Panoramic Rickshaw

With a quick change of plans to the project that came Monday, each new group began to prepare for our community visit on Wednesday. The teams divided into the infrastructure group, behaviour change and children’s play and education. Each group was working away at how we would implement and plan within the final two days.  Organizing of materials, meetings, conversations and presentations had to be done. It was decided that in terms of accessing the community we would have one visit tomorrow to have an interaction with the community and one final presentation day of of the sustainability plan on Friday. During the day most of us were found crouched in front of our laptops, our notebooks or having group discussions. We felt like we were back at OCAD for a moment  doing work until the smell of Hussein’s cooking and brought us back to where we were.

This day became a learning activity in and of itself. All of our insights had to be presented analogue, a presentation style many of us hadn’t experienced since elementary school. We worked away until the late afternoon on how best to approach and development visual graphics that could be translatable and easily digested.

As we wrapped up the presentations a few of us decided to take a rickshaw into Maragau, seeing as this might be the last opportunity to gather materials and to wander around Newmarket for the last time. The rickshaw whisked us away under the midday heat to the city. First stop: Fabindia, to see what what was so fab about it. Turns out it is the Indian version of Anthropology. We soaked up the air conditioned atmosphere, admired some beautifully patterned kurtas and compared futon prices and then off we were to Newmarket. Our rickshaw driver led us to where he said we would find the best spices, despite the fact that we were already quite familiar with this area. With some saffron in our pockets, we wandered a little more, only to discover that every exit looked the same and there were minimal opportunities to reorientate ourselves. Exiting Newmarket, we decided on a quick stop at the ice cream shop that had the unique Indian flavours we had enjoyed before. The cool fig and mango icecream is always the perfect treat. Arriving back at the guesthouse we had the groups favourite “Indian” meal waiting for us: Chinese food!