AFS Newsletter Mackay (May 4)

Letter from alex

Hello AFS Community Mackay,
 
I would like to tell you something about my Australian life after meanwhile 9 months.
Although I suppose everybody knows me and thinks of this “bloody German” who came to Mackay without any idea of English, I would like you to consider some facts about me.
I was born in Leipzig a city with a half a million inhabitants and lived there for over 20 years before I went to Australia. Here I turned 21 and had the superb opportunity to celebrate my birthday in summer by 35 degrees what is normally winter with around minus 5 degrees. All that happened in Canberra one day before Australia Day. To defend my language deficit I want to mention that I past only the 10 year secondary school with a little amount of basic vocabulary and grammar but no interest at all. Soon after I started an apprenticeship to become a car mechanic for the following three years without any compulsory part of English. After that I attended a kind of a one-year TAFE to achieve the university entrance qualification. Within this time I learnt pretty much all I knew as I came over to Australia.
 
Before I finally start with my Australian story, I want to clarify why I do my service pretty much for Germany. All young boys between 18 and 24 years have to do a compulsory service which is either the National Service what means going to the army or an alternative service. Both of them take 9 months. The most popular alternative or community service is working in a retirement home taking care of old people or sometimes supporting the regional council. I decided to do community service as I knew there are a few chances to combine foreign experience with our German alternative service. After ages of searching in the Internet I finally got to AFS and applied for the FSJ Program. I passed the selection process and became one of the 15 German interns. Our tasks should be on the one hand working in any community service and on the other hand promoting AFS in our particular region. To explain it in a different way. Our tasks are not the same like Torben the previous intern who was solely orientated to promote AFS.
I do not know about the following interns because both national and alternative service are not compulsory anymore.
 
On the 28th of August 2010 I arrived in Sydney and I was just overloaded with everything. New people, Opera House, Harbour Bridge and speaking in English all the time got me very tired. Luckily somebody threw me in an airplane in the direction of north. With some trouble I finally arrived in Mackay. The first person I met was Rosemary Shanks when she picked me up from the airport. Rosemary and her son Michael became the first hostfamily for me, they showed me around Mackay and spoke to me in a way that I could understand them. Thanks a lot for that! One or two weeks later I started working at the Whitsunday Anglican School and moved into the Boarding House. During the weekends I stayed with family Russlle which consists of Adrian, Penny, Nicholas and Alex.

Some of the boarders with me(left), John the boss(middle), Christina previous workmate (right sitting)

 
There are around 70 kids living in the boarding house. I felt like a animal in a zoo because everybody was looking at me and came and tried to get to know me. After a couple of weeks everything turned normal and life in the boarding house became a quite good fun for me. Especially with my lovely workmate Christina from Germany and Lori from Belgian who took over her place I got along quite well. Luckily I attended some karate lessons at school because both of them fell head over heals in love with me and started suddenly following me... Just kidding ;)
 
At school I started of with assisting in sport lessons.
During these sport tasks I had the great opportunity to attend a camp at South Molle Island for one night and then I did the Whitsunday Great Walk for another 4 days. At least it sounds great because it was definitely the most exhausting challenge for my Aussie time so far. I had to carry 18 kilograms for a distance of 30 km. Due to injuries we lost 4 kids with broken arms and shoulders and in the end was it only me and one teacher who were left in middle of the jungle to keep 50 unbehaved 15 year olds which I could not even understand under control.
 
The school also gave me the chance to explore the Great Barrier Reef with the biology class. As well as that I became the assistant coach of the futsal team of grade 10. They had a tournament at the Gold Coast, I went there with them and even though we lost all games we had an incredible time. I went surfing for the first time in my life and we visited the Wet´n Wild Water Park as well.
 
Another task was to support an 11 years old Austrian girl who came over because her dad got a job in Mackay. Her name was Heidi and she had more trouble with English than me. So I could translate her tasks during the lessons and work with her. Honestly, this was the first time I really felt I did something useful as she was a bit frustrated before. As well as that I did some class room support for a guy from grade 9 who is just a bit slow.

Heidi´s class which used to be grade 5 2010. Heidi in white.

 
During the whole time I worked at the Whitsunday School I learnt a lot about sports but also about children, how to work with them and how they work out different tasks. The kids made me think about me and my childhood. Sometimes I felt a bit unskilled because almost everybody has got a special strength. Either playing instruments, playing football, table tennis, riding skateboard or solving Rubik’s Cube they could at least do one of them.
Although it was of course not easy to deal with children and teenagers I started to like them very much and will find it hard to leave.
 
