Just travelling, learning, growing, living..and collecting beatiful memories on the way❤️

Feeling blessed✨
The imperfect and daring balance between its strong flavour of danger, its impossible chaos (which somehow, unexplainably, always gets to be solved) and its unique beauty, along with the elegance with which it pulls off all its imperfections, is what makes India so fascinating to me.
From the moment you arrive, you feel just totally overwhelmed and your 5 senses so completely overstimulated that you think you can't take it anymore..but that's when India surprises you all over again..✨
The cows, the monkeys and the dogs round every corner, along with the fear of a monkey-attack coming from the tree above the entrance to your house; the mountains of rubbish littering the roadsides; the pollution and heaviness in the air to the point that everything, including the sky, appears faded; the sweat clinging to your body in the scorching heat; the dangers everywhere, from the rabid animals to the food you eat and the water you drink; the overpowering and ever contrasting smells down every street; the fear of mosquitoes and disease...
And then there's the people: the brilliance of the colours of women's sarees and the sparkle of their jewellery, the melodic cadence of the language, the head bobbing, the jingle of all the bangles and the intensity of their stare...
But most of all it's never-ending chaos: the jostling crowds, the incessant congestion of the Indian traffic, its maddening confusion dictated by the rhythm of its never-ending honking and the blast of indian folk music coming from every tuk tuk🛺..
All these small details of daily life in India are aspects that really hit you when you get there, but that you slowly get accustomed to and grow to love and finally miss once you've left.🥻🐒🇮🇳
This is my photograph of India, a country magical in all its contrasts and that will forever have a place in my heart.❤️

Thank you IVHQ, I'm so grateful for the opportunity you gave me to combine two of the things I love the most; getting the chance to travel and visit some beautiful places, while at the same time investing in my future as a doctor made this experience really meaningful to me.🌍🩺
But most of all, it was really special to volunteer in a country where so many are in need of help and I feel like working in the slums made the experience even more fulfilling. It was truly heartbreaking to see the living conditions of people in the slums and really humbling to be able to experience their day to day life, even if just for a few hours each day. It also brought me to see the most beautiful aspect of it: all those people showed a strong sense of belonging towards their slum and the community they had built together. It was moving to see how much importance those people give to taking care of one another, taking time out of their daily activities to dedicate it to accompanying their friend, their sick mother or an elderly neighbour to be seen by the slum doctor.
This experience really made me realize how unjust the world is and how it's so wrong that our opportunities in life are so strongly dependent on the country and family we're born into; it made me realize how many things we take for granted.
I was also deeply touched by how each medical volunteer, however inexperienced, is immediately made to feel appreciated and welcomed into being part of the slum community.
Feeling like I could make even just one person feel slightly better each day and bring a smile to their face despite all their challenges truly filled my heart with emotion.🥹❣️

It was also really special to share this experience with other volunteers from all over the world. I learned that although every volunteer comes from a different past, is at a different moment of their life and has chosen to volunteer for different reasons, during their time as a volunteer everyone is facing the same daily struggles, in a foreign country and away from home. And it's having this kind of experience, this small but so meaningful fragment of our lives, in common, that I feel created this strong sense of mutual understanding between us and brought us even closer together.
Every single one of you was an important part of this experience; thank you for the unforgettable memories we created together.❤️

16.09.23 - 06.10.23🙏🏻🌍🇮🇳