Dear Parents,
The past few days have been busy yet enjoyable, especially in meeting so many new people. We're all interacting really well and our group discussions have been a lot more in depth than we expected them to be.
On the first day, we landed safely at 3:00 am and after a little rest we got to meet the Inventure students at breakfast. Then we went on a cultural walk where we saw a cave temple, a bull temple, and oddly enough, fruit bats. After that we went to Jivox for our orientation and had an introduction to the design thinking process. We came back to IBC, relaxed, had a pizza dinner, and went to bed early.
On the second day, we woke up early to go to the flower market and experienced our first local perspective of Bangalore. After this, we celebrated National Yoga Day with some surya namaskar
(sun salutations) led by Usha Aunty. Following this, we practiced more design thinking through a case study about a similar water sanitation problem in Nepal. We were asked to explicitly define the problem according to the article and design and rate our own frugal innovation. After a break, we had panelists, Rajesh Shah and Dr. Niranjan, come speak to us on their perspectives of the water problem. We were inspired to take the issues of water and sanitation into our own hands because of their intellectual insight.
On the third day, we spent the majority of the time working with students from Christel House school and were amazed by their beautiful campus. Christel House school is a NGO and a non-profit school that provides education for students from low income families between kindergarten and twelfth grade. We also worked with a few of the high school students to create a mindmap of the water crisis and outline the causes and effects of it. After this we got to visit two of the communities that the students live in and interview the families about the water crisis. Most of us were very surprised by the dire situations the families face and realized how much we took our resources for granted. One thing that we did not expect was the lack of water supplied by the government in these communities. Even though the families are faced with so many hardships on a daily basis, they were very hospitable and openly welcomed us into their homes. Later that evening at IBC, we reflected on what we had experienced today and found that we were curious to expand our knowledge on the background of these communities.
Overall, the last three days have been eye opening and a great beginning to our trip. We hope everyone enjoyed Father's Day and has a great rest of the week!
Lots of love,
Sophia, Ashli, Pragya, and Ellie
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