No need to explain.
St. Thomas' digit bone in the center of this cross.
Baby mangrove plants.
Fishing village.
Chennai Fishermen.
Selling fish.
Had a great day! Saw where Thomas, one of Jesus’ apostles, is buried and they displayed a digit of one of his fingers in the center of a golden cross. Click on the pic to enlarge it to take a closer look. That was a trip!
Then, we went to MSSRF, an agriculture conservation and research institute. Fascinating place. They have a ton of projects at this site, some that I can incorporate easily into the Bio AC curriculum. Their Mangrove Project tries to conserve and restore mangrove forests that were taken out for resort developments. Studies show that mangroves prevent 90% of beach erosion and protected the inland from the tsunami in 2004. They are classifying all native mangrove species, cloning them and growing them at the institute. One pic above is of baby mangrove trees in pots. Other projects are about making and growing salt-tolerant and drought-tolerant rice crops. Freshwater in India is quickly depleting so they’re projecting a need to water their main crop, rice, with seawater. Another project is biofortifying crops that produce more iron in their tissues so anemia in children and women decrease. I was loving this place. It was so up my alley.
We also got to see 1 of 7 IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) campuses and talk to the Admissions Director of Chennai. Getting into an IIT is CRAZY! There are 300,000 students applying for only 6500 seats/year. Admission is almost solely based on an IIT 6-hour exam on math, physics and chemistry. The top 7000 students get asked for an interview until 6500 students are chosen. We saw the IIT exam given last year, and of course, there’s stuff in it that goes beyond AP classes in the U.S. Students spend 2 years preparing just for this exam. They take private coaching classes that start at 7:30am-10:30pm 4-6days/wk. When do students have time to go to their normal Class 11/12 classes to graduate? Don’t know. The Admissions Director says these coaching classes are “pure evil” and he said the system needs to change, but he doesn’t know how. Every year there are multiple suicides in the paper if students don’t get into IITs. The pressure can be super high. The worst thing is that after taking the IIT exam, students are ranked from 1-6500 on their website, so you know exactly how you compare to the rest of Indians your age. Student #1 gets his/her first choice of major and campus location, then Student #2, Student #3, etc. Student #6500 gets to write down 126 different major/location combo-preferences, but will most likely not get any of his/her preferences because, too bad, he’s at the bottom. And I though U.S. colleges were impacted. We’re not at 1.3 billion people yet…
The last thing we did was go to fishing village on the beach. So cool. Their boats were all lined up on the shoreline, nets carefully bundled in organized piles, and the women were selling fish at the roadside. We talked to one fisherman who saw the tsunami. He said that the water level was as tall as the red/white striped building (see the pic above). He was on land, high enough to see the water levels rise. There wasn’t a wall of water, but a quick rise in water, 10 meters in less than 5 minutes. Other fishermen that were in their boats, but near the shore said they could see the water rise above buildings from the sea, but they didn’t feel anything. Fishermen that were further out to see didn’t even notice the tsunami until they came back to shore. Chennai only recorded 200 deaths, but there could have been many more victims without family survivors or were homeless. Shaun got to visit a hostel that houses orphaned children from the tsunami. It’s a non-profit and is almost totally run on donations. Once kids are finished with Class 12, they have to find work and other housing. She said that about 56 kids live in the hostel of all ages. Pretty cool place. Tomorrow we’re going on a heritage tour visiting temples and more beaches with our guide that talks like Dr. Evil. All Indians feel like they have to slow their speech to us Americans so we can understand them. He’s gone a bit overboard, but no one has the heart to tell him. I’m waiting for him to put his pinky up to the corner of his mouth and bust out a line with “1 bill-ion rupees!” I’ll try to get it on video if I can J.
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