Wednesday 4 September 2013

A flooding in the office

Imagine heading out for your office in the morning. First you have to wade through an alleyway - up to your knees in dirty water, and you discover the rat swimming by your side. Then you open your office door...The floor has gone invisible under brownish stinking water. The furniture, the desks, the lockers - all in water. Files, papers, kids' drawings, photos - some of it all gone. You see, that is exactly what happened to my colleagues at the NGO office one morning when they came to work. 

So, dear reader, at the same time as I was splashing around in the Aegean sea, digging in taramosalata or singing my way up to a mountain top in Norway, the monsoon was ravaging in Mumbai.

And even though I heard a lot about how "good" the monsoon was this year ( well, after 8 months without a raindrop- it's understandable), there were lots of flooding and destruction. Let me show you what happened to our office:  

This is the alleyway leading down to where our previous office was located. The boy, one of our neighbors, is trying to clean the drainage, to help the problem. Many of the houses had flooding problems this year.

This is inside our old office... see what I mean when I say the floor was invisible?

My colleagues started to clean up and they worked so hard to save whatever could be saved, and fix the damages the best they could. However, it turned out that a lot of it was just too damaged, and it was also obvious that the office could not longer be used. So, the NGO had to move to another building.


So, when I got back to Mumbai, the NGO had just moved to a new location. Now, we have spent a lot of time to fix and adjust to the new location, and to replace items that were destroyed. But, I was happy to see that the new office was better than the old one, as it is much more spacious, and easier accessible. We just decided: - this will work! So, we put the worries behind us and we look ahead! To new beginnings!
 
PS: And I was sooo happy - because we managed to save every single book in our library. Yey!! 

Out
with old garbage: (just outside our old office...)

And in with new good moments like these, in the new office too:

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