As I’ve said before, it’s difficult for me to even try to portray to you the frustration that all of us feel right now. To pick up where we left off – after 194 letters of support arrived at our house and caused a surge of hope for a few hours, we ran into some more complications that seemed to make our goal unobtainable. For starters, we found it impossible to recruit people from the community to go and bring sand (which is needed for cement) from the river. When we pressed the village leadership about this matter and told them that this is a definite prerequisite for the construction, they set out to collect money from our students in order to pay for workers who will fulfill this task. Needless to say we were appalled. And devastated.
We’ve come so close, we could almost see it happen. And it is going to waste. It is not going to be done, and even if it is, it is not going to be done on time, and even if it is, it is not going to be done in the way that we envisioned it. And let me frankly say, that that sucks! And what’s more is that it made us lose the will to keep trying.
You see, this is not a project like all projects. It’s our baby, every one of us. We all want it to work, we all have been working tirelessly in order to make it work. It’s bigger than anything we have done here before.
But when I stop to think about it, the truly crucial point is that this community center also embodies the very essence of what we are trying to do. By building it, we are trying to get the locals to work together in order to reach a shared goal which will be beneficial for all of them. In other words – we are forcing them to act as a community, and in doing so we create a community where there was none before. Though this thought seems like an epiphany to me now, it’s actually something I’ve known all along- that we were coming here to build a community. This idea makes all the setbacks seem a bit trivial: I mean, really, how could I ever imagine it to be anything but difficult?
Not to confuse you – I get angry and frustrated on a daily (sometimes hourly) basis. But I understand it now. I know it could not be any other way, because the mission I’ve chosen for myself (and it was my chosen mission from the very beginning) is one that is fundamentally laced with innumerable obstacles and failures. That’s no reason to quit pursuing it.
And on a side note – after an inquiry with the village leadership, we discovered that money was collected from the students, and not only from them, because no one had time to get the sand, and thus workers had to be hired. If you think about it, this is a community effort. Their first. And it’s a clumsy one, but a moving one nonetheless.
We’ve come so close, we could almost see it happen. And it is going to waste. It is not going to be done, and even if it is, it is not going to be done on time, and even if it is, it is not going to be done in the way that we envisioned it. And let me frankly say, that that sucks! And what’s more is that it made us lose the will to keep trying.
You see, this is not a project like all projects. It’s our baby, every one of us. We all want it to work, we all have been working tirelessly in order to make it work. It’s bigger than anything we have done here before.
But when I stop to think about it, the truly crucial point is that this community center also embodies the very essence of what we are trying to do. By building it, we are trying to get the locals to work together in order to reach a shared goal which will be beneficial for all of them. In other words – we are forcing them to act as a community, and in doing so we create a community where there was none before. Though this thought seems like an epiphany to me now, it’s actually something I’ve known all along- that we were coming here to build a community. This idea makes all the setbacks seem a bit trivial: I mean, really, how could I ever imagine it to be anything but difficult?
Not to confuse you – I get angry and frustrated on a daily (sometimes hourly) basis. But I understand it now. I know it could not be any other way, because the mission I’ve chosen for myself (and it was my chosen mission from the very beginning) is one that is fundamentally laced with innumerable obstacles and failures. That’s no reason to quit pursuing it.
And on a side note – after an inquiry with the village leadership, we discovered that money was collected from the students, and not only from them, because no one had time to get the sand, and thus workers had to be hired. If you think about it, this is a community effort. Their first. And it’s a clumsy one, but a moving one nonetheless.
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