A Splendid Vegetation

ただいま: I'm back

2010-09-07T08:21:00.000-07:00

I left Japan one month ago. Since then, I've been in Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, and Massachusetts. I've spent time with family and friends; I've unpacked and repacked and trucked my worldly possessions across several state borders; I've sailed around Cape Ann, Massachusetts; and I've eaten sushi at least three times. I've gone through culture shock (as the stereotypes tell us, Americans are indeed much louder than the Japanese) and farm deprivation (plastic-wrapped vegetables?!), and I've enjoyed being back in a culture whose rules are more relaxed, more fluid. I've a lot thought about what ARI meant to me while I was in Japan, about what it means to me now, and about how my experience at ARI will shape my future plans.

With my sister and mother in North Carolina

I learned a lot from ARI. I learned about farming and about how to live more simply; I learned how to interact and how to form meaningful relationships with people from drastically different backgrounds; I learned more about what makes me happy, about what I truly need. ARI is a radical place (I often refer to it as my Japanese hippy commune), and I loved it for its radical message of (paraphrasing from Ghandi here) living simply, so that others may simply live.

Most importantly, my time at ARI reminded me of the importance of slowing down. Not slowing down physically or mentally, but slowing down your pace of living – taking the time to appreciate the world around you, to appreciate the gifts and the challenges of the moment, to appreciate people. At ARI, we’re forced to pay attention to the natural world, a world that many of us are far removed from in our daily lives. We’re asked to adjust our working pace to the pace of growing vegetables and livestock; we’re asked to adjust our speaking to the English abilities of our Japanese and Indian and Indonesian friends; we’re asked to adjust our eating to the rhythm of the seasons. I especially loved eating in season, even though that sometimes meant eating inordinate quantities of carrots and sweet potatoes or doing without onions or tomatoes.

I would like to share a passage from a book called The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka, a Japanese farmer who rebelled against the industrialization and commercialization of food production that occurred in Japan after the end of World War II. In this passage, Fukuoka-san describes the commercial production of mikan, or Japanese mandarin oranges.

Farming out of season is becoming more and more popular all the time. To have mandarin oranges just one month earlier, the people in the city seem happy enough to pay for the farmer’s extra investment in labor and equipment. But if you ask how important it is for human beings to have this fruit a month earlier, the truth is that it is not important at all, and money is not the only price paid for such indulgence.

Furthermore, a coloring agent, not used a few years ago, is now being used. With this chemical, the fruit becomes fully colored one week earlier. Depending on whether the fruit is sold a week before or after the 10th of October, the price either doubles or falls by half, so the farmer applies color-accelerating chemicals, and after the harvest places the fruit in a ripening room for gas treatment.

But when the fruit is shipped out early, it is not sweet enough, and so artificial sweeteners are used. It is generally though that chemical sweeteners have been prohibited, but the artificial sweetener sprayed on citrus trees has not been specifically outlawed. The question is whether or not is falls into the category of ‘agricultural chemicals.’ In any case, almost everybody is using it.

The fruit is then taken to the co-op fruit-sorting center. In order to separate the fruit into large and small sizes, each one is sent rolling several hundred yards down a long conveyor. Bruising is common… After a water washing, the mandarin oranges are sprayed with preservatives and a coloring agent is brushed on. Finally, as a finishing touch, a paraffin wax solution is applied and the fruit is polished to a glossy shine…

So from the time just before the fruit has been harvested to the time it is shipped out and put on the display counter, five or six chemicals are used. This is not to mention the chemical fertilizers and sprays that were used while the crops were growing in the orchard. And this is all because the consumer wants to buy fruit just a little more attractive. This little edge of preference has put the farmer in a real predicament.

… Fruit which is not wax treated no longer brings so high a price. In two or three years waxing is taken up all over the country. The competition then brings the prices down, and all that is left to the farmer is the burden of hard work and the added costs of supplies and equipment. Now he must apply the wax.

Of course the consumer suffers as a result. Food that is not fresh can be sold because it looks fresh… until there is a reversal of the sense of values which cares more for size and appearance than for quality, there will be no solving the problem of food pollution.

I like what Fukuoka-san says about slowing down our desires. Before coming to ARI, I had never eaten in season. Like most Americans, I had eaten tomatoes, kiwis, and spinach all year round – barely even aware that vegetables and fruits have seasons, or that, outside of industrialized countries, you must reconcile your desires with the progression of the seasons. By eating in season, I had more appreciation for the variety of nature, and I felt more connected to the rhythms of the year. I found that I could do without many things I had thought essential, and that I felt healthier and more balanced for it. And, most importantly, I didn’t take food for granted anymore.

I want to keep these ARI lessons close as I start a new life up here in New England. I want to always remember to appreciate the soil, the food that it supports, and the people who cultivate it. I want to always remember to slow down enough to really appreciate the friends and family around me. I want to always seek ways to build connections within my community.

This will be my last blog entry, but I'm working on compiling an ARI cookbook (in the form of a website) that will also include more information on what the ARI farm produces and how we produce it. I'll be sending out the online link for that sometime before Thanksgiving. So to everyone who supported me financially, who read my blog or sent me an email, who thought about me while I was across the Pacific: Thank you, again, for an incredible year. I hope to pay it forward.

Hiroshima

2010-08-05T00:10:00.000-07:00

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a large city in western Japan. I recently read several Japanese accounts of the bombing, and I'd like to share a section from one novel, Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse, which is a fictionalized compilation of bomb victims' diaries. In this section, the main character has just emerged from Yokogawa station, about 1 mile from the epicenter of the blast, minutes after the bomb was dropped:

"I was shocked to find that almost every house adjoining the station had been knocked flat, covering the ground about with an undulating sea of tiles. A few houses away from the station a young woman of marriageable age, the upper half of her body emerging from the rubble, was throwing tiles as rapidly as she could lay hands on them and screaming in a shrill voice. She probably thought she was crying 'Help,' but the sound that emerged was no intelligible human speech...

In the grounds of the Yokogawa Shrine... nothing remained of the main sanctuary save a number of naked uprights. The worship hall in front of it had vanished, leaving only its clay foundation, a bare and ugly hump.

The people in the street by the shrine ground were all covered over their heads and shoulders with something resembling dust or ash. There was not one of them who was not bleeding. They bled from the head, from the face, from the hands; those who were naked bled from the chest, from the back, from the thighs, from any place from which it was possible to bleed. One woman, her cheeks so swollen that they drooped on either side in heavy pouches, walked with her arms stretched out before her, hands drooping forlornly, like a ghost. A man without a stitch of clothing on came jogging along the road with his body bent forward and his hands between his legs, for all the world like someone about to enter the communal tub at a public bathhouse. There was a woman in her slip who ran wearily along the road groaning as she went. Another carrying a baby in her arms, crying, 'Water! Water!' and constantly wiping at the baby's eyes between her cries. Its eyes were clogged with some substance like ash... A man plumped down by the side of the road with his arms thrust skywards, waving them frantically. An elderly woman sitting earnestly praying with her eyes closed, her hands pressed together in supplication, beside a pile of tiles that had slid off the roof. A half-naked man who came along at a trot, cannoned into her and ran on cursing her foully. A man in white trousers who crept along a little at a time on all fours, weeping noisily to himself as he went...

