Pablo Borchi Klapp

November 2008 Update

November has been a closing month for this exchange experience. The whole month I was doing final examinations for the university, one or two everyweek. Also, all of the other activities I was involved in came to an end and this month was when I had the closure of all of them. First, I had to say goodbye to the music band I am in. It is a shame that the year is almost over because the band was really starting to work. We even managed to do our first gig in a proper venue, by the way the band is called
Gramcracker. We played at The Barley Corn Hotel as the main band, a lot of people came and although the sound wasnt really good and we didnt play that well it was great to say goodbye to the band with a final gig.

Another thing would be working for greenpeace. Over these past months I have learnt a lot about environmental issues around the world. All the time I was working as a fundraiser for GP I had to strugle with the toughness of the job and with trying to not fall victim of greenpeace propaganda, but to understand it. In the end I can say that I am not a GP fanatic, but I am well more concerned about what they defend and I understand my responsability towards the environment. Additionally, I anaged to make some of my best friends in Australia. Finally, the ootball competition came to an end and we managed to win the whole turnament. This experience was perfect for a semestre closure and also to bring closer the whole team, making everyone true friends.

Now that the semester is over its time to travel, so I had to say goodbye to all of my friends as if I was already leaving Australia. It was sad but made me think of what a worthy experience being on exchange in Australia was.

September 2008 Update

September has been a very interesting month. It started off with a series of exams and assignments that I had to do during the first week of the month. Everything went fine with my exams as I enjoyed the experience of sitting in an examination room with approximately other 200 students, something completely new for me and different from my 15 person classrooms in Mexico. The first week ended with a fundraising party for the Afghanistan Peace Scholarship recipients. The party took place in the Copacabana Club in Fitzroy, it was organized by Melbourne University’s latin students’ organization. Most of Melbourne’s Peace Scholarship recipients participated in selling tickets for the party. The deal with the organizers was that 8 dollars would be directed to Afghanistan from every ticket that we sold. The party turned out to be a complete success and the team managed to raise a bit over 800 dollars.

The next day from the party I left Melbourne to go to my sister’s wedding in Mexico. Going back to home was an interesting experience because it made me realise of all the changes that I have been experiencing while being in Australia. After the wedding I returned to Melbourne and school life again. The biggest challenge was to catch up with all the lost material, which took most of my weekend, but luckily I managed to get through the lectures and tutorials before going back to lessons on Monday.

Towards the end of the month another fundraising opportunity came into place. The community outreach coordinator at the college where Diego Forcada and me are living decided to do a themed dinner destined to charity. Ever since we got here we had been talking to people around the college about the Afghanistan program to see wether they could help us in any way. So when the themed dinner came close to its date we were told that it was going to be done to fundraise money for Afghanistan. The dinner was a success and I have not received the round up of the money raised jet, but it looks as if it could be around the amount raised at the latin or even a bit more.

August 2008 Update

August has been a very exciting month of my stay in Australia, however, it has been completely different from my first month in the country. To begin with, the adaptation process is now over and my activities are starting to see some regularity. The biggest challenge regarding this has been managing to keep up with all the different things I have got into in the last month without underachieving in any of them.

The most important one has been keeping up with school. Now that August is gone all my assignments and exams are getting closer, which has become a bit challenging as I have found myself in the need of giving up some time (that I used to invest in getting to know Melbourne and the different things in it) in order not to let my performance in the university to drop. It has been very interesting to study in La Trobe University because it has widened my perspective about education and academia as a whole. Now I can look back to Mexico and understand a bit better the failures and success of our educational system. Regarding this, I would like to say that one of the biggest advantages that Australia has in its educational system is the large amount of technology involved in the whole process, which enables the system to be more efficient and to work in a large scale, while not loosing the interaction between professors and students.

One of the other activities in which I have started is to play with La Trobe University’s Ultimate Frisbee team. This has been a great opportunity to meet local and international people while keeping myself fit. Besides Ultimate Frisbee, I have become involved with an indie music band in which I play keyboards. Once again, it is a great opportunity to interact with local people, while it has helped me a lot in improving my musical skills as it involves a challenge to my current musical capacity.

Another activity in which I have been involved is to start working for Greenpeace. I am greatly satisfied that I have managed to get into a non governmental organization of this importance. I hope this leads me into other types of social action in which I interact with social problems beyond environmental concerns, however, this is a good starting point and it has been a good opportunity to create a new network with a group of people in general concerned with developing issues as well as environmental care.

As a whole, this month has been extremely rewarding for myself as I have come to realise of the large diversity of people and cultures around the world. Wether it is by interacting with people in my college, at university or in my other activities, I have received many new lessons about the world. Things that I took as granted, such as how we do our daily activities (eating, religion, prejudices, society, etc), have been confronted by people from other nationalities that have different views about them. This has made me rethink about Mexico and give a greater value to some of our characteristics of society as well as condemn some of them. According to this, I have come to appreciate Mexican kindness and warmness in general social interaction while at the same time it has made me realise of the enormous presence of prejudice in our society. Regarding prejudice, I can now say its presence is overlooked by society while it is a great impediment for the development of the country and its people.

July 2008 Update

This first month in Australia has been a very interesting experience. I have met a great number of people from all over the World in just a few weeks, I have seen many new places and I have experienced what is like to live on my own for the first time.

The greatest challenge has been to know how to manage my monthly budget. Given that the cost of living here is so different to my home country it has been a hard thing to know when something is expensive, cheap or affordable for my budget. However, I had already booked my accomodation at La Trobe University’s Chisholm college back when I was in Mexico, so I can say that my money worries were limited only to daily consumption and not about finding a place to live in, which made things simpler.

I now have a group of people to go out and do all the extracurricular activities. Some of them are other Mexican students that I met at the Sydney orientation program, the rest are from the college in which I am staying. We have made a nice group here in Melbourne, which has been very important for the starting stage of this semester because we have helped each other on several issues whether it would be money, accommodation, etc.

I haven’t had the chance to get involved in any volunteering or in any community service activity because of the short time that I have been here. However, I have been gathering information about of the different options in which I can get involved into community service. I have seen that one of the simplest ways of getting into action is through the university channels. They have many projects going on inside and outside Australia, and there are many opportunities to get into short term activities that can be done even while in classes.

The college in which I am staying has a lot of social activities going on. Regarding this, I am starting to think that one way in which we can get the Afganistan fund raising going on is to approach the student representatives at the University to see if there is any way to introduce it in some of the regular social activities.

The semester is just starting and there is much more ahead but just for the short time that I have been in this country I can say that this is a great learning experience personal as well as the academic wise.