Next Stop: Walchandnagar

Written May 19th:

Today we spend most of the day traveling. We took a flight from Delhi to Pune in the morning, then we were picked up by a bus to go to Walchandnagar. This week we will be working on an educational outreach project with the secondary school in Walchandnagar, so the blog posts in the next few days will be centered on the different activities we do with the children.

Walchandnagar Industries Limited is an engineering company located in Walchandnagar, which is about a 3 hour bus ride from Pune. The company is run by a family with strong ties to the University of Michigan, which is how we connected with them to do this outreach project. From Monday through Thursday we will be doing two hands-on science and engineering activities each morning.

We learned yesterday that we definitely do not want to be out and about in the afternoon heat, so we are very thankful we’ll be working mainly in the mornings. All eleven of us have been working hard over the past semester to plan these outreach activities, so we are very excited to get to Walchandnagar and get started on putting our work into action! We’re also pretty excited to use the supplies in our “outreach bag” – a bag full of scissors, tape, glue, wires, tiny motors, and other items we’ll be using in the activities this week. Explaining to security why we have a bag full of strange items is getting a little old.

We will have a blog post for each day this week explaining the activities we did, but we aren’t sure how internet will work while we’re in the Walchandnagar community, so please don’t worry if we’re a little off schedule on posting each day.

PS. Sorry there are no pictures today! Girls tend not to like being photographed in their travel clothes…There will be more exciting pictures to come this week!

-Beth