Week 2, Shelter Associates

I've been working at Shelter for about 10 days now, so I thought I'd update everyone on what we're doing. They just started a new project in Solapur, which is about 4hrs south east of Pune. They want to get a city-wide view of the slums, so they can make improvements to the sewage systems that are in place at the moment. We started this past week by mapping all 220 slums in google earth. We are only missing about 10 of them, which we just couldn't find. We have outlined them, and labelled them, and entered them into a spreadsheet. This week, we are actually going to Solapur to check that what we mapped is correct. I'm not sure we will be able to cover all 220 in 5 days, but we should be able to make a good start on it. After that, the idea is for the social workers to go survey all the slums with fewer than 200 houses, to find out about the facilities there. We can then add this to the maps, along with information about the existing sewers from the government, to get a complete picture of the city and make recomendations about how to improve the situation.

Here are a few photos from the office. This is the outside. We are the building on the left, and the office is in one of the appartments at the back of the buildings so you can't see it. It's actually a residential block, and the flat we are in is just used as an office.

And here is where we work. They just remodeled the place in the last year, so it is quite nice. This is the desk where the volunteers work. You can see Jenny and Beran (a french architect who has been here for about 3 months) hard at work.