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/