17th November

Gday,

Not too much special has been going on the last week so this blog will be a bit more brief compared to my more recent ones. 

So if you don't remember, I'm part of a small student group that are doing work in a village called 'Dunda'. We are doing a variety of projects that may seem interesting to a few of you. The main project we are working on is to build a pre-prep to grade 6 school in the village. The school currently is in a horrible state so it's a high priority to get this done. We have successfully found an architect, got permission to build on the land and the construction is set to start before I leave. Other projects include providing sanitary pads for women, promoting the use of organic seeds in farming and various others. Last Sunday our group was asked to present to the Woodstock board of directors about our work. The board was made up of previous Woodstock students who live all over the world and come to Woodstock once a semester for meetings and stuff. It was quite an official event, I suited up, prepared a beautiful powerpoint and presented on our project to provide farmers in the Dunda village with organic seeds which are much more practical genetically modified seeds they are using now. I was pretty nervous understandably and my whole presentation went by in a blur. Mrs Mark, the staff leader of our group said I did well and the board congratulated all of us and seemed really impressed with what we had done.

The night before the presentation I was finding it hard to sleep and I had one of those nights where your mind just trails on and you get really caught up with your thoughts. I remember thinking about how cool it is that I can be over here in India building a school. It all seems a bit surreal, and i'm sure if you told me that 1 year ago I would be in India doing such things I would never had believed you. That's something that has really made me begin to love it here. I feel like I can achieve a lot more over here then in Melbourne. I know it isn't really true and that feeling would wear off after a while but at the moment I'm loving the opportunities. It reminds of a quote from the movie/novel 'Into the Wild'. “I read somewhere... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong... to measure yourself at least once.” I first heard about this quote when we were studying the film in 'Learning Literacies" a class back at Carey. I knew it had some power and I reflected on it before coming to India but I don't think I had a complete understanding on it. It was only the night before the presentation, when I couldn't get to sleep, that God muttered these words back into my mind and I've been thinking into it a lot. I'm now have these random bursts of happiness and I feel so privileged and lucky to be where I am.

Stay well, 

Lachy