As well as I tried to find myself when I was in school but unfortunately I did not find such a cool guy. :)
 
Once I finished my school work for the year 2010, I did some traveling to discover this beautiful country Australia. I went from Brisbane to Sydney by bus. Destinations were Gold Coast, Byron Bay, Nimbin, Newcastle, Blue Mountains. On the way down to Sydney I visited some AFS friends and met heaps of people who made me think that travelling is actually more about people you meet then places you see. My favorite destination was Byron Bay which is a little hippie town. I have never seen so many people with dreadlocks and crazy style of clothing. At this moment I had not been to the Woodford Folk Festival but it topped the lot as far as craziness goes. I listened from junkies´s drug stories to a professor´s conspiracy theory against the world and it´s bitter enemies. All in all it was very interesting and it got better over Christmas by 25 degrees and of course the Woodford Festival which became the wettest experience in my life. I celebrated Christmas with family Russlle at the Sunshine Coast and straight afterwards we went to the Woodford Festival where we had to cope with the rain and the mud. We came on a point where we just wanted to escape and one day later due to floods which were suddenly there became it worse so that we just could not leave anymore. Immediately after realizing that there is no escape, the mood of all participants improved amazingly fast. What a great week! Dancing with gumboots in the mud, watching drunk hippies rolling naked in the mud and hugging other people, our own little river at our campsite. There is a lot to tell but in conclusion everything went well and we finally enjoyed the whole festival even though the flooded area in Queensland was bigger than France and Germany combined at this stage. Thank you family Russlle I will never forget this week.

Me and my backpack in Brisbane

Penny and Adrian at our campsite

 
My next plan was to take a chance to do a roadtrip from Melbourne via Great Ocean Road to Adelaide and from there straight through the desert to Alice Springs and our final destination Uluru and remember also all the way back to Melbourne. First of all I flew to Melbourne and met up with my travelmates who were Alex (German), Melina (German) and Roseanna (Australian/Canberra). We rented a campervan and started our great adventure. First Great Ocean Road with its Twelve Apostles which was just amazing. We picked January and it was incredibly hot. People were lying in the shade and some of them looked really exhausted when we walked down the foot path to the Twelve Apostles. I guess we had 40 degrees and who knows how hot it was in the sun. The heat was really different to Mackay because it felt less humid than in North Queensland. It was the opposite and thus very dry. This temperature in Mackay´s humidity would paralyse the whole city, I think. Second, the wind blew us towards Adelaide which was a nice place to stay and prepare for the desert. For the third part we headed north and started looking for the desert. We past Port Augusta and expected heaps of red sand. We stopped in Coober Pedy (800km north Adelaide). It was just too hot to stay in the sun for more than 5 minutes which explains why they built houses underneath the ground which looked like caves from the inside. Luckily we survived and could continue our journey towards Alice Springs. There were not many things I remember in Alice but Hungry Jack´s which pretty much saved our life because of the free refill of cups without which we would not have been able to cope with the heat. Furthermore our car broke down and we had to organise a garage to fix it. Soon after we went to our final destination and highlight the Uluru alias Ayres Rock and it became hotter. Honestly, I was not really interested in Uluru because I thought it is just a big piece of rock in the middle of the desert but it is much more than that. It is not big but rather huge. We were still driving when we saw Uluru and it was hard to watch the street anymore because that was exactly this picture you always see on all postcards and Australian documentations or pictures. When we came to this point, it confirmed my expectation concerning how big I imagined Ayres Rock is, we were still 60 kilometers away. So this rock became bigger and bigger after every single kilometer. It looked tremendous. We stopped at the information center and got out of the car. Firstly I felt heat. Secondly I felt around 20 flies in my face which became quite annoying after a little while. We read a lot about the Uluru and its history of Aboriginals. Thereby I understood how they think about the thing that looks like a big stone to all of us. The climb was closed because of the hot weather but even when it was open, I would not be sure if I had climbed it as I got to know what Aboriginals think about it. On the way back we saw camels and horses on the road which impressed me. Unfortunately we could not drive back the same route as we came from because of more floods. We had 16 days of sunshine and were a bit shocked about this information we received back in the civilization (Port Augusta). Brisbane was completely flooded at this stage. We went a different way without rain and any floods at all back to Melbourne. After a little collision on the busy 5 line highway in Melbourne we brought the camper back and reflected on this amazing trip. We met a lot of people who were mostly Germans but there were also some locals. We saw all we wanted to see and even more. We stayed at great places, waterholes, nationalparks, carparks, beaches, windy places, sweaty places and that made us feel free and independent which is of course a good feeling. Especially our team was quite cool and good fun to be with the whole time except from little arguments caused by the girls. All in all there was nothing to complain about and I had one of the best times at this roadtrip.

Me, Melina, Roseanna and Alex

 
I have a worriless life in Germany, with a lovely family and friends but if I had grown up here I could imagine, it would have been even better.
 
To finish up this text, I would like to thank the AFS Mackay Community for having me and Family Russlle and Family Shanks for supporting me all the time.
 
Cheers Alex