Destination: New Delhi

T-minus 48 days until we are in the slums of New Delhi, India. And who would think we’d be so excited about it?! As many of you have heard Brayden and I are traveling with a group of Irish volunteers on a Habitat Global Village (GV) trip. We are really excited about it, have spent the past few months organizing and preparing for the trip, and now that it’s finally within reach we thought we’d share a little more about it.

Over the course of the Fall I found myself constantly intrigued by the stories of my co-workers, who all work on the GV programme, leading trips to countries and locations most people would never think of traveling to. Annually, Habitat Ireland sends about 15 teams abroad to build in these severely impoverished communities, often in nearly inaccessible areas. In the midst of all my time being spent on the local Dublin programme I finally decided to propose that perhaps I could lead one of the Spring GV builds. I was so happy to be chosen for the India trip! First task at hand: recruiting Brayden to be on the team. That was an easy one!

Since then we have spent the past few months recruiting 10 other volunteers to join our team, holding team meetings, organizing the logistics, fundraising for our places on the team and our team donations to Habitat Ireland and Habitat India, and most recently getting tons of vaccinations that we never thought we would need!

One of our team meetings was a day of volunteering at our Local Programme site (ignore the unflattering safety goggles!!!).

We were both instantly excited about the destination (especially Brayden due to his love for Indian food). Originally the trip was scheduled to a small city on the SE coast of India called Pondicherry.

Then, there was a change of plans. The destination of GV teams always depends on the demand of volunteers and need for the team at the particular time. So all of the sudden a few weeks ago we were asked if we would consider taking the team to build in the slums of New Delhi instead of Pondicherry. Of course we said yes, though I can’t say I was a bit shocked at first. Though it is the same country (massive as it is) Northern India and Southern India differ a good bit. And as for the infamous slums of New Delhi… I anticipate it is a one of kind type of place. With that in mind we are actually more excited about Delhi, and know it will be an extremely eye opening experience. A quick stat just for a frame of reference: India has a population of 1.17 billion and of that 42% live below the international poverty line of $1.25/day. Yikes.

We will be doing the actual building in a community on the outskirts of Dehi called Bhalaswa. In an effort by the Indian government in 2004 to evacuate residents from the slums 7,000 families were relocated from the downtown city slums to this resettlement area. Without any real livlihood or capability to develop the land it in turn immediately became another slum area. To date Habitat has helped house 400 families in the area, with an ultimate goal of reachign 2,000. This mission is what we will be a part of!

A Habitat House in Bhalaswa

To wrap up, we wanted to say another big thank you to all of the people who have donated to our fundraising page and that if anyone else is interested in supporting the cause we would be extremely grateful. Looking forward to updating everyone post the trip!

Here is the link to our charity page:

http://www.mycharity.ie/event/alisa_brayden_india_build/

Final Basketball Update

Last week was the DBS Sports and Societies Awards Banquet, as well as the All-Ireland Intervarsities tournament. This tournament was the final basketball commitment I had for this year. But let's start with the banquet first.

Alisa and I at the banquet

DBS held the banquet last Thursday night at the Conrad, a 5-star hotel over near St. Stephen's Green. It was a pretty swanky place, so it gave Alisa and I a chance to play dress-up. The banquet was nice enough like*. Our team cleaned up on the awards, picking up Coach of the Year and Team of the Year. I was also lucky enough to win MVP, which was pretty nice. While most of the Irish people stayed at the hotel and got pretty messy as the Irish do, Alisa and I headed home early. She had work and I had the varsities tournament the next day.

After winning the MVP

The Intervarsities (or varisities) is a tournament where the best basketball playing colleges from all of Ireland come together for a weekend. It starts with pool play, then moves to a knockout-style playoff format. We won our pool, so we made it to the final round of 8. But because of the crappy draw we had to face the 3rd best team in the quarterfinals and and the 2nd best team in the semifinal.  In total it ended up being lots of games with 1 Friday night, and 2 on both Saturday and Sunday.

In the quarterfinal on Saturday we played the team we beat earlier in the league final, Cork IT. It was a close game early in the 3rd quarter when I jumped for a rebound and landed on somebodies foot. I wrecked my ankle and had to be helped off the court. I missed the rest of the game, but fortunately my teammates pulled out the victory. Our semifinal game against Carlow was at 9:30 the next morning, so I went home to rest.

When I got up in the morning my ankle was very swollen and blue. I could barely walk, but I brought my bball stuff just in case. The athletic trainer looked at it and said I hadn't torn any ligaments, just tendons. I had her wrap it up real tight, in case my team needed me.

I didn't start, but ended up playing most of the game against Carlow. We were down 8 going into the 4th quarter, and I had yet to score. I was in a lot of pain and could barely move. But I decided this was my last shot at organized bball for awhile so I figured I might as well get some shots up. I made some shots, and with about 25 seconds to go we had the ball down 4 points. One of my teammates made a boneheaded move and got called for the obvious travel, which gave the other team the ball. Things were looking pretty bleak at that point.

I should mention there were a lot of people watching our game because us and Carlow were the best teams in the Division 2 tournament. Carlow is actually Division 1, but for some reason they played down. Anyway, there were lots of people watching, and they all wanted Carlow to win. This is because everybody knew that DBS brought over me and Glenn. Apparently this pissed off the rest of Ireland, so the whole place was rooting for Carlow.

All the fans were pretty happy at this point, yelling things that I'd rather not write here. We came out playing tough defense, forcing a turnover on the inbounds pass. As our player was trying to pass ahead to Glenn he was tackled from behind by a Carlow player. The refs called an intentional foul, so we got 2 shots and the ball. Luckily we hit both free throws and now had the ball down 2. We inbounded the ball, but Carlow was playing really good defense. Finally I got open and caught the ball on the 3-point line. I immediately shot it in some big guys face, and it went in to put us up 1 with ten seconds to go. Carlow called timeout to draw up a play, and I switched onto their best guard because everybody in the gym knew the ball was going to him. He got the ball and tried to drive around me, but because I'm so tall he couldn't get where he wanted to get. He ended up shooting a fingerroll by reaching around me from about the free throw line. This shot hit the side of the backboard and ricocheted right to their big man. He put up a mildly contested layup that rolled off the rim and I grabbed the board and got fouled with 2 seconds to go. At this point their coach went nuts, yelling at the refs saying they were less than great and that my 3 was "way inside the line". He swiftly got 4 technicals and was kicked out of the gym.

We hit a bunch of the free throws and won by 7 or 8. It was a pretty crazy comeback, something I haven't been a part of since as long as I can remember. The coach later apologized to me, he thought I was inside the line because I was inside an orange line on the court, but the bball 3-point line was red. My 3-pt shot was about 3 feet behind that line...it was a ridiculous argument to the refs at the time!

After the semis we played in the final against a team that isn't all that great. We were never really pressed and ended up winning by 25. It was great to win the tournament though because DBS brought me and Glenn over for this, and I feel like I've gotten the better end of the deal by far. But DBS is happy, so therefore I'm happy. Now I can concentrate on school and getting my ankle better. It is really swollen and blue on both the inside and outside. Luckily it's the right ankle this time. I severely injured the left one a couple months back.

After wining the Intervarsities Division 2

*"nice enough like" or "handy enough like" is quickly becoming one of my favorite popular Irish sayings because it sounds so ridiculous to end a sentence with the word 'like'.