January 4, 2012
Wednesday we woke up in our familiar hotel and ate breakfast there. We then piled in the cars and road around the neighborhood to IRRAD – our partnering NGO. We finally got our projects rolling and busted out some actual research!
IRRAD is an organization that works with the villages in Mewat district (where we visited before) and attempts to better the communities by empowering the people of the community to take charge and make change. They focus on the access and availability of safe drinking water and enough irrigation water to farm. They also try to provide buildings and areas for schools and provide teachers within the community. IRRAD is doing a lot of great things for this district, but they are also open to getting some help! Our job was to focus on three separate projects; rainwater harvesting, groundwater desalinization, and water quality. We rearranged our ideas and formed new groups; water sustainability indexing, women empowerment in collecting safe water, data collection of the region, and hydrologic modeling of the region.
After our normal work day, we went to the largest mall in ASIA! At least that is what we are told! It’s called Ambience and it has seven floors; lower ground, ground, first, second, third, fourth, fifth. We took our time shopping around and discovered the 10 rupee (2 cent) vanilla ice cream cones! Yum.