Koraput changes

At last, after 5 months in India I have my first visitor from home.  Jon, my husband has braved the journey and arrived here on Saturday morning, staggering off the overnight train looking a bit bemused and crumpled after 48 hours of travelling.  It's lovely to see him again after such a long time but I can't help feeling very apprehensive about how I'll feel when he leaves again.  Miserable as sin I suspect!  (that's a nice welcome for him isn't it?)  The first time I have a visitor arriving is also the first time that I've managed to get sick since I've been here.  It's really not fair.  Maybe I'm getting a bit too blase about hygiene after 5  months of good health. The only food I ate for over 24 hours before it started had been cooked by myself so I can't even blame someone else's dodgy food.

J arrived here on the same day that my friend M left at the end of his assignment to return home to the UK.   M had been expecting to travel back to Delhi by train, starting from Vizniagaram junction in Andhra Pradesh then on to Delhi via Bhubaneswar.  Due to some civil unrest the director of his NGO decided that it would be safer for him to go to Bhuba by car so he duly spent half the night being ferried across the state in chauffeur-driven luxury in an effort to make sure he got his train connection to Delhi.  M has been replaced by a married couple working at the same NGO who both seem really nice but it does mean that there are now 2 married couples and lonesome me here in remote Koraput.  I need to get back to my Oriya books to try to acquire a bit more language, getting to know some local people would be easier if I could actually manage to talk to them.

Ants have invaded my house.  I gave the place a thorough cleaning around 10 days ago on my first "rest" day for around 3 weeks - the dust was beginning to pile up and I thought I ought to do a bit of cleaning in honour of my visitor.  A few days later I noticed some grains of red soil accumulated in a corner.

I followed the trail to find a rather magnificant architectural edifice comprising a tube which had been made with the soil combined with ant saliva, rapidly growing and running alongside the wall.  The tube was filled with ants scurrying around carrying grains of soil to build their nest then filling it with their eggs.  By the time I decided I'd better stop the colony from encircling the room (and my bed!) it was around 2 metres long.  I'm now wondering how many millions of ants there are living in the mortar and brickwork underneath my house, burrowing their way through and carrying segments off to make homes elsewhere.

I'm curious about the house that's growing in the plot next door to mine.  I had been a bit put out by the close proximity of the new building as my windows now look out onto a blank brick wall about a metre away, blocking out most of my natural daylight.  It does however bring the advantage of cutting out most of the sun which helps to keep it cooler and for me, that has to be an advantage.  The thing that is really intriguing me is the building technique.  This photo is taken from my roof, looking down into the plot onto the internal walls.  The bricks were laid, the door and window holes roughly framed with bamboo poles and a layer of what looked like ordinary local soil laid over the top.  After that, a layer of cement was added followed by a metal frame which was used to build a concrete beam along the top of the walls, windows and doors.  I suspect that is how my house was built as well.  The site is staffed by a couple of (male) brickies and up to half a dozen women doing the heavy digging, lifting and mortar mixing work.  Somehow these women manage to look elegant while carrying great pans of mortar or a dozen bricks on their heads, saris carefully folded around them and sometimes wearing flowers in their hair.  They have colonised the steps up onto my roof, keeping their tiffin tins with their lunch on there and out of the sun during the morning and sitting on my roof to eat their lunch in the early hours of the afternoon.  So much for being able to use a private roof space for hanging out my newly washed underwear to dry in the sun.  It risks being splattered with mortar which they carry up onto my roof to lay.   At least they sound cheerful while they work, the place is constantly filled with peals of laughter.

Power cuts are a regular occurrence here in Koraput but have been particularly bad over the last couple of weeks due to a faulty transformer.  The town has been sharing a single transformer since the pair blew with different parts of town alternating supply, 2 hours on and 2 hours off.  It gets to be quite a challenge to work out when there will be supply to recharge batteries and refill water tanks.  I had been told that the transformer was due to be replaced on Tuesday but we still had a lengthy power cut this morning, Wednesday.  Maybe tomorrow?