Day 2 started off with thunder clouds and torrential rain. The team decided to go to an existing habitat village (Tao) a couple of miles prior to the Yangwei village.
We were welcomed by an elderly local couple in the Tao village to have tea with them. Being of Asian descent and having spent majority of my life in India, I could easily see the striking parallelism between the 2 Asian cultures. We were offered tea and biscuits (cracker) by this couple. The tea was prepared by them by drying the tea leaves plucked from the tea gardens and brewing it at home. It is not often that a team of 20 adults would get an impromptu invite from strangers to their abode. The hospitality and relative uncomplicated and unpretentious nature of the elderly couple was refreshingly breathtaking and overwhelmed most of the people and definitely gives a perspective on life in general.
During the ground/back breaking hard work, the team seemed to be able to rally around in a much more efficient manner than day 1. We had an assembly line going which started with locating the bricks and putting them in baskets and moving them from ground to the second floor. The importance of team work was definitely illustarated today and everyone seeming to identify their strong areas and much more comfortable with their respective strengths which we could utilize to the best advantage for the work on hand. The age old adage of 'Building a house - a brick at a time couldn't have been better vivified by the exploits of 'Oceans 18' on day2. (Ocean is the local Chinese contact who worked with us for Habitat)
