96 Days

96 Days

Kylee Rasmussen

It’s time to get serious.

Sunday night The Bandhu team got a serious wake up call when we were reminded that there’s now less than one hundred days till we leave for West Bengal.

Life gets hard and life gets busy; Sunday we realized that although we have all been working, maybe we haven’t been putting in the 110% that YMAD deserves. So we sat down as a group of teens faced with the task of deciding what would make our impending trip a success, and what we were planning to do to make it happen.

For longer than we should have, we discussed how we all want to become closer. We all came to the conclusion that we want to become better friends before the trip. Because it will only help us teach and work together while we’re in India if we’re more comfortable with each other. Each of us got excited about going and doing things together and supporting each other: whether that be at a benefit concert, carwash, or football game. We decided that we need to do a better job of watching out for each other and reminding one another to stay on track in our personal and group goals.

Another thing that was easy for all of us to agree on was that we had been given a once in a lifetime opportunity. Our leaders had trusted us to meet, teach, and love some of their dearest friends and that wasn’t something any of us were prepared to mess up. With that, we decided that we all had to put in more effort into perfecting our lessons. We don’t know what will happen when we get to West Bengal, we have no clue what will work well and what won’t, so it’s up to us to have a million different solutions to every problem we could run into and coming up with a backup for every possible outcome.

It was a unanimous decision that we had to put in more effort in learning our lessons and becoming closer as a team. We also decided that no matter what it was before, or what else we may have going on YMAD is now a top priority in each of our lives, and we all know what we need to do personally to make that happen.

For us, our trip being successful means that we help the kids more than we help ourselves. We all recognize the amazing opportunity that we have been gifted, but it’s not about us. It’s about the kids we get to teach and making a difference in their lives before we worry about our own.

 

We have 96 days to make up for any effort we haven’t put in.

96 days to work our hardest at raising money and learning lessons.

96 days to become close within our group.

96 days till we get the opportunity to make a difference in those kids lives.

Let’s make those days count.