The construction has finished for the new room we got built for the Sambhali Jodhpur project, the doors and windows are up, the bathroom is ready; it is also painted blue, like Jodhpur.

Our friend Ms. Ernestine Badegruber from Soziale Initiative in Linz, Austria, is coming to Jodhpur for few days with friends, she is our guest of honor and will inaugurate the new building of Sambhali Jodhpur project. Our volunteers and participants worked hard with cleaning and preparing the new building to be ready to welcome our first guest since the building in finished and ready to be used.

Sambhali Jodhpur and Setrawa project are doing well. At my presentation in Basel this year in July, I had met quickly with a lady who was working with women travelers to India or something. It was such a short meeting that I couldn’t get much of her introduction, she works with a well known agent in India (Sita). She has four ladies visit our Trust’s Jodhpur project and both the sewing centers, they were very happy to see our projects and passionate people behind its success. We had our guest honor our new participant Sangeeta to be our new leader of the participants and present her with a sewing maschine.

Ms. Margret Nobs (family friend) and Ms. Ruth Engler (participant of Rajput cultural adventure trip I made in 2008 with Mr. Max) now have come back to Jodhpur to volunteer at the Sambhali Trust.

We are working hard with the preparation of UNICEF program proposal to work with us on child marriage prevention issue and the Kuoni destination management who wants to bring us GAP year program participants to volunteer as a group at Setrawa project. I have sent them the proposal and hopefully they will like it.

We applied for the FCRA permission (Foreign contribution regulation act) given by the RBI (Reserve Bank of India) and the respected Home Ministry to the NGOs to legally accept foreign money in March 2007 and 12 government departments have made evaluation accordingly, but 20 days back I received a letter that their procedure has changed and we need to reapply on their website. Well, disappointed with the delays, but all this time when we were waiting for the FCRA permission we learnt a lot about the Government and its interesting ways.