Another 5am start! All members of the group were up and eager for prayer and exercises, except for Liam… (he claims he was engaged in private prayer) and were beginning to settle into a routine at Udayan. However, that wasn’t to last for long as our city break to Kolkata was to come. With a surprisingly emotional goodbye to the students after Maddie and Sophia helped to serve breakfast, we set out at 10am on the Udayan bus, jamming to our Bollywood tunes and joined by some of the boys setting out to their three-hour English exam!

After another experience of the chaotically-organised Indian traffic system, we arrived at the Titagarh centre for leprosy sufferers, a moving and uplifting insight life in a leper colony. The centre, built between the train tracks and a ginormous land-fill site, was founded by Mother Teresa in the 1970s and provides a safe place for lepers to live, access to medical care and opportunity for work. Regardless of their physical disability, the group was in awe of the hard-working, joyous and hospitable people we met in there – a true example of why Kolkata is called the ‘City of Joy’. The centre looked glorious in the thirty-degree heat – a welcomed break from the freezing winter at home. After a short break of sweet-tea and biscuits, we headed out towards the legendary Fairlawn Hotel.

There aren’t many relevant photos of this day as the centre has a no photo policy but this one shows the huge waste pile that the Leprosy commune is built beside.