All these I saw in less than two hundred yards as I walked from Yokogawa Station along the highway."

If you have a chance, I highly recommend Black Rain as a powerful, beautifully detailed, insightful account of wartime Japan and of the lasting effects of the bomb on postwar Japanese society.

Homeward bound

2010-07-29T17:09:00.000-07:00

I will be leaving Japan in just over a week, on Monday, August 9th.

I'm leaving ARI a few weeks early so that I have time to rest, process my experience, and spend time with my family and friends in the Washington area before heading up to Boston for the next step in early September. I'm hoping to find work in Boston related to international development and/or the promotion of sustainable food systems - but I don't have any fixed plans at the moment, and I'm heading north with an open mind. If you have any insights or brainwaves, or if you have contacts in those fields, please drop me a line!

I'll write a more comprehensive overview of my year at ARI later, once I've had time to think and talk with friends and adjust to the culture shock that I know is coming. Now I'll just share a few photos from this past month - I hope you can feel something of the energy of ARI through these photos.

Sunrise in the paddy

Butog (the Philippines) on harvest day

Summer veggies

Chinese cabbage harvest

Our spring onion harvest

A sayonara party at a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant

Thank you, everyone, for all your support during this past year. My ARI experience will shape my thinking and my actions for a long time to come - thank you for blessing me with such a rich, thought-provoking, fun, life-changing year.

Fuji-san!

2010-07-22T18:31:00.000-07:00

Several weekends ago, I fulfilled my New Year's resolution to hike Mount Fuji! Mount Fuji, or Fuji-san, is the highest mountain in Japan at 3776 m (12,388 ft) and is still an active volcano, although the last eruption occurred a comfortable 300 years ago. For most of Japanese history, Fuji-san was considered a sacred mountain; until the late nineteenth century, climbing Fuji-san was an act of pilgrimage forbidden to women. Now, around 200,000 people climb Fuji every year during the short official season that runs from July 1st through August 31st (the summit is covered with snow for the other 10 months of the year), and most people climb through the night in order to reach the summit in time to see the sun rise. What used to be a sacred ceremony has become a heavily commercialized adventure, but still a highlight of any stay in Japan.

My volunteer friends and I had been talking about climbing Fuji since last winter, so, as the climbing season approached, we set aside a weekend in July for an expedition to the holy mountain. The seven of us (three Americans, two Germans, and two Japanese) left ARI on a stormy Saturday afternoon in a tiny rental car filled to bursting with backpacks, hiking gear, iPods, and hiking snacks for a very squished ride to Shizuoka Prefecture, west of Tokyo. We reached the foot of the mountain around 7 pm, grabbed a quick dinner at one of Japan's ubiquitous 7-11's, and started driving up to the 5th hiking station, which, at 7,900 ft, is where the paved road ends and where most people start climbing. The forest at the base of Fuji is infamous as a popular suicide spot, and as we started driving through the tall, dense cedars, I began to understand why - the cedars formed black walls on either side of the winding mountain road, and a thick, low fog played with the shapes of the trees. Finally, just before the 5th station, we drove out of the fog into a clear night, and, when we got out of the car at the 5th station, I was surprised by the cool air that greeted us - it felt like somehow stepping from a humid August day in Virginia into a crisp September evening in Hanover. We threw on some layers, enjoyed our convenience store sushi dinners, and walked around the souvenir shops (where you can buy Fuji-shaped stuffed toys, Fuji lollipops, Fuji-emblazoned plates, Fuji chopsticks...) as we let our bodies acclimate to the altitude. Finally, around 9:30 pm, we started climbing.

This was my first experience in a low-oxygen environment, and I was shocked by how hard it was to hike those first few minutes. The path was not very steep, but just five minutes of walking left me as tired as running a mile. I started to get a little worried about the remaining 3 miles to the summit, and I quickly adopted the "zombie method" of the Japanese hikers around us, who shuffled slowly over the ground in order to conserve energy. But the mountain was beautiful in the starlight - black rock cutting into the blue-black sky, pale silver stars lighting the trail. I felt strangely suspended above the mountains and valleys below us, as if I could just step off the sharp edge of the black volcano and into the misty darkness below.

As we continued up Fuji, my body gradually adjusted to the thinner mountain air and the hiking became easier. We also took long acclimation breaks at the regularly-spaced rest stations, which were fully outfitted with mini-restaurants, souvenir shops, and vending machines - modern Japanese convenience at exorbitant prices. At the 5th station, I had thought such niceties were superfluous, but by the time we reached the penultimate 9th station in the windy predawn cold, I was very happy for a warm cup of oshiruko (sweet red bean soup). Sometimes it's hard to deny Japanese uber-convenience.

The 9th station hut at 2 am

Felix (Germany) enjoying a cup of oshiruko

Around 3:30 am, we started the final ascent to the summit, hoping to arrive just before sunrise at 4:30. We shuffled slowly up the mountain, leaning against a cold wind that was sometimes strong enough to knock us off balance. At this point, we had been awake for almost 24 hours and were a little loopy from exhaustion - I certainly felt as if I were in a dream state, somehow separated from the person climbing up the slopes of loose volcanic rock and ash. As we approached the summit, the trail became very congested with hundreds of other sunrise climbers. Looking both up and down the mountain, you could see a bright line of stationary headlamps winding up the trail. Frustrated, impatient, I asked my Japanese friend if it was impolite to hike past the people standing in front of us using the narrow margins of the trail. "Hmm, maybe okay," he said - which means, I think, that passing is impolite, but we can go ahead since our group is mostly foreigners, and foreigners aren't always expected to follow the same rules as the Japanese (which can be very liberating). So we practically sprinted the remaining distance, reaching the summit tori just as the sky started to lighten.

Victory!

The summit was spectacular. A deep, snow-lined crater is surrounded by many-layered peaks of rock, which rear up against the pre-dawn sky with an alien redness. Here and there, small wooden tori gates mark the summit as sacred ground. Looking down, you see all of Japan spread out before you - mountains, hilly tea fields, and wide rice paddies, stretching all the way to the silver Pacific. And everywhere, clouds. As the sun slowly rose over the Pacific, it touched the clouds with purple red orange pink in the most beautiful display of color and light I have ever seen.

Sunrise

The group - Felix (Germany), Rachel (U.S.), Mori (Japan), Me, Gabe (U.S.), Pascal (Germany)

Dawn over Japan

The crater at the summit

After the exhilarating sunrise, we then hiked back down the mountain - or, rather, stumbled down, so sleep-deprived that I was worried that some of our group would literally fall asleep while walking - and drove back to our little corner of Japan in Nishinasuno. A wonderful weekend adventure, and definitely a high point of my time in Japan.

