For many weeks now, when you turn off the Somanahalli main road into the mud road that leads you the gate for Shibumi, there is a horrible stretch of road. About 10 meters of slush and clayey mud that makes it really tough for the vans to come in. Venki (our driver) always takes a deep breath and a measured pause before he drives through this patch. So yesterday morning while Venki was driving us (a group of children between the ages of 5 and 9 and two adults) to a lake… we had a sudden idea! LETS FIX THE ROAD!! So we turned back into Shibumi, walked to the patch with a tool in our hand and the energy to fix it. We rolled up our sleeves and trousers and got to ‘work’. Scooping all the water out and trying to level the mud on all sides.
The excitement took us through the first quarter hour, the motivation to fix in the next fifteen minutes and somehow for an hour and a half we managed to work hard. Then we stopped! Exhausted. It was a mammoth task, we gave all our energy and had not made the tiniest improvement to the road.
We walked back, soaked in the muddy water with plans for the road!
‘We should get a tractor load of gravel.’
‘If Sharad bhaiya and Sagar (18 year old student) came, they would do it super fast!’
‘We should pay taxes to the government, and they should fix it.’
‘If everyone at school came and worked, we’d surely fix it.’
Let’s see what happens now…
