DST:Meaningful and joyful work

                           Meaningful and joyful work
  Habitat For Humanity was an unknown organization to most of Chinese people including me. Following my friends’ recommendation, I joined our school Habitat For Humanity club which was the first student team of Habitat For Humanity among China mainland high schools in my 10th grade. Taking advantage of my interest in accounting, I successfully applied for the position of the treasurer of this team. My responsibility was to ensure the record of all the documents and receipts. Although this job was novel for me , I attempted to do my best in my position.
  After nearly two months’ preparation, we convinced a bank and a semiconductor company to support our program of renovating villagers’ houses with financial aid. Besides the money we collected from local firms, we tried to raise more donations through the help of other students, teachers and parents. For example,  we organized a charity evening which covered different shows like Tai Chi, chorus, musical instrument performances and so on. Seeing a large number of strange people in addition to lots of familiar faces, I was in charge of reception work. Some of the audience had to sit on the floor to watch this show because the auditorium could not provide enough seats for all of them. With the unexpected number of incoming audience, we collected much more money than our expectation.
  Gathering money we raised in our charity evening and sponsorship from caring corporations, we started this memorable week in Gan Hai Zi Village, Yunnan Province. This was my first time to take long haul bus. It took about 4 hours to the small town located near our aimed village from Kunming Airport. As a result of terrible road situation, we could not fall asleep along the journey. After we settled up at the little hotel, we were shocked by the lack of hot bath water. One of my teammates had altitude sickness when he reached the hotel, so we had to look after him by turns until we arranged an early flight for him to return home.  We had to get up early and walked across the mountain to the village every day because the mountain road took us almost one and a half hours. Digging the ground and piling up bricks under the burning sun was our daily work for five days. Team spirit played an important role in this trip. Without the help of others, we could not finish any of work by ourselves like when three excavated earth with shovels, two had to pile earth up into the carts and one must push it to waste disposal site. One day, we were excited to have a new task-picking up the corns because we had never touched farming stuff. Though my work was rudiment of house building while the following work are transferred to professional construction companys, I was delighted when I saw the smiling faces of villagers.
   Fortunately, I got the opportunity of representing our club at the promotion night in Shanghai. This promotion night was aimed to propagate upcoming projects in China and to raise money by charity bazaar. I could only drink orange juice under the age restriction while others could have cocktails. I met some friends from Shanghai American School, and their school also found a team and organized projects to poor areas. By communicating with them, I realized some deficits of our works and shared gaps with my teammates when I came back.
   Right now, I have graduated from my high school and left my position in our team, but I will not forget this valuable experience and those teammates I cooperated with.