An exciting opportunity

There are many people who like to transform every opportunity that comes their way into something fun and adventurous worth remembering for a long time to come. Similarly, Amod Mathew and Rashmi Ashok from Christ University made use of an opportunity to fulfill their dream of travelling while helping kids learn. The 18-year-old students did an internship in Sri Lanka where they taught government school kids and also captured and wrote about the native beauty of the country. The two spoke to Sirisha Venkatesh about their exciting experience and the challenges they faced.

How did it all start?

Amod: Growing up, I’ve always wanted to capture moments and show others the beauty I see in them. I’m not a good artist, so for me, photography was a way to express what I saw.

Rashmi: My passion is to travel the entire world, capture its beauty and keep it with me. I also enjoy writing. When I heard that I’ve got an internship, I decided to do something to fulfill my dream.

Tell us about the opportunity in Sri Lanka.

Amod: As a student of media studies, I had to intern in this semester holidays. I heard about this internship from a friend and it sounded very exciting. Teaching little kids English while also travelling seemed like a dream.

Rashmi: I found out about this internship from a senior. Though not related to my coursework, it allowed me to travel the beautiful country. It also put me in contact with people of various nationalities and living with them, I have learnt so much more about diverse cultures.

Did you face any problems?

Rashmi: The initial challenge was convincing my parents to let me go, but eventually they saw what this meant to me and agreed. They were very supportive and happy about this.

Amod: The local language posed a bit of a problem. Communicating was difficult, but if you see, language is only a barrier if we allow it to be. I picked up enough of the local language to get by so things were easier.

What was your experience like?

Rashmi: Sri Lanka is absolutely beautiful. Supposedly a developing country, it is amazing how clean and well-organised it is! The locals were friendly and always helped us out with directions to places. During this internship, we taught English to children in a government school. The effort has been extremely rewarding as the children were loving and eager to learn. The memory of 12 year olds dancing to ‘Roop Tera Mastana’ is something I can’t forget. I am grateful for it all.

Amod: We had a really funny experience. On our first trip to the town, Rashmi and I were searching for a SIM card shop, and as Indians, we ran across the road when the traffic thinned out. Two traffic cops stopped us promptly and berated us in the local language. We shook our heads, and said ‘Indian, Indian’. It was only then that they stopped, laughed, and said, ‘No wonder you ran across the road!’

It wasn’t hard to teach the children; they were quick learners and they like Sachin Tendulkar and new Hindi songs.They were always happy to be around us, talking about different things, about India and asking how it is different from Sri Lanka. I feel the population and pollution are much lesser in Sri Lanka.

On the weekends, we would catch a train and travel to different tourist destinations, making sure to explore every bit that place had to offer and take pictures.

We had planned to visit the Yala National Park in the last week of our stay but had to cancel our plans due to the floods.

Tell us about your blog.

Amod: We wanted to do something different with the internship, and after visiting so many beautiful places, we decided that we would like to share our experience with other people through a blog!

Rashmi: We realised that unless we promote the offbeat places we visited, we aren’t really giving back anything to the wonderful place. So we decided to create a personalised blog, where we could provide inspiration as well as information on our travel. It’s called ‘bohemiansblog’.