Shackleton's Saga

Hello, everyone.
It's been a long time since I posted my blog last time, and I feel very sorry about how long I haven't been writing my blog posts. I do really regret my procrastination ... so, in order to get over my bad habit, procrastinating, I decided to release my blog as much as I can, more than four posts in a week!!!

I know everyone did this a long ago, but let me begin with Shackleton's Saga. Among "Acknowledgement," "Preface" and "The Shackleton Saga," what put the most impact on me was "The Shackleton Saga." After reading the whole story (even though it was a shorten version) of long journey, I felt the same way as the author, Dennis Perkins did as he states, "Every time I relieve this story, I want to give these explorers a round of applause. I want to applaud them, not just because they made it safety, but because of the extraordinary leadership and teamwork they exhibited."

At the first time I read the fact that Shackleton himself wanted to do the journey and many people volunteered to do this with him, I was feeling like, "are you guys crazy?" but as I read through the story, I was able to imagine the great feeling that I would get after accomplishing the goal in the journey.

The most impressive part for me in this section, "The Shackleton Saga," was on the page 9, when Shackleton decided to break up with five crews and let them sail for help. Just before that, the author asks a question, "whether to stay and wait for rescue, or to sail for help. If you sail, where do you go?" Actually, my answer right after reading this question was "I have no idea," and then I realized if I were the leader of this journey, I would make all the crews die, and I would need a quick decision-making ability to be a leader in any fields.

The whole story reminded me of my one-week volunteer trip to Nepal at the time when I was a 10th grader. We raised money by ourselves and spent those money to buy things Nepalese people needed for everyday life. They definitely needed food, clothes, shoes and some stuff like toothbrushes.

After we arrived in a town and were preparing for distributing those items, I saw a very long line, full of people looking at us in front of me. They really needed those stuff.

We, as a team, had to work together for the whole time: carrying and sorting the huge amount of items and food, distributing them, visiting orphanages and playing with kids, going back to the shelter and get food for ourselves. We weren't able to take a bath, and we weren't able to eat food everyday because Nepalese people who were really in trouble of getting food, clothes and other necessities lived mainly in town or country sides so that we didn't stay in a hotel in a city. The condition in Nepal was not good. During the trip, some members get irritated and had some fight with team members. Some people got diarrhea and weren't able to work for a few days. Sometimes we had to make a tough decision. It was almost impossible to give items to all the people in line and we knew we had to visit other towns where people were waiting for the items we had. In that case, we had to leave the rest of people in line even though they'd been waiting for getting the items for a long time in line. They were crying and many of them were begging us not to leave. All I was able to do was to say sorry. In this extreme situation, team members were getting more and more degenerate day by day and so was I.

As compared to Shackleton's Saga, my volunteer trip is such a tiny agony experience, but this book lets me think what kind of leadership we needed at that time and how our teamwork would have been if Shackleton had been with us. What would he do?

In the beginning of this blog post, I wrote I wasn't able to understand Shackleton and those other people who volunteered to do such a painful journey, but I think I knew why they wanted to do the journey. I wanted to know what was there, in Nepal. I wanted to see the truth by myself, how Nepalese people were in trouble of living their lives. I wanted to accomplish my goal, to be a small help to those people even though it was devastatingly tiny. Although the specific motivations are different from Shackleton's and his crews', I think we both wanted to achieve something we'd never done and get something we'd never felt or thought by putting ourselves into tough situations.

Bye!

Shiori Asakura