Summer Camps: Harshit Jaiswal from India

Be the truth said my internship was a life changing experience for me, it filled me with optimism and got me back my long lost confidence. Be the truth said once again, it was a time of my life where in I was the star, where people not only were fascinated by me but also loved me and yes they cried for me, yes not only 1 2 or 3 children but all about seventy of them, hugging me and crying, all at once, so hard that I just wished, so very intensely that time stopped and I would live in that very space and moment forever.  

I only speak the truth, and to speak it once again, I shall say that when I arrived at the camp, I had some difficulties while interacting with hundreds of children because of the fact they don’t know English very well and so we have some problems with understanding each other. It made me very upset and even I thought it would be the problem of whole my internship. But I had heard awesome stories of people who had already gone for an exchange and I wanted my exchange story to be likewise, an awesome one. 

The truth seemed a bit ugly here, yes it was back then, but among all this what I failed to realise was my expectations where so big that I wasn’t opening up to smaller things. People from back home especially my Exchange manager, Ayushi Gupta  and  VP OGX, Pooja, whom I have sent mails informing my unexpected problems, told me only 2 things. One “your internship will be the way you want it to be” and “if you come back now you’ll regret all your life that you didn’t stay back”. So I decided to stay on and see what was coming and all I did was, I stopped trying to control things and had great working experience and learned the most important lessons of my life. I didn’t only gain what I started in the beginning of this article but the biggest learning I learned is “if you a radical change start embracing the small ones” and yes I realised the power of small.

There’s a lot more of the truth which I want to share especially about the friends I made, like Nickolay helping me all the time especially the early days and his mom feeding great Ukrainian food at my after work days, Zhanna giving me all those spriritual lectures and many others who made feel the worthwhile again.

At the end I was so glad that I did this internship, I really want to thank AIESEC in Simferopol that presented me the challenge and so gave me the strength to overcome the biggest challenges in life.