Explorations: Potential for change!

It's been another incredible day on this journey of "explorations". When I started blogging about the trip, I couldn't decide what I wanted to call it and thought of "explorations" off the top of my head and I think that's a pretty appropriate title. This journey has been an exploration in so many ways. An exploration of myself. The future. Of this beautiful, incredibly diverse and rich nation of endless possibilities and potential. And I think I'll be left with a hunger to explore more and more of the world even when this journey ends.

Traveling with a bunch of (incredible!!) Australians who see the world through a wide lens has been such a blessing and has made me question and see things differently. (I've also learnt, thanks to James, that if you read your watch upside down on Indian time, it tells you exactly what the time in Australia is!) It's scary how easy it is to get stuck in a rut and become complacent and comfortable. We can't get comfortable. We don't deserve it and we can't afford it. There's so much to be done and it's been so exciting actually seeing what is already being done in modest but powerful ways in all the places that we've travelled to over the last two weeks or so.

Right now, we're in Gudalur - a little town just down the hill from Ooty. We're staying with an organisation that works with Adivasis which is the generic term given to the indigenious tribes of India. (Adi = original, Vasi = inhabitants) In the social heirarchy, they fall even below the lowest caste in the Caste system and have suffered much injustice and still do. The work being done here involves various things including a school, a hospital, a fair trade company, etc all set up by amazing and sacrificing professionals who in some cases left high-paying jobs in the cities to start something here. To make a difference. But the work is not about them and they make that pretty clear to us whenever we talk to any of them. It's about the people and they train the people to own the work, to own their institutions and be independent of the mainstream system that often discriminates against them.

Today we went into a village in the state of Kerala where we learnt something about how a model of the micro credit system started by Muhammed Yunus in Bangladesh has worked here. And it's just incredible. Especially for me as a Sociology student… And I can't believe that I'm referring to myself as that because after leaving college, I've often discounted that I even went to college. Stupid I know, but it was so frustrating and I felt like I barely learnt anything because it was all theory and I didn't see any of it in practice but I'm seeing it now and it's so exciting! How society in villages work and how important agriculture is. How culture can actually have such a huge impact on how the people treat the environment. Seeing how women can be at the forefront of social change and how giving them a chance to actually do something really does make a difference and could spiral into something radical and huge…

Sometimes I feel like my head is going to burst from all that we're taking in but at the same time, it feels so satisfying to be constantly thinking and processing these things.

Anyway, methinks it's bedtime now!

Life is God's novel. Let him write it.
- Isaac Bashevis Singer