The most experiencing day would be the second day of the trip. On the second day I did two activities that I’ve never done before: gardening and paint scraping. We were told to scrape paints off a house in an isolated building in Crossroads. It was a fun experience paint scraping because we worked as a team. Different groups were assigned so that each group could work efficiently and focus on one spot. I underestimated the job, because it really is not a pushover thing. We chose our spots and went to scrape the walls. During scrapipng we talked a lot. Although it was dusty, we enjoyed every bit of the whole process.
Eventually we stopped scraping and took off at lunch. Lunch was fine and I skipped to my next job, perhaps the hardest job that I’ve done: gardening. Gardening under a hot sun was not ideal, because we had to wear extra clothes. It also involves a lot of steps, such as plowing the field, re-planting the plant and relocating the soil. But despite the heat and pain, we began to adapt ourselves to the field and started to like it. We had a break and during the break we went to Crossroads Free Trade Restaurant and bought some iced coffee, which was very refreshing. After break we became involved in gardneing again for the next couple hours.
After gardening we did something that we never attemped before, and never dared to attempt. It was an insane experience for us, because we had to use chainsaw to saw off the trees in Crossroads. The trees were so ancient and old that it took us nearly thirty minutes just to chop one tree off. It was a group effort activity and it was also extremely dangerous. We had to wear gloves and stayed at least one meter. It was fun and we did accomplish a lot during this event session. We chopped off three big trees in the front door of Crossroads. In the end our gloves were ripped off due to the rust on the chainsaw.
The trip was meaningful in a lot of ways, and taught me a lot about living in a refugee’s perspective. The theme of this trip is, “Live a day a billion do’, and the theme was very shocking to me. I really learned to step into the shoes of the poor ones, and I felt how blessed I am to have healthy family members.
