Bombay to Burgh

(Freely interpretive syntax never sounded quite so comforting before I read the above in an e-mail confirmation from the concierge of the lower Mumbai hotel I booked online last week.  No dis intended, by the way - his English is far better than my Hindi or Marathi :)

Namaskar from the Southside slopes!  My name is Adam, and I’m a volunteer for the Pittsburgh Action Center of Child Rights and You (CRY) America, Inc., a nonprofit NGO that raises funds in support of basic childrens’ rights projects in India and the U.S.  This month I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to visit India (Mumbai - formerly Bombay, New Delhi, and Jaipur are among my destinations) for 3.5 weeks in order to survey some of the sites that CRY America supports through our fundraising.  You can find out more about CRY at www.america.cry.org, and five minutes of clicking and searching will turn up some information on Pittsburgh’s (very active) action center.

As opportunity permits, I will be blogging here about my experiences.  I am to leave tomorrow Oct. 31 on an early evening flight to Newark, then catch up on some reading for three hours until my flight leaves for the 18-hour voyage (incidentally, that’s going to be my longest flight to date - I am indebted to a few key people for hydration/DVT prevention tips :).

End of dispatch for the moment - I’ve got the next 24 hours fairly jammed with last-minute exigencies: pricing and hastily purchasing a cheap mp3 player (looking at the Creative Stone Plus 2GB so I can keep the inspirational sounds of Jesu and Killing Joke’s ‘Brighter than a Thousand Suns’ on demand at all times), collecting some audio cassettes for interviews & field recordings, getting some travelers’ checks and finally packing my bags and saying some goodbyes.  My thanks to the truespies community for the blogspace!