Sadhana forest

I'm learning a lot about myself st the moment. I'm in sadhana forest, a reforestation project in tamil nadu, india. Its a community of people who live trying to make the least amount of impact on the environment. They use compost toilets, bucket showers, wood stoves and completely biodegradable products. This is such a lovely idea and a great community of people but for some reason I feel so out of place. I can't pinpoint the reason why though and keep trying to figure out what makes me so uneasy. Its definitely not the fault if people here in sadhana, its all to do with my own limitations and perhaps the wealthy first world environment I was brought up in. The thought of how much work goes into creating a self sustaining community like this just blows my mind! Simple things like getting enough food for everyone, ensuring toilets are properly composted, rubbish disposal, fresh drinking water, electricity all have to be done by the people here. There's no outside services coming to fix things or take things away. The rubbish we generate has to be sorted out by us. The toilets cleaned out by us, water stations refilled, ash sifted for soap and countless other things. These are just things I've noticed on my first day. There has to be so much more going on being the scenes that I can't even begin to comprehend!

My day started with 5:45 wake up and 6:30 heading to the forest. Some people stay back to make breakfast, everyone else plants trees. This only happens for about 2 hours before we head back for breakfast. Its hard work those 2 hours, especially before breakfast and when you're not used to manual labour! But then for forest work, that's it for the day! after breakfast time is spent maintaining the community, my job was termite eradication. This went on until lunch when we finished for the day's work. Afternoons and evenings are free. I think I thought there would be more tree work and we'd be in the first for longer. 2 hours in the morning doesn't seem like a lot to rebuild a forest. Hopefully as I get to know more people in the community I'll become more relaxed and get into everything as I thought I would!

The photo is my afternoon's work, reshaping my mosquito net to fit around my hammock!