Read about Team Lasalette’s time on their project and how they grew to love the community they were working in. What an inspiring blog by students from St Helen and St Katharine School
Our time on the project has been wonderful! It has involved building two new rooms of an upcoming care home founded by Paster Lasalette, and painting murals on the walls of two care points for children in villages who aren’t able to go to school or receive substantial meals. These care points are also run by Paster Lasalette. When talking to our team, the obvious highlights were grouting the walls of the building, painting murals, and singing with the children from the care point.
Starting Our Building Project
Our 10 day project started with building the rooms, which involved many jobs such as cement mixing, brick laying, and grouting between the bricks. We created a rhythmic flow of work that united us as a team, and this paired with our spirit encouraged us on to complete the work load in half the expected time! In these first few days, we learnt lots of new skills which enabled us to work faster and more efficiently as a team: we had a cement mixing team, a grouting team, and also a team which played with the young kids around the site from the care point!
Painting Murals
The other half of our project was spent across two care points, where we painted three large murals. For this we had a design team who carefully created beautiful scenes for each wall. Everyone then transferred these designs onto the walls and the painting began. One wall had a safari theme with giraffe, a zebra, an elephant and lots of flowers, another was centred around a large tree with a few bumblebees and flowers, and the last was a vast array of flowers, bees, and butterflies.
These completed murals can now allow the young children in the care points to have a brighter and happier school environment which will hopefully enlighten their days! From painting these murals we have learnt how to collaborate on a unified goal and tap into our artistic talents, which enabled us to paint these exciting images!
Sunday Church Visit
Towards the end of our time on project, we were thankful to embrace the energy of the Sunday church service and the vibrant atmosphere of gospel music! Between the music and uplifting messages of the Pastors we were also able to share our ways of worship with the community by singing ‘Lord of the Dance’. After the service we were met with the loving hospitality of the community and members of the church who welcomed us into their culture.
Overall, throughout our 10 days of project work, we learnt many skills, most importantly how to work as a team, and this meant that we could complete lots of jobs in two different villages to help the community the best that we could.
Misha, Krishna & Isabella