4:30 am

2010-07-22T03:28:00.000-07:00

Last week, the rainy season finally broke - not in the gradual way I had expected, but in a startling transformation from humid white haze to hot glorious blue. We're enjoying seeing the sun again, but the intense summer heat (think Washington at its worst hot-humid moments) makes farm work during the afternoon almost unbearable. So the farm volunteers have decided to adopt a new summer schedule: wake up with the sun and enjoy a siesta during the afternoon. The sun rises in Japan at around 4:30 am, and we can enjoy about an hour of cool(ish) dawn weather before we start sweating again.

I started this morning plowing the egoma (a plant similar to sesame) field next to an ARI paddy, and I discovered that the world at 4:30 can be quite a beautiful place - soft pink sunrise over the ripening rice, clear blue sky touching the rocky tops of the nearby mountains. Add a nice onigiri (rice ball) as a pre-breakfast snack, and all feels right with the world...

Onigiri!

Plow

In a more general update: I've had lots of wonderful summer adventures recently (climbing Mount Fuji, visiting a friend in the mountains of Nagano) that I hope to share with you soon - but as I'll be waking up tomorrow at 4 again, it's now time to head to bed to the sound of cicadas and a distant thunder storm...

Summer

2010-07-02T21:34:00.000-07:00

ARI changes with each season. During my time here, I've experienced the fall harvests, the winter doldrums of food processing and farm maintenance, and the spring sowing. I've lived with three distinct ARI communities: the 2009 participant community, the staff/volunteer winter community, and now the 2010 participant community. I've watched the surrounding mountains progress through their seasonal coats of fiery red and orange, white steel, and hazy blue. And I've eaten my way through the wonderful variety of three seasons, each with its own taste: a pumpkin and radish fall ; a sweet potato, taro, and carrot winter; a wild green buds and red radish spring.

And now we're in the midst of summer, which brings a new landscape, new work, and new flavors. Summer in Japan is dominated by the annual rainy season (tsuyu), which lasts roughly six weeks, from the beginning of June to the middle of August. I'd been dreading rainy season ever since arriving at ARI last year, but (knock on wood!) tsuyu has so far proved quite manageable. It rains often, but rarely for the whole day, and we usually have one or two sunny days a week. But the humidity can be awful, masking the beautiful mountains in a bright grey haze and making farm work a very hot and sweaty affair. I almost miss the winter cold!

Tsuyu brings new farm work. In the paddies, we've finished with the spring transplanting and weeding, and now we just support the rice with occasional fertilizer boosts, applied by hand while walking through the paddies. In the fields, we're harvesting the winter wheat and preparing to harvest the potatoes next week. Our summer vegetables (tomato! bell pepper! egg plant! cucumber!) are starting to mature, and our fall and winter vegetables (pumpkin, sweet potatoes, taro, and carrots) are already growing nicely. Summer seems to be the season of watching - not a passive watching, but an active watching that involves weeding, supporting, fertilizing. As one Japanese proverb says, vegetables grow by listening to the sounds of a farmer's boots - vegetables need our attention, even if just our watchful eyes. Judging by the sorry state of the beets in my individual field, this seems to be true! I planted the beets in early May, and I could see several tiny seedlings by the time I left for vacation in early June. But when I returned in late June, all the seedlings had died! Admittedly, the seeds had expired in 2007, but I think my general neglect also had a hand in their demise... My bell peppers seedlings, however, are doing well after their recent move from the greenhouse to the field, so I hope to see at least a few fruits from my labors.

And with the coming of summer, the food on our plates also changed! After the cruelty of late spring (when all the flowers and trees were blooming, but the vegetables were still far from mature), we can finally eat our fill of vegetables again. Komatsuna, cabbage, spinach, turnip, spring chrysanthemum leaves, broccoli, celery, beets, cucumber, onion, garlic, mint, green bean, green snap pea, lettuce, Chinese leek, radish... A wonderful, delicious variety. We harvest from the participants' group fields every Tuesday and Friday, so we always have fresh vegetables in the kitchen. Here are some pictures of last week's harvest days taken by a new American volunteer, David, from Oregon:

Preparing for the harvest

A participant group field

Weighing and recording the harvest

Taking the harvest to the kitchen

Vegetables!

With the coming of summer, I also see significant changes in the ARI community. The participants are uniformly more confident, more relaxed, and more open than when they first arrived in Japan three months ago. In conversations with them, many participants talk about how much they enjoy ARI life, about how much they're learning, about how they're beginning to see themselves and their home communities in new ways. And, as people begin to make a home here, ARI begins to feels like a real community again - as one participant put it, a "miracle" community of individuals from so many different places and walks of life, gathered together on a small farm atop a small hill in a small town in Japan.

Sumathi (Sri Lanka) enjoying ice cream during a break from farm work

Aneth (Cambodia) and Lester (the Philippines)

As this is my last season in ARI, I'm planning on enjoying it to the fullest. I'm trying to learn as much as possible before I leave - about the farm, about the participants, about Japanese culture. I'm also planning several off-campus adventures with the other volunteers, most notably an expedition to Mount Fuji, Japan's highest mountain, next weekend. Wish me luck!

ARI on TV!

2010-06-29T00:54:00.001-07:00

NHK (Japanese national public television) just aired a 5-minute segment on ARI! I think the reporters did a good job describing the central mission of ARI, so please watch! I make a very brief appearance about half-way into the segment - look for a girl wearing red pants and a blue shirt when they switch to the dining hall scene...

A trip south

2010-06-25T04:27:00.000-07:00

Ohisashiburi desu - long time no see! I'm now back from two weeks of traveling with my boyfriend, Eric, and I'm ready to give a trip report of my time "in Japan":

We first went to Okinawa, the southern-most islands of the Japanese archipelago famous for their white coral beaches and their people's warm hospitality. I wanted to go to Okinawa for two reasons. First, I had never been to the tropics, and, as I planned this trip on cold March evenings, I found that the pictures of coral and white beaches and transparent turquoise water had an irresistible attraction. Second, I had heard that the culture of the islands was very different from that of mainland Japan - that the food was more Chinese than Japanese in taste, that the traditional music was different, that people were supposed to be more open - so I wanted to see this "other" part of Japan.

