One of the themes I see many young people my age struggling with is having a sense of purpose. I know for myself it’s been a pretty prominent theme since I graduated college in December. Many of us go through our days going to work and coming home, doing our “jobs” on our career path, but we lack a sense of purpose. Even when many of us have what we would call “meaningful” or “impactful” jobs like police officers, nurses, social workers, etc., we eventually begin to feel the magnitude of being a little fish in a big pond. We go into our fields looking to make a change or somehow make a difference but quickly realize we are only capable of making a small ripple. Yes, that ripple amplifies and whatnot, but often we never see the end result of our ripple. This is what ends up being one of the contributing factors to our lack of sense of purpose.
Today at the farm, our task for the day was to collect rocks. On this farm, there are about ten elephants that like to take baths after their walks. As you could imagine, a very large pond is needed for ten elephants to bathe in. In order to make a big enough bathing area, we needed to build a dam, which we did by collecting rocks and piling them across the river. We needed rocks of all shapes and sizes to adequately build a barrier that would prevent the water from pooling in one place. This was by no means an easy task, especially since we lacked the heavy machinery to help us. Collecting small boulders in the heat of the humid jungle, while covering our shoulders and knees, of course, was exhausting. About five minutes into our job, we realized that an efficient way of accomplishing this task needed to be thought of, or else we would all tire out. At first, we had our biggest and strongest guy in the water collecting rocks and placing them in buckets. This was a horrible idea. His buckets were MASSIVELY heavy, making them impossible for any of us to carry up the hill. After we realized that the hill down to the river was quite slippery, we figured out that our workers would be taken out one by one if we all had to climb up and down with heavy buckets filled with rocks. With these two things in mind, our idea was formed. We placed some of the girls in the water to collect rocks and place them in the buckets. Someone stood in the middle of the hill as the “middle man,” collecting the full buckets from the girls in the river. We then passed the bucket of rocks down a line all the way to a wheelbarrow where our strongest man stood. He was in charge of wheeling the wheelbarrow full of rocks to the site where the dam would be built. This line continued for a few hours, passing the full buckets up and then returning them empty down the line to be filled again.
The work was quite simple and very rewarding. Each of us became an important piece of a bigger puzzle. Without the middle man, someone would slip trying to carry the buckets of rocks up the hill. Without the girls in the water, we would have no buckets of rocks. Without our assembly line, we would get tired from carrying buckets to the wheelbarrow. And without placing our strength at the right location, we would have no one to actually complete the final and most important task: building the dam. Not only was the teamwork impressive, but our purpose in the project was easily made known. Even though we were in the middle of the jungle, in a town that many people hadn’t heard of, we had a sense of purpose. Why? Because we became big fish. Allowing ourselves to be apart of this transformative process and seeing an end result gave us all a sense of security that we were finally a part of something more. Even though this “something more” was quite small compared to our lives at home, it felt much much bigger. Even if just for today, we had a purpose ❤️
Rhae 🙂
Now What? 
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