Project Trip

Well I have arrived safely back from our project trip, and boy what a trip it was. I won’t be able to tell all the

stories in this space but be sure to ask me about them when I return.

At the India Gate in Delhi

The Trip There(above is a rough outline of our route)

We left the office in Mussoorie at 3

AM on Thursday morning to take a taxi down to the train station at Dehradun. From there took a train to Delhi. We spent most of the day in Delhi site-seeing and relaxing as our train to the Northeast didn’t leave until 11:30PM. Well, the train left a little later than that, we didn’t leave Delhi until around 1 AM on Friday morning. The train ride originally was scheduled for about 29 hours to the Assam city of Guwahati, but the Indian railway has an interesting perspective on late trains, that being the late trains will get later. So whenever an on-time train was on the tracks we had to stop to allow it to pass, that turned our 29 hour trip into a 39 hour trip. Upon arriving in Guwahati we had to find a taxi to take us to Tura.

We left Guwahati around 6:30 PM and arrived in Tura right around midnight. We were hosted by a church there who is an eMi client and attended church in Tura on Saturday morning. The cool part about Tura is it is actually the home town of our project leader, so we were able to meet a lot of his family on Sun

day. After lunch in Tura we were picked up by our client, Ku’simkol Baptist Church(KBC) and driven to Williamnagar, which is about a 2.5 hour journey.

Our train berth

The Project

We sat down with the client on Monday morning. Their vision is pretty unique and the scope of the project was a bit greater then we were previously anticipating. The church is supporting about 7-8 missionaries in India and another one in Sudan and they would like to support more, but they are very strained financially. So their vision is to create a separate center for revenue generation, and they set-up a separate society to manage the project since they are going to try and pursue government loans and subsidies and the government of India will not support churches in any way. The vision for the project is kind of broken down into three main areas, a shopping center, a seminar hall, and a guesthouse. They felt like all of these are needs of the town and will help generate revenue by renting out these facilities.

Our project team awkwardly trying to all fit on one couch from left to right: Peter(volunteer), myself, Katie(Architect Intern), Sashi Kiran(civil/structural eng. volunteer from South India), Huberth(eMi staff architect and native of Tura)

Our work began with a survey of the site boundaries. We were using a Total Station System which makes land survey quite easy. So after we captured the boundary points, we plotted them in AutoCAD so the architects could begin with a master plan for the site. Then on Tuesday and Wednesday we went back and surveyed the features of the site, whether that be existing trees, wells, pipelines, or topography. We then inserted all those points into AutoCAD and created a topographical map of the site. Other engineering work that we did consisted of a basic water quality test of the ground water and another test know as a percolation test. The percolation test is a simple field test where a hole is dug in the ground and it is filled with water and length of time it takes to drain the water is measured. This test is important for the way in which we design the wastewater treatment system, which is typically composed of a septic tank and a soak pit/field. The percolation test helps us to properly size the soak field so that the water is released into the ground at the proper rate. Another portion of our work is an estimation of the water usage so that we can properly size the water supply systems.

We presented our work to the client on Saturday afternoon in a meeting that was attended by about 50 people from the church congregation. They seemed very pleased with the conceptual design and hope to start construction by 2013.

Presenting at the final conceptual design meeting

The People

I’m not sure I have ever encountered such wonderfully hospitable people in my life. Upon our arrival on Sunday afternoon we were greeted by a large portion of the church and served fresh homemade sweets and tea. We had multiple different meat dishes served to us at each lunch and dinner meal. Also, I was ill at one part during the trip and they took me to the doctor and paid for the visit and the medication without even a second thought about accepting any money from me. Also when we left on Sunday the gave us a “small” gift of appreciation which was a handmade necklace, a bouquet of flowers, and a mysterious envelope. Later inspection of the envelope showed 4500 Rs(100 USD) for each person, we only accepted about half the money since we thought it would be rude to return it all and we donated the rest back to the church. Their generosity was truly humbling and something I hope I can practice in my own life.

Saying goodbye to the KBC folks

The Place

Meghalaya is beautiful state in the northeast portion of India, that is bordered on the west and south by Bangaladesh. Meghalaya is home to exotic flower species including orchids and anthurium which they export to Europe. Meghalaya is also home to an endangered species of monkey and also allegedly a bigfoot type creature.

Some of the native grown flowers

The Return Trip

We departed Williamnagar for Tura on Sunday afternoon. From Tura we took an overnight bus (8PM-3AM) to get to Guwahati. Once in Guwahati we went to an Baptist missionary compound for breakfast and a bit of rest before getting on the train at 10 AM. This train was scheduled for 32 hours and it took us about 37 hours to get to Delhi. We were originally supposed to be taking a train from Delhi to Dehradun, but because of recent heavy rains and landslides part of the railroad track was impassable. So we ended up driving from Delhi to Dehradun which all said and done was about a 15 hour drive.

Please continue to pray for our eMi office here in India as we have one team currently out on a project in south India. Please also pray that God would really bless our work as we begin to produce the project design reports and that we would serve Him with humble hearts.

"Cast your cares on the LORD and he will sustain you;
he will never let the righteous fall."

-Psalm 55:22

With Love,

Nate