Okinawa occupies an interesting place in Japanese history. The islands originally formed an independent kingdom, known as the Ryukyu Kingdom, with its own people (the Ryukyu people, who are believed to share a common ancestor with the mainland Japanese people - although the identify of this ancestor is still hotly debated) and its own cultures and languages. For most of its history, the Ryukyu Kingdom was a tribute state of China - its principle commercial and cultural ties were thus with Beijing rather than with Tokyo. The Ryukyu Islands only became part of Japan in 1879, when the Meiji government forcibly annexed the islands and renamed the Kingdom the Okinawa Prefecture. Ever since annexation, the relationship between Okinawa and mainland Japan has been difficult. Okinawans faced discrimination from mainland Japanese throughout the prewar period, as many mainland Japanese felt the Ryukyu people were ethnically inferior to the "pure" Yamato people of the main islands; traditional Okinawan languages and culture almost disappeared due to Tokyo's efforts to impose the Japanese language and cultural identity on the islanders. During World War II, the islands saw the infamous Battle of Okinawa, which cost the lives of over 100,000 American and Japanese soldiers and an almost equal number of Okinawan civilians (about one-quarter of the prewar population), who were ordered by the Japanese government to kill themselves and their families rather than surrender to the American forces. After the war, Okinawa remained under the exclusive jurisdiction of the U.S. military for an incredible 20 years longer than the rest of Japan, due to the strategic importance of Okinawa as the United States' military foothold in the Pacific - many Okinawans believed that Tokyo in fact sacrificed Okinawa to the United States in order to end the Allied occupation of mainland Japan in 1952. The relationship between Okinawa and Tokyo remains tense due to these longstanding disagreements over the American military presence in Okinawa, which today accounts for over ten percent of total land usage on the islands. One American base in particular, Futenma Marine Air Corps Station near the prefectural capital city of Naha, has recently strained relations between Okinawa and Tokyo. Many Okinawans want Tokyo to get Futenma removed from the islands, but Washington will only discuss moving the base to another, less residential location within Okinawa. Prime Minister Hatoyama failed to fulfill his campaign pledge to resolve this issue, and resigned earlier this month as a result.

We spent our first day in Okinawa in Naha. As soon as we stepped out of the Naha airport, we were greeted by the incredible, physical humidity of the tropics - the kind of humidity that you have to swim against, that tastes of the ocean. We were also greeted by the pleasant Naha monorail, the three-car elevated trolley that serves as the main means of public transportation in the capital. After the sleek Metro systems of mainland Japan, with their twenty-car trains with designated "people pushers" for rush times, it was refreshing to visit a city that only needed a three-car capacity for its public transportation system. Already, I sensed that we were in a different Japan.

We spent most of our time in Naha wandering the streets and sampling Okinawan cuisine: mango ice cream, Okinawan soba noodles with pickled ginger, and Okinawan stir-fry with pork and bitter gourd... we declined the specialty chiraga, pig's face. Actually, we found the heat and humidity a little difficult to bear, so we had to do our sight-seeing in short bursts as we scuttled from air-conditioned store to air-conditioned store. And even after one day in Naha, we found that the American military presence was very noticeable - the city was crawling with American soldiers on leave, we heard large jets taking off from nearby Futenma Air Station at least once an hour, and the ubiquitous vending machines had Mug's Root Beer and other American brands that hadn't yet reached the main island.

Enjoying Okinawan soba noodles

Naha at night

After Naha, we took a ferry to Zamami Island, a small island about 30 miles from Naha with around 700 residents. Zamami was nothing short of charming. The island's population is centered around the southern port village, which is a labyrinth of quiet houses and overgrown gardens behind crumbling stones walls, and the island itself is a scorched jungle bordered by white coral beaches. Zamami felt very removed from the bustle of Naha - and since we were traveling at the end of the Okinawan rainy season, we had almost the entire island to ourselves! We stayed on the island for four days, exploring the village, the port, and the beaches. The highlight of our Zamami stay was a sea kayaking trip, which included a lunch of traditional Okinawan soba on the beach, snorkeling above a coral forest (I got to see clown fish, sea cucumbers, and star fish!), and a short exploration of an uninhabited island in search of goats - all narrated by our incredibly enthusiastic guide, Mami, who was so amazed by Eric's height that she spent the first five minutes of our orientation comparing her 5' to his 6'4" with ever louder exclamations of surprise and delight.

Zamami Island

Snorkeling above the coral forest

Sea kayaking!

After Zamami, we headed back to the main island of Japan for a brief stop at ARI. Eric worked on the farm for two days as a working visitor - we spent both days in the rice paddies, doing supplemental transplanting and weeding by hand. The first month after transplanting rice largely determines the success of the harvest, so the farm section has to spend many hours in the paddy, carefully removing weeds and millet (a grain that competes with rice) so that the seedlings have space to grow and develop. Tough work, but very important!

One of eight ARI paddies

Taking a break from the paddy

After hours in the paddy, we were ready for the second leg of our vacation, a trip down to Yokohama. Just 20 miles south of Tokyo, Yokohama is a lovely city with shady parks, a lively port, interesting neighborhoods, and a very international feel, as the port has been a center of foreign commerce ever since the forced opening of Japan by Admiral Perry in 1853. In our three days in Yokohama, we explored China Town, wandered around nineteenth-century mansions of foreign merchants, did some boat-watching along the port... and I enjoyed window shopping at some of the specialty food stores (Granola! Camembert cheese! Fettuccine! Crunchy peanut butter!). I must say that I much preferred Yokohama to Tokyo - it has a breezier, more open feel than the towering, claustrophobic capital, and people seem less hurried.

Eric in China Town

China Town

Overlooking the port

A wonderful two weeks! I really enjoyed seeing more of Japan, especially as I've now accumulated enough Japanese to actually communicate with our hostel hosts and even random strangers. So much fun! I particularly remember one conservation with a Japanese man on the train down to Yokohama. I was trying to describe ARI and the work we do, but I only knew isolated words: yuuki nougyou o benkyoshimasu (study organic agriculture), gaijin gakusei (foreign students), tanbo (rice paddy)... I could tell he didn't really understand what kind of work I did, so finally I just told him that we had been working in the paddy that morning. His eyes widened - I could tell he was thinking, "What are a pair of foreigners doing working in a rice paddy in Japan??" Sometimes I wonder, too, about the strange and wonderful twists of fate that brought me to the paddies of ARI...

8 months

2010-06-03T22:08:00.000-07:00

In a way, I've now come full circle at ARI. Last week, we transplanted rice using the seedlings from the grains that I helped harvest last year during my first day of work. Comparing the "October Lizzie" to the "June Lizzie," I can sense many changes. In October, I was confused about the technical side of harvesting ("You want me to distinguish between normal rice and sticky rice? And what is sticky rice again...?"), and I felt a little at sea among the boisterous strangers of the ARI community. Now, eight months later, I helped coordinate the transplanting process, and I felt wonderfully comfortable working with people whom I now know as friends. I'm even starting to develop a love of rice - I crave onigiri (rice balls) wrapped in salty nori (seaweed), and I always have tamago-gohan (raw egg over rice with soy sauce - much more delicious than it sounds!) for breakfast on the weekends.

Here are some pictures from the community transplanting day, when the entire ARI community (volunteers, staff, and participants) got to wade into the paddies for some muddy fun.

Zippo (India) with rice seedlings

Participants transplanting

The whole community!

I'll be away from ARI and from this blog until the end of June, as I'll be traveling around Japan with my boyfriend, Eric. We'll spend time in Okinawa, ARI, and Yokohama - expect a trip report soon...

Je vous presente: John Nday

2010-05-31T21:10:00.000-07:00

Meet John Nday: A 30-something community-development worker with the United Methodist Church OR from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo)- a tall, lean man with a quick smile and a gentle voice. Over the past two months, I've gotten to know John through our regular conversations en français (French is still the national language of the DR Congo, a living reminder of its colonial past) over dinner or in the field. I wanted to share some of his comments with you, hoping that learning more about one of the participants and his home context will make ARI a little more real to my readers at home. After all, ARI was created for the participants - you cannot really understand ARI and its mission without understanding the participants and their struggles.

