to wander around the grounds at night. The noise was tremendous. Chatter, singing, flute sellers, drum sellers, hawkers of toasted rice with their charcoal warming pots, distant honking traffic and screaming, shouting kids all contributed enthusiastically to the cacophony.

After a good while wandering around, we finally went out to dinner and gave Arun his cake. He was both touched and hideously embarrassed in unequal measures. Especially as we sung him happy birthday (out of tune) and then blew some noisy, squeaky bird things we had bought at the palace, whose tails unrolled, not by the usual 12 inches but by up to 6 feet. The entire restaurant, including the manager who came up to wish him many happy returns of the day personally, joined in.

Exhausted we went to bed finally at about one o' clock. Tomorrow - I'll tell you about the elephants.

Starting the PRA

It's been an amazingly full week last week and I haven't had a chance to catch up with the Blog, which, as everyone has said how much they had the word, I shall now refer to as "Betty the" or just Betty.

All last week, every night from 5-7 we were supposed to go to the village and do our data collection. Well of course, being India, that only partially happened. Sickness, weddings, elections and thunderstorms made it difficult for us to go every day so we went on two nights, but the process was fascinating.

First we went to the village and sat around in the dwindling light waiting for the villagers to arrive. The combined draw of RUHSA (somewhat of a legend in the community) and the rumour of a few foreigners (there were three) was enough to get the grapevine buzzing vigorously and the road was soon filled with locals. The women were keen and disciplined and the men, mostly teenagers and young adult, hung around, leaning on their Hero bikes, trying to look nochalant and uninterested. the women sat round in a circle and listened to a member of the project team explaining what we wanted to do.

PRA (participatory rural analysis) is a fully dynamic process to gather qualitative data and is therefore a very different experience to gathering quantitative data. Initially, I was uncomfortable about how loose and fluid everything seemed. I wanted to impose rigidity, to ensure that the same things were asked and standards set, but the entire principle of it is to access what people really find important and not what researchers want to hear, and so, making it rigid, destroys that process, by imposing researchers priorities above the locals. It is meant to be flexible. Threads which become apparent can be enlarged upon and issues which the villagers are not intersted in can be dropped.

After the introduction, one of the women started drawing a map of part of the village on the road. Each house was included and the name of the head of the household & an identifying number was written on a piece of paper and weighted down by a stone. Here is one of our most enthusiastic helpers.

As the light faded and the map was completed, by candle light and, later, the car headlights the women discussed which households were the poorest and placed a pink piece of paper in the corresponding chalk square.

It is very difficult to assess wealth, especially as RUHSA has a reputation for helping the poorest. Several times people were volunteering to put pink paper in their own square only to be told by the other women that they didn't qualify. It seems an arbitrary distinction to make, when the difference might be only whether or no they have a cow, or irrigation in their paddy fields, not whether they have a Mercedes or can take a family vacation in Tenerife.

After assessing wealth, we then asked about neediness in the village, related to aving to care for elderly relatives, whther bedridden, about physical disabilty, mental impairment, destitute or abandoned. We tried also to ask about mental health, but this is a very difficult subject to get information on, even in developed countries which are supposed to be aware of mental illness. But we did ask about villagers who were socially withdrawn, or experiencing extremely difficult times. It yielded up a few names which was intersting to know. I think we shall ask about sadness on another occasion.

Of course, I wasn't very useful in this process except to entertain the children and keep them occupied, a job I did with great enthusiasm, dedication and help from my digital camera.