In Podcast 26 I spend a week in India, visiting a charity project that I support through my church here in Bristol. From Hyderabad we travelled to Kurnool with our contact Father Pratap Reddy and visited some of the villages where he is supporting the education of the poorest children and developing community projects to help the people there. You’ll hear about our visits to schools, hostels and rural villages seeing for ourselves how donations from overseas were being used and making a big difference to people’s lives.

Link to audio file

To subscribe to all my podcasts in ITunes click here
If you enjoyed this podcast, check out all my other Travel Podcasts in my Podcast Archive

Day 1 - Shopping and sightseeing in Hyderabad
In Hyderabad we stayed at the lovely Mercure Abids Hotel that was booked through AsiaRooms.com in a neighbourhood that has plenty of small local shops, selling clothes and jewellery. We took a tuk tuk across the river to the Charminar district which is one of the older districts of Hyderabad where we climbed up the famous Charminar monument, to get a view over the city. I soon realised that not many European tourists visit Hyderabad, when two different Indians visiting the monument asked to have their photos taken with me as if I was a rare and exotic creature that they only see very rarely.

With my friends Marilyn & Robert I walked down the road past all the shops selling jewellery and brightly coloured bangles, and we found ourselves near the Chowmahalla Palace built in the 18th century for the Nizams or rulers of Hyderabad to entertain their guests. The white palace buildings were set around two large courtyards with lawns and fountains, and we walked through some of the rooms, including the throne room with enormous sparkling chandeliers that were designed to impress. You can read more in my article about Shopping and Sightseeing in Hyderabad.

After lunch back at the hotel, we were picked up by our contact, Fr Pratap Reddy who drove us the three hours south to Kurnool. The landscape was a dry, arid scrub-land with not much to see other than a few fields and rice paddies being cultivated wherever there was a source of water for irrigation. Every so often there might be a field of chilli plants speckled with red, or cotton bushes and mango trees in flower. It seemed to be harvest time and we saw many carts heavily loaded with hay, including one that had tipped over and was blocking half of the 2 lane highway. As we got closer to Kurnool, Father Pratap pointed out the river that had flooded in 2009 and overflowing its banks after unexpectedly high rainfall and causing a disaster when water and mud flowed into the major town destroying shops and businesses.
Day 2 - Meeting sponsor children in Nandikotkur
We stayed for the next 3 days at a hotel in Kurnool and from there Father Pratap took us to see various community projects that he had started. On our first morning at the Parish House at Nandikotkur, we met some of the children whose education was being sponsored by families in the UK. I had met Fr Pratap over 15 years ago through my church when he was visiting the UK making appeals for help in his parish and as he had been back to the UK a number of times, I set up a small charity to channel the fundraising efforts. Together with my friends Marilyn and Robert who are also involved in the charity, we were there to see how the money raised had been used.

The sponsorship is normally used to pay for books, uniforms and other school expenses for the children from poorer families whose parents may find it difficult even to pay the small amount for schooling. By the time we arrived at the parish house, there were already some children there with their parents, who had travelled for 3 or 4 hours to meet us, which we really appreciated. Some had come from Father Pratap's old parish of P. Yaleru and others who were attending school nearby came to meet us in their school lunch break,