At last!

I had a very mixed day yesterday.  I'm close to reaching another of my milestones, the completion of the manual of finance policies and procedures.  I'd like to say it's been a labour of love but to be honest, it's just felt like hard labour.  But all being well, I'll be able to get it sent off to the boss over the next day or two for his approval before it's shipped out to be scrutinised by chartered accountants.  Then I'll be moving on to my next challenge - whatever that turns out to be.

My cellphone died on me on Monday having run out of credit so another trip into town last night to top it up.  First I wanted to get some more cash from the ATM but it didn't want to let me have any.  The ATM dialogue is different to the machines back at home and most of them use touch screens not buttons which always confuses me as the keypads are the same as the UK ones so I keep pressing the Enter buttons which don't work.  After several attempts to extract money with a group of tall Indian men crowding round me watching every move and telling me what to do, I gave up as I was a bit worried about them watching me key in my PIN and walk out with a wad of cash (I was still hopeful).  I have never felt threatened in any way here in Koraput but I don't like people peering at me keying in my PIN number! 

Off I went to Ramesh and paid over my last bit of cash to get my phone working again then on to another ATM that's less crowded as it's about a mile's walk out of town.  Success there.  On my way back home from there I decided to drop in at the Spoken English Institute, a place I'd been taken to a couple of weeks ago by a neighbour Binu, a 19 year old young woman studying English and commerce.  Binod, the tutor was very pleased to see me and introduced me to his students as their new tutor and told me to take the class.  After my initial horror at the thought of taking a class of teenagers I had great fun talking to them and getting a bit of banter going backwards and forwards.  And I got a cup of tea out of it!  However, by the time I got home it was late and I was too tired to cook so just had a banana and went to bed,

I have to go to Delhi again later this month to attend a VSO workshop.  I'm travelling there by train but flying back as I have a trip out into the field at the weekend.  The most direct train route from Rayagada to Delhi (only 31 hours, no changes) was fully booked so I have to go from Koraput to Bhubaneswar (14.5 hours) then on to Delhi from Bhuba (a mere 23 hours - which is strange as I'm sure it was 25 hours when I did the reverse of that journey).  So I leave Koraput at around 6:30pm on Saturday and arrive in Delhi at around 10:30 Monday.  I'll be shattered.  The flight back will only take a couple of hours but it's scheduled to leave at 05:55 - what time will I have to get up!

Booking the tickets was painful.  I'm limited to a dial-up mobile modem device which is OK but has limited bandwidth and temperamental coverage.  It can slow down a lot when there's lots of cellphone traffic but it's been terrible over the last few days.  I went to see Ramesh, the supplier a few days ago and he told me that someone had hammered something and broken it.  I know the feeling, I frequently want to take a hammer to it.  Unfortunately, living out here in a remote rural area, it can take ages to get replacement parts or specialist repair tools.  It took me well over 2 hours to book the train tickets, not helped by the train I really wanted to get being fully booked already.  Then came the trauma of the Air India site to book those tickets.  An hour and a half later I gave up, slammed my laptop shut and stomped home.  Fortunately my wonderful, long-suffering husband somehow picked up the vibes emanating from me and offered to book it for me with the benefit of broadband.  Even that was difficult but at least he was able to see that the Air India site was down, it wasn't just my rubbish internet connection.  So after about half a day of battling with various computers, I'm now in possession of 3 tickets to ride.  Next problem will be printing them but I think I need a rest from battles today.