first post!

Hey everyone!!! All of these posts until further noted will be made from this wonderful "cyber-cafe" (a nice name for a small room with 10 tiny cubicles) in the city of Berhampur, in the state of Orissa which, as you may have worked out, is in India. From this place I can access the internet for the fee of around 30 cents an hour, so hopefully I will be able to regularly update this journal. For those of you who don't know, I am working for an NGO named Gram Vikas, which in oriya means "village development." All of it's operations are under two different programs entitled RHEP (rural health and environment program), and ITDP (integrated tribal development program), both of which two years ago were officially combined to form MANTRA (don't remember what that stands for, but you get the gist), for some reason MANTRA still only exists on paper (I haven't really worked out why yet). I'll explain what each of those programs involves and does at a latter date, for at the moment I am rather pressed for time. I am afraid that this computer will lose it's connection and that I'll then lose everything that I typed, so I'm going to cut this message short and try to figure out how to email this link to all of you. I'll type a more extensive email on Monday.