Last year, John was selected by his employer, a Congolese branch of the United Methodist Committee on Relief called UMCOR-NGO, to participate in the ARI training program, an intensive nine-month course in sustainable, organic agricultural and in community development. UMCOR-NGO mostly works through micro-finance projects, providing funding and training for local, small-scale income-generation projects in villages throughout rural DR Congo. In all their projects, UMCOR-NGO development workers first meet with village representatives (or, if there is no preexisting representative group, ask that a village committee be formed) and ask them to decide, as a community, how to use the donated funds. UMCOR-NGO then provides basic training related to the project (practical training in agricultural skills or in sanitation techniques), with the goal of enabling the community members to independently manage the project once the UMCOR-NGO workers leave.

I asked John to identify some of the problems facing communities in his area. He described the chronic food and water shortages; the lack of health care or even basic sanitation facilities; the economic and psychological traumas caused by the civil wars that wracked Congo during the 1990s (many of the people who fled their homes almost 20 years ago are still afraid of going back - they now live in permanent-temporary communities in the countryside, "lacking almost everything"). But the biggest problem, according to John, "is poverty, because there are no factories, no industries around, so there are no job opportunities. For these people to survive, it's quite difficult. Most of the people are just farming. We have a lot of resources - we have a lot of land, we've got rivers and streams - but people still continue to suffer. The reason is a lack of knowledge, a lack of knowledge in agricultural skills. We set up projects to empower these people by teaching them agricultural skills." As a project manager, John specialized in agricultural projects that distributed seeds, tools, and food-processing equipment to struggling rural communities. He also led training sessions, giving demonstrations of different agricultural skills (from transplanting to plowing) and teaching communities how to process and sell the foods they produced (sunflower oil seems to be a particularly successful endeavor). Please see UMCOR's website for more details about their work in DR Congo.

Before coming to ARI, John had already studied agriculture at a university in Zimbabwe, but he said that the university program "trained us to become workers in big agricultural companies, maybe companies using chemicals. We cannot apply [that knowledge] to our small communities - where will they find the money to buy chemicals?" So in March, John left his wife and two infant sons in the DR Congo to travel to Japan for the ARI training course, which teaches the theory and practice of sustainable, organic farming. John says that he already finds finds the ARI training must more suited to local conditions than his university studies. "ARI training teaches us to do organic farming using local resources - using bokashi [organic fertilizer] or compost, things you can make." The focus of the training course is not on teaching specific technical skills, but on "teaching us how to think," as another participant said, so that participants can more effectively use their community resources - the people and materials available locally - rather than relying on imported products or imported solutions.

My conservations with John reminded me of an interesting article I read in this past April's National Geographic about water scarcity in northern Kenya. The article described the failed attempts of many-an-NGO to provide the villages of rural Kenya with reliable access to clean water:

"The villages of Konso [in northern Kenya] are littered with the ghosts of water projects past. In Konsos around the developing world, the biggest problem with water schemes is that about half of them fall into disrepair soon after the groups that built them move on. Sometimes technology is used that can't be repaired locally, or spare parts are available only in the capital... The 2007 survey of Konso found that only nine projects out of 35 built were functioning."

But the article gave cause for hope, saying that some international aid groups are starting to change the way they implement development projects. "The real innovation," according to the article, "is [to treat] technology as only part of the solution. Just as important is involving the local community in designing, building, and maintaining new projects." ARI was built on the belief that sustainable social change, whether in Kenya or the Philippines or in Japan, must come through local community action rather than imported fixes. John's organization in DRC, UMCOR-NGO, operates on the same principles. Watching this class of participants learn and grow as leaders, I find hope for this world in the belief that they will go back and inspire their communities to develop in ways that are sustainable and appropriate to their local contexts.

My garden

2010-05-16T00:57:00.000-07:00

This is my garden, my own small piece of ARI land that I cultivated from the grass growing in front of the women's dorm. It measures about 4' by 6', and it's conveniently located just underneath my window (yup, that's my laundry drying in the picture). I planted beets about one week ago, and I'm also going to plant edamame (that green bean you often see at Japanese restaurants), chili, spinach, and bell pepper... which means I'll have to expand at some point. I'm hoping this tiny piece of land will supply me with enough veggies for weekend lunches during the summer months. Wish me luck!

Summer revelries

2010-05-15T23:54:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, some of the volunteers "went to Japan," as we like to say - in other words, we ventured off the ARI campus for a wonderful afternoon of Japanese hospitality (sushi! tea ceremony!) at a commuting volunteer's house, followed by a relaxing night of camping by a nearby river. What a way to start the summer!

The commuting volunteer, Ito-san, is a retired Japanese gentleman who lives up in the mountains surrounding ARI. His houses sits among small rice paddies, patches of bamboo forest, and 19th century family cemeteries - the perfect image of rural Japan. Before beginning our sushi feast, we got a tour of Ito-san's garden / home farm, where he grows onions, beans, taro, broccoli, cabbage, and other kitchen veggies on the quarter-acre of land surrounding his house. (Related side note: One of the striking things about Japanese development is the way the Japanese incorporate agricultural land into their towns and cities. Because land is very scarce, agricultural land is not separated from residential or commercial land the way it is in the U.S. - rice paddies abut major highways, family garden plots sit next to restaurants, even larger commercial farming enterprises can be found under overpasses or next to residential neighborhoods. It makes for an interestingly mixed landscape.) After the tour, we got down to the more important work of making and eating temaki-zushi, or hand-made sushi rolls, using nori (sheets of seaweed), sushi rice (white rice mixed with a little vinegar), slices of raw fish (tuna! mackerel! salmon!), wasabi, and pickled vegetables. And then, after three hours of eating and talking, Ito-san's wife performed a casual tea ceremony, offering us macha (powdered green tea) and seasonal mochi (rice cake) sweets. ほんとにおいしかたです (really delicious!).

After dinner, feeling wonderfully stuffed with fish, we drove down to one of the rivers around ARI and set up camp for the night. We pitched some tents (although one tent turned out to just be a rain cover... ahem), pulled some bamboo out from the woods for a fire, and settled down to an evening of talking, eating smoked garlic bread, and enjoying the warm summer night. Just like camping in the States, except we ate rice balls instead of bagels for breakfast.

Mori (Japan)

The view from our campsite

Nami (Japan)

That weekend of eating and camping adventures made me realize how happy, how lucky I am to be at ARI. I love the people here, I love the lifestyle, I love the opportunity to learn new things every day. I hope you're also enjoying good food (maybe even sushi?) and warm summer nights with friends...

A taste of ARI

2010-05-02T03:58:00.000-07:00

Last week, I finished my second month of kitchen duty - which means that for almost a third of my time here, I've helped make breakfast and dinner every day for the entire ARI community. ARI food is a unique combination of cuisines, informed by the personal tastes of our participants and volunteers and by the selection of ingredients we have on hand (right now that means tons of carrots - so we eat carrots at every meal). During my two months in the kitchen, I've learned that recipes are overrated, that "curry" means a dozen different things to a dozen different participants, and that almost everything tastes better when you add a little cooking sake. To give you a little taste of ARI cooking, I've included four recipes for a typical ARI dinner below. The quantities listed are roughly for four people, but beware - I made up the quantities, since we usually cook for around 60 people, and we never measure anything.

