Trip to Vansda!

A large part of our country’s population consists of farmers. Farmers are one of the most hard working kind of people, and I got a little taste of this tremendous hard work through this plantation and farming activity organized by our school.

This activity took place in Janki Van in early july, and being a new student, I was very anxious to go on this trip because I was not a very active person so I was worried if I would be able to the hard work and also, because I didn’t have a lot of friends yet as I was a new student. However, I decided to take up this new challenge of planting and getting dirty in the mud with new people! And it is safe to say that I did not regret it.

When we arrived to the beautiful Janki Van, we were first shown and instructed about how to plant the saplings, how to get the mud and ground ready for the plantation, how to dig etc… all these things looked very easy but when we started doing them I realised how difficult they were.

While digging and planting at first, we were all very confused and bored, a few hours went by, and despite all our hard work, we were very slow and felt exhausted in the heat. Then we came up with the solution to divide the work according to our strengths, the people who were good at digging, started doing that and the people who were good at planting and getting the mud ready started doing that, so with this sort of team work, our working-speed increased.

After a few hours, even when we were very tired, we stayed committed and we continued working until we had finished planting all the saplings and all the work assigned to us, by mid afternoon, our hands and legs were aching but we did not stop working. After all of this work, we went to a river and relaxed there and had fun.

At the end of the day, I was very exhausted, and realized that I needed to get more active and increase my stamina for physical exertion. I also realized the importance of team efforts in getting a job done and also ended up making new friends in the process. I had to be ethically mindful as I needed to stay committed to my promise of getting the work done and doing it properly while using proper methods so that I did not waste the resources of Janki Van, I also had to be mindful that I did my efforts as a team worker and did not just laze around and let everyone else do the work.

One of the most important lessons I learnt was that of the hard work that our farmers do, I got tired in just one day of a small plantation activity but my sense of gratitude for the farmers of our country grew immensely. I felt a new found respect for them, and also vowed to never waste food as a lot of effort has gone into growing the food and grains.

Another lesson I learnt was the importance of growing plants in saving our earth, while farming is hard work, I learnt a new skill of plantations and realized that if we all knew the basics of planting small saplings, we could do our own bit to save the world from global warming.