Arrival to Lucknow

We have left Hyderabad in order to exchange our non productive management traineeship for a socially beneficial one. We were about to teach children English and French and later on go to nearby villages and teach about personal hygiene. We were looking forward being useful again and maybe even getting better care from the local AIESEC comitee.

The arrival seemed promising. There were two AIESEC people waiting for us at the railway station (and they were waiting for quite some time since our train was delayed by 2 hours on a 5 hour journey). They took us to the intern’s apartment. Our room was wonderful. Nice double bed, big wardrobes, even a private bathroom and a small balcony. And air conditioning! (Well, we have to pay some extra money for that, but still :-) Besides our room there is one more with two people occupying it, a shared bathroom, kitchen and living room.

Kitchen with the usual disorder

Living room - already with a bed of Annas who arrived a week ago from Tunisia

Our room

Great apartment, isn’t it? The only problem is, they want to put in here 3 more people! One more will stay in the other room, but the 2 guys are supposed to be in the shared living room. But the AISECErs wouldn’t see where the problem is when we started complaining... At least me and Petr we can be happy for our comfort will remain almost untouched but I really feel for those in the living room.

We face the same problem as in Hyderabad – we keep getting incorrect information. And when we insist on keeping the promises the only response we usually get is something like “sorry there was a misunderstanding” or “sorry the situation has changed”. For example we have explicitly asked about the work – if there are any teaching materials prepared or if we have to do our preparations ourselves – we were assured there was no need to prepare anything. When we came, nothing was there.

Anyway we have come to see, that the local AIESECers do care more than those in Hyderabad (they come to see us, we have already visited some of them, etc.) but when there is a real problem to solve there is not much action. At least they are friendly and take care about our leisure time activities (which is far better than Hyderabad).