Train Rides...

Yesterday, we woke up at 3am to travel 4.5 hour (just one way) on a blue, bug infested, ‘air-conditioned’, cramped train to the southern most tip of India to the city of Kovalam. We then took a 30-minute bus ride to random bus stop in the middle of nowhere and then caught an auto rickshaw to travel down a mud road to a small fishing/coconut village. Sidenote: auto rickshaws are small three-wheeled taxis that we take to get around when buses are unavailable. I would like to refer to them from now on as a ‘death trap’.

The fishing/coconut village itself sits about 10 feet from the Arabian Sea. We were all able to sit and take a moment to enjoy the ocean breeze before we began our work. The village has also experienced severe tsunamis in years past and has since barracked the beach with huge boulders to try and protect the village.



We were there with the organization OutReach to assess the village and the needs of the family to send their children to school. It was a long process, but now at least one child from each family in the village will be ‘sponsored’. It was emotional to see some of these families and what little they had to live on. Our guides told us that when fishing is doing poorly that families will ‘harvest’ coconuts and make the thready inside of coconuts into twine to sell at the market. A typical day of a coconut worker would be working from 3am-7pm.

baby coconut tree.

After we were done we took the train back (another 4.5 hours) home. It was a looooooooooong day, but well worth it.