I learnt that Buddhism was not one but that there were many Buddhism depending on the country, what people were looking for inside the religion. It is a bit confusing as I thought that everybody wanted to reach the same goal, but I feel that there are many ways to practice Buddhism.
The most important thing that I kept in mind is always do your opinion by yourself. Monks were talking about newspapers and the difficulty to find articles that don’t mix facts and feelings. They were explaining that the most important thing was to have facts, and then you can make your own opinion.
Volunteering was a really good experience, even though I am not a Buddhist, sharing time, giving time to people for free is always gratifying. We learn so much from this kind of experience. I really like welcoming people in the morning. It was amazing to see how easy it was despite the big number of people ( The most impressing part was offering food to monks in the morning, I was surprised it didn’t last a long time regarding the number of monks who were here. And I really enjoyed the time when we lighted the candles, it was really beautiful and so quiet! Ohhh and of course I really liked the group meditation, it was a very peaceful time!
I was not really confident in helping people for the garbage as my Thai language was not good enough to understand what people asked me sometimes.
Maybe for the garbage management to have a small training before going on site, to have the vocabulary about recycling and so on.
But all the senior sister, staff and monks were very welcoming with us. We felt really welcome. Thank you for your time. (I really felt as a part of the people ‘working’ for that special celebration to be as beautiful, peaceful and rich as expected!)
--Teacher Mathilde Foyer, French.
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