As most of the world’ borders are still closed and the healthcare situation has not stabilized in many countries, we miss our school building trips a lot. Construction processes in some of our schools were put on hold, others are simply not safe enough to travel to. While we try to support the communities remotely with the help of local partnering NGOs on the ground, our volunteers who have participated in the last school construction trek in Nepal shared their memories and emotions.
Alexey’s story
Hello! My name is Alexey Ruslyakov, I am a Senior Director in Solutions Engineering at Acronis. Last November 18 of my colleagues and I went to a small village called Rajipur Chaumala (Bagdola) in the Terai region of Nepal.
Obviously, education is very important for local people because they have very limited opportunities for it. What I observed there were many talented people.
My goal was to learn something from them, to learn how to be happy because people are really happy there. You know, in our world of different technologies, mobile phones and social media, we often forget to take a moment to recognize all the surroundings and nice things that we have. What I really like about people there is that they are smiley, open, and very welcoming. And what I figured out is that these people have no free time, they have to work hard but they enjoy every day of their life. This is something we should learn and recognize in our home countries.
The kids there are really hungry for education: they want to study, they want to go to school. It’s not like in our home countries, where you need to force kids to go to school. There they enjoy it. And very often little kids have to leave their homes at 5 am to walk for an hour or more to school. They carry their books and they do it happily. This was a tremendous experience for our team and that’s really what I went there for – to learn this, to share it with my kids, and, maybe, to bring my kids there one day to show them how people live in the real world, not in the artificial social network world.
Dmitry’s story
My name is Dmitry Ledenev, I am a Partner Success Manager at Acronis.
Last November I had the chance to participate in a school construction trek with Acronis. I must say, after it I was extremely proud of our team, the Acronis Cyber Foundation, and our company because we are doing a really, really big job!
When we came to the village, the whole community came to greet and thank us because we all came from far parts of the world to help them. And I felt so excited about it, I had expected much less, frankly speaking. Such a warm welcome gave me very powerful energy and a strong motivation to work, to help them. Our work will influence their future lives and the life of that whole region, which might become successful in years to come. This will be a primary school from first to fifth grade, and after that they want to extend it to the eighth grade. And I really believe the school we are building there will create educated kids. My heart gets warmed by this thought. ????
Read Part One here
More information about this school initiative project can be found here.
