I begin by saying its difficult to share all that this tour has undertaken, but you  are seeing just a little.

Samakhushi felt making in the morning.

The people on the pavements overflow out onto the road. It appears to be a dance between vehicles and pedestrians, but the motorbikes seem to fly out of nowhere and weave through the traffic.

It’s  dusty light and extremely colorful. There are no pavements on the outer ring roads, the bitumen ends and dirt begins. The sounds of horns and crows blend.  There seems to be a huge amount of buses in proportion to other vehicles and to heck with health and safety, they are packed to capacity.

We walked down narrow alleys, having to press against the fence to allow the motorbikes and  bikes to pass.  Past houses that looked as if they been designed by Dr Zeuss until we came upon a small corrugated iron compound.

Its an honor to share in the lives of these lovely people, you would never be privy to this experience on a ‘tour’.  Life must be hard for many but everyone greets us with a smile and a ‘Namaste’

There were about 20 women standing over raised wooden platforms rolling trays of stone over  balls of white felt. It appears that the felt had been soaked in a basin of water and then the water is expressed by the weight on top of it and the balls are compressed to about half their size. The weight were large rocks, sometimes single, often a in a bag.

We ladies were given a lesson on how to create crafts from some of the felt balls. I imagine the people in the workshop had a rather different view us in comparison to our view of the entire proceedings. I feel like such a fake in these situations.

No matter what we do in our personal lives to make the lives of others better. I’m still humbled by the lives, ingenuity and humility of being in a place like this.