Image this: You jump down into a cement ditch and crawl through a long, dark tunnel. Once through you come to another dark tunnel -except this one is filled with mud, rocks and scum up to your shins. There are HUGE spiders everywhere, who- knows-what creepy crawly critters in the water/gook you are standing in, and lizards running around. Now you are given shovels, a wheelbarrow and a pick-ax and told that you are going to clear out EVERYTHING —What do you do?
A.) Run Away really fast
B B.) Cry
C C.) Look at the person like they are crazy
D.) sing merrily while you work away at it
As must as I wanted to do options A, B and C I chose to happily sing my way through it. The people of Mitchelton, Australia have been complaining about their waterways never being cleared out. They are supposed to prevent flooding, but with all the backed up mud it is not efficient. The government has not done anything to help the matter so our team decided to take it upon ourselves to get things done.
Now I am NOT a manual labor type of person. While my family would go outside to do yard/garden work I would alwasy stay inside and do house work. Although the job seemed impossible and the mud was never ending we began to shovel. And we continued to shovel and shovel and shovel and shovel some more. We broke up the monotony by singing, playing would you rather and asking each other ridiculous questions. It was a good team boding time. I got my first blister from shoveling (actually 3 of them).
We came across some crazy big spiders and lizards. Some members on my team were not so thrilled but I enjoy studying them…especially becasue they are ones i’ve never seen before.
Clearing out these waterways has been a good experience for me. I enjoyed getting to know more about my team. Although it was hard work, we did a really good job at keeping it fun and had a lot of laughs. When we finally cleared one of the tunnels it was a huge accompolishment and I am proud of the work I got to do.
