As I enter my second week at ARI, I'm still processing what this place is - what ARI means to the participants, what ARI means to the staff, what ARI will mean to me. That will be an ongoing process. Right now, all I have to offer are some fragmented thoughts...
Highlights of the past week:
Learning how to make Chinese sesame balls (delicious!). Dishing out dozens of Sri Lankan egg hoppers (basically crepes with fried egg) to customers during the Harvest Thanksgiving Celebration (HTC) - and speaking broken Japanese in the process! Seeing the participants' pride in their HTC. Singing a Thai folk song. Seeing Nasu mountain for the first time while working in the fields one clear, sunny morning. Laughing, cooking, exploring.
Not-so-great moments:
Getting sick! I've been sick for three days now - not fun. (And what is that special Mother-power that enables my mom to see that I'm sick over Skype?) At least it gives me time to work on my Japanese... I just hope that I get better in time for the farewell party (involving kareoke!) for the volunteers who are leaving this weekend.
Thinking about:
The concept of "mottainai," waste and wastefulness. Dartmouth (particularly the student chaplains at the Episcopal Student Center) really opened my eyes to the idea of resource conservation on a local, individual scale. Simple things, like composting, taking your own bag to the grocery store or your own mug to the dining halls, buying your vegetables locally, covering your windows with plastic insulation and turning down the heat. ARI takes that concepts and institutionalizes it. The office uses only used or recycled paper, the pig feed comes from the cafeteria leftovers of local schools, and we put old egg shells in the chickens' feed to strengthen the next crop of eggs. During HTC, ARI provided regular dishes and asked the guests to wash their own dishes - as a result, all the trash for an event involving over 1000 people could have fit in my kitchen trash can at home! It's impressive what an organization can do when it really embraces the concept of no mottainai.
Also thinking about the Japanese system of counting - why is it so complicated?? There are different "counter words" for numbers, time, flat objects, round objects, days of the month, days of the week... yikes. Wish me luck!
And Haruki Murakami. I'm about half-way through The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is a crazy, gripping, trippy, wonderful book set in 1980's Tokyo ( / an alternate universe of Murakami's imagination...). I definitely recommend it!
Pictures!:
I don't have very many at the moment (since I'm very bad about bringing my camera around), but here are a few from this past weekend's Harvest Thanksgiving Celebration.
Opening worship
Tsusara (from Sri Lanka) and me making egg hoppers
Bai-bai for now.
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What a couple of weeks! Hope your Japanese is going well, or at least hope that you're eloquent in charades by now.
ReplyDelete"Fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you... Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step." - Murakami Haruki, Kaftka on the Shore
Feel better soon!
Meghan