Sri Lankan carrot stir-fry
- Carrots, peeled and cut julienne (into small sticks)
- 1 onion, cut julienne
- Olive oil
- 4 cloves of garlic, minced
- Turmeric
- Garam masala
- Chili (either powder or whole, to your spice tolerance - Sri Lankans like it hot)
- Salt

Sauté the onions and garlic in oil for 3 to 5 minutes, until the onions become translucent.
Add generous amounts of turmeric and garam masala, and sauté for 2 to 3 minutes to bring out the flavor of the spices. If you wish to add chili, add with the other spices.
Add the carrots. Continue to sauté until the carrots are tender.
Adjust spices and salt to taste, and serve.

Filipino pork adobo
- 2 lbs. pork, chopped into cubes
- 1/2 lbs. potatoes, chopped
- 1/2 onion, diced
- 1/2 cup soy sauce
- 1 cup vinegar
- 2 cups water
- 1 teaspoon paprika
- 5 laurel leaves (bay leaves)
- 2 tablespoons minced ginger
- 1 head garlic, minced
- 4 tablespoons olive oil
- 2 tablespoons cornstarch
- Salt, black pepper to taste
- 3 tablespoons of water

In a big sauce pan or wok, heat 2 tablespoons of oil then sauté the minced garlic, ginger, and onions.
Add the pork and the potatoes to the pan. Add 2 cups of water, 1/4 cup of soy sauce, vinegar, paprika and the bay leaves. Bring to a boil. Cover and simmer for 30 minutes or when meat is tender and potatoes are cooked.
Remove the pork from the sauce pan and on another pan, heat cooking oil and brown the pork for a few minutes.
Mix the browned pork back to the sauce and add cornstarch dissolved in water to thicken.
Add salt and pepper if desired
Bring to a boil then simmer for an additional 5 minutes.
Serve hot with the adobo gravy and rice.

Deep-fried curry tofu (for the vegetarians)
- Hard (momen) tofu, cut into large cubes
- Soy sauce
- Mirin (sweet cooking sake)
- Garam masala
- Turmeric
- Flour
- Baking soda

Prepare a half-and-half mixture of soy sauce and mirin, and add a generous quantity (several tablespoons) of garam masala and a little turmeric.
Briefly marinate the tofu cubes in the sauce
Coat the tofu with a half-and-half mixture of flour and baking soda.
Deep-fry and serve, either plain or over rice.

Japanese miso soup
- Sweet potatoes (or potatoes or yams), cut into bite-sized pieces
- Carrots, thinly sliced
- Shitake mushrooms, sliced
- Komatsuna (any leafy green vegetable will do - spinach, cabbage, etc.), in large pieces
- Miso paste

Fill a pot with enough water for four servings of soup. Add the prepared sweet potatoes and carrots, and bring the water to a boil.
After the carrots and potatoes are fully cooked, add the shitake mushrooms.
After the mushrooms are tender, add the leafy green vegetable. Cook for about 1 minute, then turn off the heat (careful - if you cook leafy vegetables too long, they will wilt).
Immediately add the miso paste to taste by stirring the miso into the soup through a strainer. Place the miso in a strainer, then hold the strainer over the soup so that the miso is just submerged - using a wooden spoon, stir the miso until it dissolves. (Miso will lose its flavor if cooked too long, so make sure to add the miso right before serving.)
Serve immediately.

Good luck, and enjoy!

Why local food matters

2010-04-20T03:25:00.000-07:00

At ARI, we talk a lot about strengthening or revitalizing local networks of food production, marketing, and consumption in order to provide a greater degree of food security to local communities in countries around the world (not just in developing countries, but in Japan and the United States as well). But why are local food networks important? As someone whose food now comes almost exclusively from my own community (i.e. the ARI farm), I find that eating locally produced food deepens my understanding of the seed-to-plate process and my appreciation for the food itself. I now know how onions are grown; I understand why organic food is sometimes more expensive than chemically-produced food (many extra man-hours of thinning and applying compost and weeding and weeding...); I know the difference between varieties of sweet potatoes; I know how long it takes for a spinach plant to mature.

But for many others, especially the participants and their home communities, having access to locally produced food can mean the difference between having enough food and going hungry. If there is no local source of food, communities must rely on imports, which are often prohibitively expensive. One of my high school friends, Jess, is currently studying and traveling in Africa under a Watson Fellowship - she wrote the following about her experiences at food markets in Liberia and Rwanda:

"This afternoon, I went to Nyabugogo market to pick up some fresh vegetables, and I suddenly understood in a very concrete way why farming matters in developing countries. Here in Rwanda – land of terraced hills and industrious yeoman farmers — I paid 350 Rwf (around 60 cents) for a kilo of tomatoes. In Liberia – land of rubber plantations and untouched forest – a pound of tomatoes costs 150 LD (about $2.15). Given the pound-kilo conversion, this means that Liberian tomatoes are roughly eight times the price of their Rwandan counterparts. In other words, tomatoes sold from wheelbarrows in the streets of Liberia — a country where 95% of the population lives on less than $2 a day – cost more than tomatoes in my local Safeway back home."

Due to the recent civil war and various other economic and political crises, Liberia has a very weak agricultural sector, which is mostly oriented towards export of a few cash crops rather than towards domestic consumption. The result: expensive tomatoes. Again, as Jess wrote:

"Everything is imported. This was sort of true in Aceh [Indonesia], but Monrovia [Liberia] takes it to a completely different level. A quick inventory of the groceries I bought yesterday: tea from Sri Lanka (with labeling in Sinhala and, inexplicably, Russian), rice from the US (labeled in Arabic), lemonade from Cyprus, juice from South Africa, lentils from someplace Spanish-speaking, spices and Cream of Wheat from Lebanon, and jam from Belgium. (The fresh bread, bananas, and ginger were presumably from here in Liberia.) Unsurprisingly, my grocery bills are painfully high."

Again and again, participants recount similar stories of one-crop, export-oriented farmers in their communities who can not afford to feed their own families because they must buy expensive, imported food. "How is it that farmers cannot even feed themselves?" So for me, eating local food is a way of reconnecting with the reality of natural food production - for much of the world, it's a means of survival.

はなみ: Cherry-blossom viewing

2010-04-18T21:50:00.000-07:00

One beautiful spring day in Japan, the farm staff took a quick break from the normal routine to enjoy the cherry blossoms...

よこそ: Welcome!

2010-04-18T02:16:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, we officially welcomed the class of 2010 participants into the ARI community! This year, we have 30 participants from 17 different countries (Brazil, Cambodia, Cameroon, Congo, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, Kiribati, Liberia, Malawi, Myanmar, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Zambia). Ages range from 21 to 50; spiritual backgrounds vary from Christian (the vast majority) to Hindu to atheist; favorite foods range from rice to cornmeal mash to spicy spicy curry to chickens' feet. But for the next few months, we'll all live together in small dorms on a small campus in a small town in rural Japan.

