THE transition from beach to Outback has been hard for Crescent Head’s Jess Maynard, but she says the experience has been well worth it.
Maynard is more than halfway through a 10-week sabbatical in the tiny Northern Territory community of Yuendumu, about 290km north-west of Alice Springs.
It’s part of a program called the ActNow Challenge, which encourages young people to live and work alongside an indigenous community in Central Australia.
As a requirement of her stay, Jess also keeps a regular blog journal each week.
And, as she writes, after growing up in the Macleay and rarely venturing far from the east coast, the opportunity to visit the red centre was one she couldn’t resist.
“Until now, I did not dare travel west. Anything beyond the V8-loving Bathurst was a mystery to me,” she wrote in her blog.
“It’s totally lame and quite embarrassing, but my beautiful beach was too good an excuse to stay east of the Great Dividing Range.
“Back then, the thought of missing out on one day of crystal clear ocean was way too hard for me to deal with.
“Lately however, I’ve had a change of heart.
“I don’t know if it’s got anything to do with growing older or maybe it’s just that I don’t look so good in a bikini anymore, but I’ve been experiencing more of an urge to get out and see the rest of this beautiful and diverse country.”
Maynard found out about the ActNow Challenge while looking into volunteer positions overseas.
She applied by completing a one minute video about herself and soon afterwards found out she had been selected for the Challenge along with another young woman from Port Macquarie.
“We didn’t know each other. We just applied,” Jess said.
“The first time we met was on the plane over.”
Since arriving in Yuendumu at the start of October, Maynard has been busy helping out at the local Aboriginal art gallery, making cups of tea and catering to the artists’ needs as well as preparing paints and stretching canvasses.
In the afternoons she helps teach young schoolchildren to read, before joining the older kids in activities of an evening.
“It’s completely different to anything I’ve experienced before, almost like another country,” she said.
“The landscape, the language - a lot of people out here don’t speak much English - living conditions, it’s all so dissimilar to what I’m used to.”
She said the opportunity to work with so many young children and the different cultures she had encountered had all been a highlight of her trip.
“The friendships we’ve made are probably the best part of it all,” she said.
“I want to make a bit of a movie before we leave and put it in the website.
“I suppose the most important thing we get out of the program is the ability to inform young people and make them aware of how cool it is out here, just in terms of what our own country has to offer and how beautiful it is.”