Painting hope in hills
Adiba Ahmed
June 12, 2017

It is not every day you hear that someone decides to paint a ghost village with life lessons. Yes, you read it right, I am talking about painting an abundant village with life lessons of people who lived there. And yes, I agree you don’t hear that at all!

 

So obviously when I came across the Wise Wall Project, it got my undivided attention.

 

 

Project FUEL, who are known for collecting and passing on life lessons from people all over the world, decided to put life lessons in a tangible form this time. In a way that can bring new hope to people who have long before lost it.

 

‘Migration’ is a known discussion, that is lost in the periphery for quite long and no longer attracts headlines. Though forgotten it still poses huge threats and Uttarakhand is one such place that is struggling with it. With more than a thousand abundant villages, the issue is bigger than the share of attention it gets.

 

When I got to know that Wise Wall Project decided to collect life lessons from ‘Saur’ a remote village in Tehri Garhwal, I was delighted that people will get to know about places like these. And maybe someone will decide to help.

 

 

To my surprise, Wise Wall Project had a bigger vision associated with it. They were planning to paint those life lessons on the walls of the houses they were collected from. Making it the first village in the world to have a documented database of life lessons from an entire community on the exterior of every house wall including the abandoned ones.

 

Once I got to know all about it, I knew I had to share it with the team. We all have shared some or the other connection with hills and that is why we choose to come back to hills and do something from here.

 

With Wise Wall Project we all saw a hope that maybe more people will resonate with the idea and help in opening employability channels for native people. That maybe others will see what we are seeing here and create opportunities for others.

 

 

Resonating with the idea we all decided to be part of Wise Wall Project. Talking to Deepak and seeing the Project FUEL team and volunteers working with passion, trying to create something they had faith in was truly inspiring for us.

 

After our day painting the village with Wise Wall Warriors, we came back with a positive spirit. With the desire to contribute more and to create more employability channels in hills.

 

We wish Wise Wall Project and Project FUEL all the best for their initiative. Let’s bring people back to hills.