In this work, we consider the goal of enabling effective voice communication in a TDMA, multi-hop mesh network, using low cost and low power platforms. We consider two primary usage scenarios: (1) enabling a local voice communication within a village-like setting, in developing regions (2) supporting an on-site local communication among a team of users e.g. during emergency response systems. While there is plentiful literature on the use of TDMA for multi-hop wireless mesh networks, a practical multi-hop TDMA system remains elusive. Our contributions in this regard are three-fold. (1) We demonstrate the working of an 802.15.4-based low-cost, low-power, local communication system (referred as Lo3 ) using custom made handsets and off-the-shelf platforms. (2) We show the practicability of LiT: a full-fledged TDMA-based multi-hop, multi-channel MAC protocol for real-time applications; especially on resource constrained platforms, (3) We present implementationbased evaluations results of L...