Summer Hols: How about community work? Locally.

 

Over two weekends, some cool ones, we chose to do some personal community work.

I was invited and said ‘yes’.

The goal was to give a new look to a sprawling sand and vegetation plot of land my friends owned not far from the city.

Work would be in two sessions - 6 to 8.30 am. And 4.30 to 6 p.m.

I am not a hard-labour person. Nor am I good at using all kinds of tools.

But my group knew how best to use my little talent.

They made me the landscape artiste!

A green hedge was planned and okayed. And knowing well how good ‘paper rose’, the common name for bougainvillea, is for creating what was wanted, we went shopping at a nursery. 

I mixed up the magenta, orange, red, white and the hybrid, carted some 30 saplings at 15 rupees each and got them planted in a slight zig-zag line. On the second weekend of our community work, some paper roses were blooming, proud in the April sunshine.

This summer, when the kids are having their annual holidays, are you choosing to allot a few days to a domestic project?

This could be at home, for your apartments’ campus or as part of a community outreach project.

Greening the interior of your home with plants can be one idea to work on.

Now this is not about picking up some potted plants and plonking them on a window sill or kitchen ledge. It is about sitting down and making plans, debating them and making a list. There’s some joy in doing this over a nice tiffin spread!

You then go shopping to the nursery and execute it over a couple of hours.

Greening and colouring the exterior walls of your apartment campus is another holiday activity. This transforms the drabness of a colony. 

Again, organise a meeting of youth and seniors to make plans; enlist the creative souls in the group; shop for paint and brushes and crop plants in the campus that will grow outside too. And then, one weekend for the hands-on work.

Outreach is also an engaging activity. As is volunteering.

There are many organisations around you who will welcome your ideas and hands. Perhaps, colouring the wall of the civic body-managed local primary school.  Or de-weeding operations at the local park. Or re-setting a private library.

Top of this week, when I was bouncing some field assignment ideas on school children, we found that three out of five in this group had not stepped into Tholkappia Poonga ( Adyar Poonga). I have gently nudged them to spend a weekend there.

One of them then shared this piece of volunteering news - that Sri Ramakrishna Math in Mylapore welcomes hands at its library, health centre and its campus this summer. Go for it!

- Photo courtesy: Smruthy Mahesh