I leave for Project Week in a few days, and my group’s planning for this trip has luckily been pretty good other than a few minor hiccups, so this has given me some time to do some thinking of my own about Project Week as an experience.

I am going to be going to Gili Trawangan Island, off the coast of Lombok, Indonesia. This comes from my and my group’s work with and within the Gili Eco Trust GC at UWC. Our aim at Gili is to work with the NGO that our GC works with – Gili Eco Trust, and to aid them in whichever tasks or jobs that they do around the island. While there is a wide variety of options as to what we can do for Service with Gili Eco Trust, our focus will likely be around beach cleanup, marine cleanup and aiding in odd jobs such as administration work for events or documenting trash sites around the island that are yet to be cleaned up. I hope that my work in Service will allow me to learn more about the NGO and how they’re making progress, while also understanding what they hope the future holds for the NGO and their overall goal.

For the Activity part of our trip our group will have to split up due to some people having medical conditions that will prevent them from participating in certain activities. For the rest of us, we are going Scuba Diving to get a better understanding of the marine issues at Gili such as coral bleaching and depleting marine life due to human pollution. For this we will be working with Trawangan Dive, a diving company our school is well acquainted with, with whom we will train and dive with for 3 days. What I hope to take away from the diving experience is not only the achievement of diving, but also a sense of familiarity with the issue that I have been working towards fixing while in GC at school.

The learning outcomes I’ve demonstrated are LO1, LO3, LO5, and LO6, as of course project week and the planning of it basically requires each individual taking on the task they would be best at, or think they would be best at and this really helped me understand my strengths, especially in a managerial role, and this has actually helped me decide what I want to do in the future and has been another factor that has contributed to my experience with logistics (LO1). Project week also really tests one’s ability to plan a CAS experience, and thus I had to develop those skills (LO3), and furthermore this ties into working collaboratively as I needed to work alongside my four group members to maximise our experience during project week (LO5), and finally our actual work in Gili Trawangan is important in a global context, as we are not only representing our GC but we are physically engaging and helping solve a problem that an NGO is also trying to solve (LO6).