My fun arrival experience placed me in a mental fog for the next few days which coincidentally was alright because the students just arrived from Thailand a day or two prior and everybody had a couple of days off to adjust and get acquainted with the workings of FERAL and the town of Pondi. I spent the next day completely awake to try and adjust as much as possible to the time here. The students went into town to scope out Pondicherry and to meet up with the program coordinator Tara. I tagged along mainly to catch up with Tara. She was the program assistant for the study abroad semester when I was a student in 2009 and had since then taken over the program and I was now filling in the spot of program assistant. We all meandered around Pondicherry and tried to convince the students not to buy too much stuff the first day so they wouldn't get ripped off because of not knowing the ins and outs of bargaining and how much things really are worth over here. The next day I slept for 13 strait hours.
And then I was caught up on sleep. The next few weeks were spent in Pondicherry at FERAL with classes on GIS (which stands for geographical information systems, a simplified description is that its a mapping program), statistics, and a classes on Gender and Culture. The students also created and collected data for projects on local estuarine systems and a few of the areas sustainable reforestation farms.
I spent a large chunk re-orienting myself and assisting with the GIS course. The problem with computer programming courses is that everyone has a different type of computer with different formats, capacities, and issues. Which means when something goes wrong, there can be up to seven different issues and ways to fix the issue each time an error popped up. I also have been compiling and working on literature reviews for a number of papers that are in the works with Tara's individual research here at FERAL which has to do with the coastal fisheries in the surrounding area.
Now that we have all been in Pondicherry for a little over a month and have gotten comfortable, its time to start traveling! The program heads to a crocodile sanctuary just south of Chennai for a week, then off to the Andaman Islands for a week at the Andaman and Nicobar Environmental Team's (ANET) campus and then off to Havelock Island for the students spring break and a chance to relax for a couple of days before returning to the mainland in early March.
