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“When someone seeks, then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means being free, being open, having no goal.” This is the perfect quote to summarise our experiences in the last three months. Over this period, we let go many of our plans and embraced things as they appeared. That shift of attitude made a huge difference. As a result of this we are focusing to working with children and intake four youths as intern in our team. Welcome to our second quarterly newsletter of 2023.
Activities:
Besides working on our three model gardens we wanted to involve one local Santhali community in growing food. Only one of our three gardens performed well dealing with the scorching summer heat. This garden actually gave us an average of 1kg of food every day over a month and a half. As the monsoon has arrived our two gardens are also slowly picking momentum. Our effort to involve the Santhal community was not fruitful. With some reflection find our gardens are not at that stage where we can show the adults the potential of our gardens. This lets our spirit down.
Later, we changed our approach and focused on the couple of children who were already engaging with us. They took seeds and advice from us and created their gardens. It has been over a month since we have been involved with those children and more on the weekend through different activities. Our idea is to create more gardens working with the children instead of focusing on the children as we were doing earlier.
People:
Sajal Bhanja: In the last 15 days we have hired four interns. Sajal is one of them. He is from our neighboring village. The more we know about this 20-year-old young man, the more fascinated we become about him. He is good at writing Bengali and loves taking care of flowering plants. We assigned him to take care of the flowering plants in our gardens and write about bon’s work in Bengali (our local language).
Sonali Rana: Sonali is in 23-old woman from our village. Who aspires to Bengali professor. She gives private tuition to some local children. Through a couple of interactions, we found out she is passionate about spending time with children and engaging them in different activities. She is the second of four interns who will be facilitating weekly activities that we do with the children.
Connections:
In the month of April, our friend Sarthak from Urveera visited us. With his help, we created a small documentary about bon’s work. We are in discussion with Foodwise and Fafa, on partnering together to do some activities for people from urban areas to reconnect them to nature through food.