Participants waiting to introduce themselves during the ceremony

Ishiyama-san, Onasaki-san, and Ito-san: The three musketeers/commuting Japanese volunteers of the farm section

The class of 2010!

Sumathi (Sri Lanka), Nilushi (Sri Lanka), me (in Nepalese dress), Hniang (Myanmar), and Hgun (Myanmar)

The two Johns: John from Congo and Jon from the U.S.

Welcome!

Happy Easter!

2010-04-04T01:13:00.000-07:00

This Easter season marks many new beginnings. As ARI celebrates the Resurrection and the beginning of new spiritual life, we also greet the beginning of the next growing season and the arrival of the new 2010 participants. The happy concurrence of all these events reminds me of one of my favorite Easter hymns:

"Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain,
Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green."
- Hymn 204

I celebrated this Easter in the typical way by going to church and then eating too much sugar. In Japan, I usually attend the nearby United Church of Christ church for weekly services, but today I wanted more "smells and bells" (or High Church ceremony) than the UCC church offers, so I joined the Catholics for mass. The Catholic church turned out to be a wonderful, lively mix of cultures - Japanese, Brazilian, Indian, American, and Philippino! The mass was conducted by two priests (American and Brazilian) in Japanese and Portuguese, with smatterings of English; hymns were sung in Filipino and Hindi; the Gospel was read in Japanese by an American and in English by an Indian. It was a striking example of the original sense of "catholic," which means "universal" in Greek.

After church, we came back to ARI for an American-style Easter egg hunt! The volunteers had hard boiled and decorated over 60 eggs from our ducks the day before - now the participants had to find the eggs hidden around the farm (in the pig pen, the chicken house, the green house...). None of the participants had ever heard of an Easter egg hunt before, so I enjoyed introducing them to one of my favorite Easter traditions.

Sumathi (Sri Lanka)

Reina (Japan)

Ellie (Japan) and Nami (Japan) with the post-hunt cookies (the delicious cause of my aforementioned sugar overdose...)

Happy Easter!

A day in pictures

2010-04-01T03:45:00.000-07:00

On a typical day at ARI:

6:00 My alarm goes off...

6:22 ... I finally finish with my snooze button routine and roll out of bed.

6:30 I rush out to the courtyard for morning exercises, the rajio taiso routine broadcast over Japanese national public radio. Five minutes of waving our arms around to cheerful commands (ichi, ni, san, shi!) accompanied by graceful piano music.

6:35 Off to morning Food-Life Work. This month, I'm part of the meal service crew, so I head to the kitchen to make breakfast. Usually soup, vegetable stir-fry, and some variation on scrambled eggs à la américain.

Acivo (India) cooking up some veggies

10:00 After breakfast and morning gathering, the day's work begins. For farm volunteers, "work" means anything from sowing spinach or transplanting broccoli, packing silage for the livestock, plowing, sorting harvested soy beans, weeding, digging trenches, collecting leaves for compost, preserving sweet potato, applying compost to the fields... Last Monday, I spent the morning helping Jil weigh the pigs.

Two-week old piglets in the kotatsu (heated) box

One-month old piglets waiting to be weighed

Jil (the Philippines) weighing the piglets

12:30 Lunch! Rice and maybe curry, stir fried vegetables, soup, delicious sweet potato tempura, or homemade udon noodles...

Spring greens tempura

1:30 Farm work continues. On Monday, we sowed potatoes in several ARI fields in town. (The German farm volunteer, Felix, was extremely excited about this day - proving that some stereotypes are true).

One of our wheat fields in town

Preparing the field for May Queen potatoes

Koki (Japan) and Felix (Germany) sowing some spuds

The view from our field (if you can look through the power lines, the mountains are gorgeous!)

Taking an afternoon tea break with hot (or at least warm...) water courtesy of our solar-cooker

5:00 I finish with the daily farm work and go back to the kitchen for my evening Food-Life Work. On Monday, we had a community gambarimasho! (let's do our best!) party to celebrate the imminent arrival of the 2010 participants. We celebrated in typical Japanese fashion by making gyoza! I like to think of gyoza (dumplings that can be steamed, boiled, or fried) as the Japanese equivalent of pizza - there are countless varieties of fillings (from the more common pork with cabbage to the more unusual tofu with cheese or beef with Korean kimchi...), it's delicious but not so good for the health, and the Japanese tend to eat gyoza in large quantities with ample amounts of beer or sake. For our party, we made over 300 gyoza dumplings by hand... and they all disappeared within the first ten minutes of dinner.

Aya (Japan), Jon (America), and Benjamin (Germany) making gyoza

Satomi (Japan) and Moe (Japan) with the finished products

7:00 After dinner ends, we have free time until the buildings are locked at 9:30. I usually spend the evenings reading, talking with other volunteers around our wood stove, or doing yoga. We also have a weekly Japanese-English exchange group, where, with the help of many patient friends / teachers, I try to improve my "ARI Japanese."

And rinse and repeat! With such a busy schedule, the days seem to fly by - in some ways, it's hard to believe that I've now been in Japan for six months. I realized today, as I introduced some of the new participants to chopsticks and onigiri (rice balls), that Japanese life really feels normal. (So much so that I have to consciously restrain myself from using Japanese catchphrases when I speak to friends and family at home...) That being said, I do miss the U.S. and all my friends very much. I'm looking forward to sharing some of my new Japanese-ness with everyone in the fall!

Rice 101

2010-03-22T03:02:00.000-07:00

Before I came to Japan, I didn't have much respect for rice. Most of the rice I'd eaten in the U.S. had been mushy and without much flavor - I much preferred pasta or bread.

Of course in Japan, rice is king. No meal is complete without rice, and the Japanese seem to have a special fondness for their staple food that's beyond anything Americans feel for our cuisine. As one Japanese woman told me, "Even if we have plenty of other food, without rice, we feel like we do not have enough to eat." Even beyond cuisine, rice occupies a privileged place in Japanese culture. In Japanese, the kanji, Chinese character, for man (男) combines the characters for rice paddy (田) and power (カ) - so maleness literally translates to power for the rice paddy. And in general, the character for rice paddy is used in most words or expressions related to rural life - field (畑), village (里), hometown (田舎). The traditional religion Shinto also uses rice, either the grains itself or the straw, as sacred offerings and as a symbol to mark barriers between the external world and the sacred grounds of shrines.

A tori (the barrier marking the entrance of a Shinto shrine) in Takayama adorned with a rice-straw rope

So even though younger Japanese are eating less and less rice (largely due to the influence of Western culture - including the U.S. government's decision during the post-war occupation to add bread to school lunch menus), rice is still an everyday part of living in Japan. As the farm is now starting to prepare for this year's rice crop, I'd like to share a little of what I've learned about rice during my six months in Japan.

