Accommodations

So as it turns out, I'm staying in the "science lab," which has had a couple beds added to it to turn it into a guest room (very fitting, no?). There's an attached bathroom, which suggests that the room's double role is built in. The room is to the right of the headmaster's tiny little office, which never needs to be locked.

There are posters hung all over the room illustrating science-related topics, with multiple more rolled up on the shelves. In the picture above, there's one about great Indian scientists, vegetative propagation, and mitosis. Meiosis is on the other side of the room, and the male and female reproductive systems (surprisingly) are hanging in one corner next behind the TV (which may or may not work though we don't plan to watch it either way).

The floor in one corner of the room sports a cement-and-paint map of India, though it seems somewhat out of place in the science room/guest room/English book library (the Telugu library is made up of two shelves like the one above in a room across the quad).

There are also science materials present, so I suppose it's fine. The school recently got a donation of some science materials from a vocational school in Siddipet, which are stored in the glass-windowed cabinet. Through the glass, we can see that the top shelf holds a variety of dry chemical bottles, the second (despite the cracked glass) dark-tinted liquid containers, the third a panoply of instrumentation (prisms, lenses, rheostat, voltmeters, bulbs, etc.) along with a human heart model, a sphygmomanometer (for blood pressure), and the fourth books and glassware.

Well, that's good. There's more equipment than I would have guessed, although some of the basics are missing. Elizabeth bought and brought a set of six 100 mL beakers with her since there were none here.

At any rate, the plan is that my mother will stay here the first night, meet the students, and return to Hyderabad by bus tomorrow. As it turns out, they'll ask her to stay and help teach English, so she'll be back here again Friday, but, shhh, my fellow time travelers, keep it quiet - we don't know that yet.