So I'm home from 3 days of 'retreat' it was really fun even though my best mates werent with me. I made alot of new friends and done stuff that I never would of done. I met many new amazing people, and I have learnt so much from this retreat. So the place I stayed at was Lake Dewar, I did not expect anything nice, I was expecting disgusting food, poor shower and bad cabins, but to my surprise it was literally amazing. The place was beautiful, had such a gorgeous lake, it had a tennis court, basketball court, ping pong table and a snooker table. There was an upstairs lake view room with comfy couches and tables to sit and kick back with friends. The cabin was clean, the shower was perfect and the food was so nice! They had freshly cut fruits, fresh vegetables, moist chicken, delicious apple pie and cream, scones, wraps, burger. What I loved the most was the tea and coffee section in the kitchen, where at anytime we could just go grab a cup of tea or coffee. So we arrived at Lake Dewar  at around 11. We had cupcakes for morning tea and set off to do some activities such as speed dating and fruit salad. After that we were allowed time to relax and just kick back. We then had lunch and dinner, afterwards the whole year level sat down and listened to stories of two teachers and their family life. One teacher talked about her father who was abusive to her mother. Listening to her, broke my heart literally, I could not hold back the tears, it was so amazing of her to share something so personal and of course everyone was mature about it. We were broken up into groups and I had Mr. Matthys as my teacher. We were asked to share something about our family, and hearing many of the people who were in my group talk about their family issues made me appreciate my family so much more. I am so lucky to have such a wonderful, close and perfect family. I am really truly blessed. After the emotional activity we were left to have some free time. I sat with a couple of my friends and some people I didnt know, and we talked for abit, until Mr.Matthys came. Mr. Matthys is a new physics/specialist teacher at our school who is so cute, like geeky cute and also super smart like 99 atar score smart LOL. He talked to us about so many different things in the universe and it seemed to flow on so well. He talked about history, politics but one thing he talked about that really strucked me was education. He said that if everybody was able to be educated in this world, every child for example then there will be an end to poverty. I really do believe what he said is true, he told us that there is this charity that offers education to certain children in the village, a person donates $70 to this charity and this would provide education for this child for a year. He told us he had met some of these children who have been sponsored by this charity and one person became a doctor, one person became a lawyer and one became an engineer. The pay of one days work for those people is equivalent to a years labour for the village. But those 3 people did not choose to pursue their careers, they all went back to their village and help serve the poor. After listening to this I was really amazed and fascinated that such a small donation can do so much. If one person is educated then they are able to educate others and the domino affect goes on. I think Mr.Matthys is a very amazing person, he is very kind and generous with his time. He told us that he could of been working in the city earning $350k a year however he chose to work at this school earning 1/7th of the amount, but he believes education is the key to ending inequality in this world.So this was my first day of retreat, a very inspirational, depressing and also fun day. I shall bombared you with more retreat day tommorow, I only had like 5 hours of sleep for two days, so Im going to get some rest