Day 8 - Wednesday 9th August

WAKEY WAKEY

This morning was a 6:30am wake up for the daily sunrise walk.

After breakfast, Georgie and Milan headed off to the spirituality centre where they spent time with the ladies learning about them and their community, as well assisting them in making scarves. Much of this time was spent silently observing Georgina, Claire, Gertie and Cheryl as they painted, which was peaceful and artistically inspiring. The women opened up at different rates and all were lovely to talk and listen to. They gave us an insight into the community and their own lives, which we were grateful to learn about.

Tahlia and Tim spent the morning in the community centre where they prepared sandwiches, collected dirty washing from the community as well as delivering lunch around. The duo found this quite confronting, going into people’s houses and seeing how different they are to ours, the sights and smells, the lives they live so far outside our own expectations.. Despite this, they enjoyed driving around the town in the troopy delivering the lunches to the elderly and being able to help and be a part of the community.

Today Ben was down at the men’s shed again, this time joined by Clay. They finished off making candle holders in preparation for Claire to paint them.

Steph and Chloe spent time with the kids down at the crèche, which they found enjoyable as they were able to form bonds with the children. Each had an individual personality that we soon picked up with some loving cuddles and other toddlers that seemed to have endless energy.

After lunch, we all went down to the school basketball courts where we joined in with the kids PE class to play some basketball and kick the footy.

A couple of hours later, we joined Sister Liz in the spirituality centre where she talked to us about how the government are treating the community and gave us more of an insight of the peoples living conditions. It was quite disturbing to hear as we didn’t realise how poorly they were cared for by our government and the underlying racism that still exists in our country.

We attended another home mass. This mass was again different from the last, as this house received a blessing of the holy water with the gum leaves (even the dogs were blessed).

Later in the night we spent time at the recreation centre known as ‘the club’, where we played bball against other kids closer to our age. Ben’s below average abilities resulted in one girl getting taken off the court with a suspected broken ankle.

We finished the night off with our standard game of Uno with Steph and Milan walking away with wins. Sitting around the table is always enjoyable for all, in the words of Georgie “I’m just happy to be here”. 

No questions tonight - But a statement from all. Our lives have been changed already from this experience. They opened our hearts and homes to us. It is only fair we do the same.