Today we got straight into the painting of the clinic in Kalkaji which involved revisiting our childhood through picture books. We have three rooms to paint in total, so it seems that our creativity has no bounds! Surrounded by the sounds of bursting balloons from the craft work that was under the control of the other fab team members, we sketched our drawings first before putting paint to wall!

Two separate pizza deliveries and 16 full stomachs later, five of us had the opportunity to sit in on a peer-education class taken by Soni, the Senior Coordinator at the ASHA resource centre. It was the first opportunity that we had to be able to chat with girls of a similar age to us about their experiences of growing up and it was shocking to learn about how much they didn't know about before they became affiliated with ASHA.

These girls have a mammoth task. Being a peer educator involves making sure that all of their peers know what problems they will face going through adolescence. It's hard enough trying to come to terms with it yourself without having to make sense of it to your friends.

We all started off by introducing ourselves and some of the Indian girls spoke to us in English. However, what was particularly notable was that in contrast to the boys who may even have been younger than the girls present, the level of English the girls had was fairly minimal and definitely less than that of the boys, highlighting the particular problems in India with regards to gender discrimination. Despite that, it wasn't hard to communicate as we soon found out and of course, as soon as we brought our cameras out, we had to be in every picture!

In the afternoon, a small group of us went to visit the lanes around the ASHA centre in Kalkaji. We were led by one of the community health volunteers. Firstly she showed us a lane which was run by a girl a lot younger than ourselves. She kept a record of who lived there (about 25 families). She had one TB sufferer and two pregnant ladies. Each of the ladies who had recently had a child had charts containing all of their details and a graph showing whether the child was malnourished or healthy, approved by the World Health Organization. It was amazing to see how ASHA's education of the women and children, and their regular surveillance had improved so many lives.

One lane in particular stood out. It was run by a fifteen year old girl who was at year 10 in school (equivalent to GCSE's). She was also President of her block which was called B Block and got this position by being elected by the local children. She told us she wished to join the police when she was older. It was just unbelievable to see a girl so much younger than us being able to look after all of these families and cope with school life. It showed she wanted to achieve a lot and it was good to know ASHA was helping her do this.

The experience of walking through the lanes gave us hope because although no one deserves to live in these conditions, the people were aware how to stay healthy. All the children were at school and nearly everyone had a huge smile on their face. It was reassuring to know that there are such simple things that can be done to sort these problems.

Hannah Crawford and Susan Lenfesty