Before I begin, I was going to create a whole new page, have Libelle seperate, but that will just get confusing. So Libelle will remain as my only blog account, even though the destination has changed.
I found out this morning that I am off to Ghana for 5 months. Sometimes my life doesn’t seem real. It’s not my life. Someone else is living my dreams. There are two of me going on. Somewhere in between Sliding Doors and The Truman Show. How did I get from the little girl who would run up the hallway to the front door, to ask her Granny to draw her circles to this young lady in a hostel in Madrid, to planning a trip of a lifetime in Ghana, AFRICA!
I often find myself asking questions about who was the first mean person, or who decided it was ok to be racist? And who decided it was ok not to be? Was that the same person who told me that I have a social conscious? I sound like a religious person who had a dream, where Jesus or God, or the Buddah or ‘someone’ came to me and told me to do good. That’s not what happened.
In my first year of uni we were asked why we chose youth work, there were often two distinct answers. The first answer was something to do with religion, “I feel I should” or “I loved the youth groups when I was growing up.” The second group of answers were something to do with “my youth worker helped me a lot” or “I had a tough time growing up and it would have been great to have someone there to talk to.”
I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t have an answer, I don’t know why I did it. The ENTER to get in was the same I got for VCE, and I use signs like that to determine my path from time to time. But that doesn’t really say much considering I also applied to full fee nursing in Mildura, why would I do that?
My first memory of actually caring about issues in the world is year 11 geography. For this class we spent a term acting out a model UN. Each person in the class was assigned a country and we had a president, a vice president and 2 secretaries. I was one of the secretaries. Our job was to take the minutes and type it up for the next class. It was a pain in the butt job.
I was assigned South Korea. Each class we 2 people had to present for 5-15 minutes on their country. We had to talk about the economy, social environment, government, population, schooling etc. I couldn’t find enough to go on, I didn’t know where to look for starters and well I basically gave up before I had even began. As I was researching/ trying to find something I could use in a presentation, I came across a variety of information about people living in poverty. Mr Cranby, our geography teacher agreed to let me talk about the world, the IMF and poverty. In exchange I surprised him, and myself with a 15page hand out and a discussion that lasted more than half an hour. That is the first time I remember getting an A and feeling proud of myself. (I don’t remember too many A’s- usually a b with a scribble beside the mark saying “you can do better than this, you should try harder”).
A month or two before my trip, when I was back living with mum, I remember a day when I was working in the city. I got up before the sun came up and got home well after it had set. That day I did not see one homeless person, I did not see one piece of evidence of poverty or anything reflecting hungry people with nowhere to sleep. That made me think of all those people working in their offices, or at home, people who drive to work, or are too focused on their phones or iPods to notice someone begging for money. It is really sad, imagine you had no money, nowhere to sleep and you had to put a dirty cup in front of you, sit on the street in the same clothes as you had been wearing for a week. I hope with all my heart that that never happens to any of you. But next time you see someone selling a Big Issue magazine, buy it. It’s a good read.
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