Built to perfection from within!

Being a teacher has often times taken me to places to do the things that I would have otherwise never done. It was a week’s trip to the Telunas island recently. While I will write many posts on thoughts about it, here is one to start with…kind of one to break into the mental constipation of thoughts that I have been going through ever since I have been back.

As part of their curriculum the Junior college kids at school need to complete 150 hours of CAS(Creativity, Action and Service). This trip to Telunas, Sugi and Moro island had a lot of all the three. The sugi island school had a school that had classes(Kelas in Bahasa) till primary 5 and the school itself needed to raise a wall in order to mark their territory for legal reasons. Life had reasons for them too and disputes too for land that a neighborhood landlady claimed  was hers. By raising that stone wall we subtly told her, her limits and in return my class kids helped her with her house building too! Disputes sometimes, makes for constructive thoughts and actions to spring!

Three wheelbarrows of mud to one packet of cement to be mixed. They poured water and let the water bind the cement-mud mixture. The consistency was learned by trial and error. They then took small buckets of this mixture to the fences and used these to glue the big stones together.

Mixing the cement with the shovels and preparing the 'glue' as my kids called it!

These big stones had to be broken to sizes they needed to fit the various corners of the wall!

Digging to prepare the ground for the wall. Back breaking it was.

The wall slowly raised. Learning to sustain the heat was half the battle won.

Stopping and thinking which size rock piece will go where was not easy.

That one of my class girls who used her hands as she found it easy to go between the rocks!

The wall was so uneven to start with.

Finally at the end of day 1 quite a bit of ground work had been done!

 Though this took just three sentences to describe it certainly took the sweat out off all of us as we toiled together to raise the fence a whole day in the scorching sun. There were atleast 6 water breaks with one of them being the juice break that served honeydew juice too..absolutely fresh and cool prepared by the staff of that school specially for us.

The ditch was our guide’s pet project atleast it seemed like and my class kids shared the sentiments with him to perfect the geometrics of it too! At every brick that was laid, every single of us who worked on it had to stop and assess how linearly it was aligned. Carrying the big bricks and laying them to perfection was one thing and then pasting them together with a cement mix that was more dry than the one we used for the wall was another.  

One striking feature was the warmth the people of the village showed us by preparing a fantastic, spicy and welcoming lunch that had many highlights! The curry puff surely was one of them.

The food that they served us with lots of love was yum!

 The whole day drew to an end when we ran out of breath to simply mix more wheelbarrows to cement. That’s as much energy this project took. Everyone worked with different things striking them but one thing was common in all our minds- to serve from the heart and to see the tangible results of our sweat at the end of the day. The hands that strung rubberbands and threw paper planes in class and the voices that smacked words of mischief now was quietly washing the tools to put in place to dry for tomorrow.

Raising a wall metaphorically these days is so easy. We do it all the time with people. Quite useless and has intangible negative impacts in our lives. But this wall raised, stood for the work we believed in, taught my kids that construction workers in our country do a hundred times more hardwork each day to earn their daily bread, community service in its truest sense is to provide from the heart and do it to perfection for a mere self-satisfaction. It had my kids look at that wall, as they washed their tools, squatting together in total silence. Each of them snatched a glance of their hard day's work! Some stood next to the wall, as we walked back and took pictures, spoke about what needs to be done to that odd stone, jutting out, the next day when they restarted. To me that was clearly objectives fulfilled. They had no one telling them to straighten it, correct it or perfect it and yet the earnesty of that streak of thought, that went into their own work was a perfection with its own class, already. People, this moment of earnesty and devotion was priceless to see. Even if the wall they built wasn't the perfect one, they  were certainly shaping perfect big hearts within!