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By India Petrucco, ChildFund supporter and Youth Blogger

Hey! I’m India Petrucco and I’m 13. In January I got home from a six-week-long walk, 800km in total, across southern India. My family and I raised nearly $60,000 (and counting) for ChildFund projects in India.

It was there that we met our sponsored child, Mary. Mary is a five-year-old girl who lives in a gypsy community. A gypsy community is a community of families who travel from northern to southern India – they don’t own houses, they catch birds and rats for food, and drink polluted river water.

There were lots of children in the community but the thing that made Mary stand out was her legs. A couple of years earlier Mary had had her legs run over by a car. She is now completely disabled in one leg and has a physically impaired ankle and is missing a big chunk off the other.

After the visit to the gypsy community I started thinking about the idea of thinking globally. About the things going on in the world as opposed to just my suburb or country. It was pretty amazing, but since I got back I noticed that I haven’t been noticing much or continuing that global thinking idea. That I am getting caught up in the everyday. Life is busy and instead of living it to its full potential, or simply enjoying small pleasures, a lot of this school term I have spent stressed. Stressed about exams or homework or sports or, if you’re like me, about not living life to the limit.

We may enjoy our lives because we have friends or a nice house or the iPhone 4S, but a lot of the time we forget about the bigger picture. We forget about what it feels like to get away or do something crazy and completely irrational. We get stuck in the habit of thinking locally as opposed to thinking globally, and by that I mean the things that are happening overseas that we should care about but don’t – like poverty that claims the lives of 22,000 children under the age of five every day.

When we are busy we aren’t living life to the limit. A lot of us can’t just pack up everything and go, but we can take time to notice. To notice the sun emerging from grey winter skies or taking the time to tell a loved one simply that you love them, because you never know what tomorrow will bring. So, my action plan has been to take a few minutes to go outside and spend time relaxing, just simply to think about the things around me, about what I want to do, my ambitions and dreams, an action plan for an inspirational and epic fundraiser that may just change my life forever, or simply a dream.

Money can’t buy everything. Only we can decide where our life will take us, the possibilities are endless. So don’t forget to notice, because noticing may change your life.

Read India's previous blog here.