Indiblog

JMA made an Overseas visit to India in the last two weeks of October 2006.

This is the flag of India. Over 1 billion people live in India.


If you look on the map to the right you can see some of the places we visited - see if you can find Hyderabad, Delhi, Agra, Mumbai, and Nagpur - these were places that JMA went to!

To get to India we had to travel on a plane for over ten hours and then we were on many other planes to get around India.

This weblog will hopefully give you an idea about some the places we visited and many of the people we met!

We first set foot in India at midnight in Hyderabad, which is a huge city in the bottom half of India. In Hyderabad there are many new jobs in the computer industry and many people call it Cyberabad! As it was late when we took our first drive through the city you could not see much, but there were lots of noises and smells that were different from home! We passed many temples and lots of people in auto-rickshaws (see picture on the left!), we also saw loads of cows, goats, and chickens at the side of the road! It was an amazing time to be in this city becasue there are people living here who are Muslim, Hindu, Bhuddist and Christian. The day we arrived was the day after Diwali, a Hindu festival, and the end of Ramadan was approaching, which would mean the Muslim festival of Eid-ul-fitr. On the day of Eid we visited the home of some Muslim friends who shared a special meal with us, then we went to visit the biggest Hindu Temple in the city and followed that by a boat ride to see the Bhudda statue in the middle of the lake. On the way home our autorickshaw was caught up in a special Sikh parade! This is just one day in the city of Hyderabad!

For the first week we stayed at the Henry Martyn Institute, which is the International Centre for Interfaith work and for Peace. Here people learn all about other religions, especially Islam, and teachers come to learn how to make sure that they are asking children to think about peace in the classroom.

We visited many schools on our visit to India, and some of them were very different from the schools you go to, but some were similar. Here are some pictures from the schools we went to:

 

We went to one school where they had a wonderful playground, does your school playground look like this?

 

 

After five days in Hyderabad we moved to another city - the capital of India which is called New Delhi. This is one of the biggest cities in India and has many different parts to it, we visited both the old parts and the new parts. Some of the building in the new part of the city are very very grand! The picture on the left is of the India Gate which is in the middle of the city and was built to be an Arch for the Army to march under!

 

In Delhi we visited many different kinds of schools and projects - one built in a very poor area of the city. You can see what the street outside the school looks like on the right, very different from the impressive India Gate! The children there all look smart in their school uniform and work very hard. They gave us a wonderful welcome with a song and dances. We then toured the school. In part of the school playground they have built a house for boys who were living on the street to come and live in. They then help them to learn new skills so that they can hopefully get a job one day.

After being in Delhi we went to Mumbai which is the biggest and busiest city in the whole of India. There are more cars on the street in Mumbai than we have ever seen in our lives! To travel just a few metres can take up to twenty minutes! In Mumbai we went to visit a very special project which works with street children.
We were to meet more street children when we moved on to Nagpur, which is right in the middle of India. We met some children who live outside a railway station. Some of the children were as young as five and one young girl had just had a baby and brought her home from the hospital to live there with her. On the left is a picture of some of the boys we met at the railway station.

While in Nagpur we also travelled out to a rubbish tip at the edge of the town. This may seem like a strange place for JMA to visit but out there we met a whole group of children who work out in the rubbish for fourteen hours a day. They sort through the rubbish as it arrives and try to find things they can sell to the scrap dealers. They might collect plastic, metal, fabric, or many other things. They have to be very careful as there can be dangerous items in the rubbish that could harm them. Can you imagine what it would be like having to do this kind of work every day of the week? It is hard to imagine.



Our JMA trip to India was one of the most amazing experiences ever and we hope to share more of our trip with you through Rainbow and our upcoming Peacebuilders project. If you have any questions or comments about our time in India, then please visit the Bulletin Boards.