Just an Update

Hello,

Just a brief update on how I’m doing. At work, my induction period has now come to an end and during the next four weeks I’ll be working on a report on informal waste recycling. I’ll be helping with the analysis of quantitative data. Additionally to that, I will be conducting some interviews in order to get an idea about the “legal” issues that surround some of the everyday plastic waste materials such as plastic carrier bags (they might be banned). I will also be writing up some case studies from data that we have acquired in the field through semi-structured interviews with the owners of informal recycling units. So there is a lot of exciting work ahead of me.

Last night I went for some Italian food with Seth, an American colleague of mine who is working full-time at Chintan and who also works on a PhD thesis on informal street vending. I had a lovely evening, but when I got home my neighbours were awaiting me and asked me to have a look in my kitchen (which is a separate room and not attached to my “apartment”). When I opened the door I realised that the kitchen was flooded. The water must have come up the drain pipe as I haven’t used the water in the kitchen at all. So I had to spend a fair amount of time getting rid of the water in the kitchen (and there really was a lot of it!!). On the more positive side I got to know my neighbours, two twenty year old students, who can cook really nice food and who decided I had to join them for a delicious home made chicken curry. So I had dinner number two 🙂

Anyway, when I got up this morning there was no water at all, so I could not have a shower… How ironic! Last night I was annoyed about too much water in the kitchen, now I wished I could have some drops to clean myself.

Tomorrow on my free day I’m planning to go and see the Taj Mahal in Agra. So that should be fun and I will update you with some photographs.

Take care,

Sven