Reflections – Monday 31st Jan 2005 (Part 1)
I’ve been back for two days now, and things are pretty much back to normal, except that I don’t feel normal at all. Dancing starts again this week, today in fact, but I’m not going to go (which is very unlike me) because I just don’t think I can go back to doing ‘normal’ things yet. Its like everything I do now has to be about ‘me going to Africa’, otherwise I’ll forget and it will all be over too soon. I’ve got a huge list here of people I want to write to and things I want to do before I lose the passion of what I’ve experienced. I’ve been thinking a lot about what projects to do now that I’m back – it’s like when I go to schools I’ve got this huge opportunity to reach so many people, and I want to make sure that I get the right message out there.
Firstly, I will be promoting the 40 Hour Famine. But since that’s not till August, I will be promoting some other ways that people can get involved now. I’d like two promote two things – one that involves fundraising, and one that doesn’t involve money. For the latter, I’m still really excited about the pen pal program with the Maputo High School. I’d need to get in touch with the school and see if they had students that were interested, and they would have to be students that were learning English so that the letters would not need to be translated. And I would also need the Australian people to send a reply-paid envelope with every letter, so that the Mozambican students would not have to pay for postage. That could be the most difficult part. I went to Australia Post and asked if there is any way we can buy stamps or prepaid envelopes here that can be used to send mail from Mozambique to Australia, and basically the answer was no. So I guess we would need someone in Mozambique to get the stamps for us, or we could send a small amount of money to the students to pay for postage, but that raises the problems of currency, and the issue of sending money through the mail. I would really love for this idea to work but I need some advice on how it could be run.
August 14th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
I can relate to your experience returning home. I have been to Haiti three times, and I will possibly be making a fourth trip by the end of this year. It takes me weeks to begin getting back into my normal routine, but each time changes me such that I’m not the same person I was before.
What ever became of your writing campaign or is that a post for tomorrow?