First of all, there are several different varieties of the plant itself. Today, most Japanese farmers grow only japonica, which is the short-grain, slightly sticky variety that most of us associate with sushi. Japonica can be eaten as either brown rice (simply removed of its chaff, or outer husk) or white rice (with the bran, the inner husk and the germ, removed by a polishing process). While most people prefer white japonica, unpolished brown japonica has a higher nutritional value. Japonica also comes in a stickier variety, called mochigome, which is used to make the traditional sweet rice cakes known as mochi. In addition to japonica, Japan also produces several heirloom varieties of rice, including black rice and red rice. Of all the varieties, red rice is by far my favorite - it has a lovely bran-like, almost nutty, taste and a slightly sticker texture than normal japonica. Unfortunately, it's also the rarest variety. Even many Japanese had never had red rice before coming to ARI.

Besides being the staple carbohydrate, rice is also processed to create any number of sweets and snacks. Mochigome is pounded into mochi (see pictures below), which can be eaten in any number of ways - as daifuku (my favorite! Soft mochi dumplings with sweet filling), in savory soups, or even with ice cream. Rice is also processed into rice flour, which is used to make sweet dango dumplings or crunchy senbei rice crackers. And of course, we mustn't forget sake, rice wine, which still seems to be the national favorite when it comes to alcohol.

Benjamin (Germany) merrily pounding the mochi during our community mochi-making in January

Aya (Japan) making dumplings from the pounded mochi in the kitchen

An example of traditional mochi sweets (the pink cakes wrapped in leaves on the right) from our inn in Nagano. Delicious!

Colorful kegs of sake at a Shinto shrine in Tokyo

So back to ARI: The rice won't be transplanted to the paddies until May, but we've already started preparing the paddies and the seedlings for the growing season. The farm section worked throughout the winter digging irrigation ditches in the newest ARI paddy; we collected and sieved paddy soil to use for the rice seedlings; and we've already released aigamo (a flightless breed of duck) into one of the paddies as weed management. This weekend, we also selected the rice seeds for the year from the unhusked grains remaining from last year's harvest. Usually, you can use around 30% of harvested rice as seeds for the next crop. This coming week, the farm section will sow the seedlings in the greenhouse, where they can grow in comfort until transplanting in May.

Gussan (Japan) releasing the aigamo into the paddy

As the rice season approaches, I'm constantly surprised, even amazed, by the importance many of the Japanese at ARI attach to the rice harvest. For them, growing rice is about more than just providing food - it's an activity of emotional importance. As the Japanese crops manager told me last week, "To me, sowing the rice every year is a special chance. Who knows how many times in our lives we will have the chance to sow rice - maybe 50, maybe 60 times?" He said he understands other crops, but "rice is a mystery to me. [Even after several years growing rice,] I still don't understand how it works."

Although I don't quite understand the connection he feels to rice, it makes me think that I should be more aware of and more thankful for the food I eat. As we say before every meal in Japan, itadakimasu! (Thank you for what I am about to receive)

Back in Tochigi...

2010-03-12T16:34:00.000-08:00

My dad left Japan last week, after a whirl-wind tour that included Tokyo, Nagano prefecture, and ARI. We saw a traditional kabuki performance at Tokyo's most famous theater; we toured plum-blossom bedecked shrines and moss-covered temples; we saw the famous onsen monkeys of Nagano; we ate more delicious Japanese food than we should have (including parts of tuna that I didn't even know were edible...). And my dad worked as a volunteer at ARI for one day, joining the daily farm work and helping us put up greenhouses for the spring seedlings. It was wonderful to spend some time with family after five months apart, and I really enjoyed showing my dad around my new home.

Part of our traditional kaiseki dinner in Nagano

Monkey!

Exploring the mossy Buddhist temples of Kamakura

Matsumoto castle in Nagano prefecture

In front of the central Shinto shrine in Kamakura

Shibuya crossing, Tokyo in the rain

Watching my dad, the ever-curious and ever-adventurous, explore Japan reminded me that my year at ARI is a precious opportunity to explore, to grow, to get out there and try new things. He saw every experience during our trip as a way to learn more about Japan and about how the Japanese view the world. Even the most mundane daily activities - riding the bus, pushing our way through a crowded Tokyo subway station, eating ramen noodles - became a way to explore Japanese culture. His excitement and curiosity made me realize that I'd become somewhat passive during the slow and sometimes lonely winter months at ARI. I missed my friends and family at home, I was a little bored with winter farm work (not as active or as fun as growing-season work), and I started to just drift. My dad's fresh enthusiasm reminded me that I need to make the most of my time in Japan with this amazing group of people - otherwise I'll have missed an invaluable opportunity.

So now I'm getting psyched again. My roommate and I are starting to plan our individual vegetable plot (squash, snow peas, bell peppers?), which I'm hoping to manage using natural farming methods that don't rely on compost or heavy cultivation so that I can transfer my experience to the U.S. next year. I'm continuing to work on my Japanese (にほんごを　べんきょうしる). I'm enjoying doing yoga every day with several other volunteers. And, as always, I'm continuing to learn about food, food security, and what "development" means for people around the world. The new class of participants arrive in just three weeks, and the sakura (cherry) blossoms will be coming just behind them - it's a time of new beginnings, and I'm excited to see what the next months have in store for me.

Spring!

2010-02-25T03:32:00.000-08:00

Spring has sprung at ARI! I've been enjoying the small joys of the changing seasons: eating a sweet, sweet carrot pulled fresh from the field; feeling the sun on my arms for the first time in months; smelling that subtle spring scent in the air. As farm works starts to begin again in earnest, I realize how much I've learned from ARI. Not only am I more knowledgeable about farming and international development, I'm also much more physically confident than I was five months ago. I can milk a cow. I can drive stick (I've come a long way since this past summer, when my intrepid teacher had to grab the wheel to prevent me from backing into a fence... Now I get to tool around town in a beat-up Toyota pick-up, running farm errands among the 7-11's and karaoke bars). I can plow a field. I can deal with hungry pigs, flighty chickens, and feisty calves. I feel comfortable here, sometimes to a degree that surprises me.

I'll be away from ARI and this blog for about a week - my father is coming to Japan! He'll make an appearance at ARI as a working visitor, so maybe I'll have some good stories for my next post...

Food for thought

2010-02-14T03:13:00.000-08:00

At ARI, we talk a lot about food - about food production, access to food, food consumption, food culture. Underneath all the discussions of how to raise tomatoes or chickens, of how to process miso or kiwi jam, lies the Big Question: How can we achieve sustainability in food production? Will the earth be able to support the next generation?

I found an interesting article published by Science that gives an overview of the sustainability question and proposes some possible paths to future food security. One path involves closing the "yield gap," the "the difference between realized productivity and the best that can be achieved using current genetic material and available technologies and management." As the article explains,

"Low yields occur because of technical constraints that prevent local food producers from increasing productivity or for economic reasons arising from market conditions. For example, farmers may not have access to the technical knowledge and skills required to increase production, the finances required to invest in higher production (e.g., irrigation, fertilizer, machinery, crop-protection products, and soil-conservation measures), or the crop and livestock varieties that maximize yields. After harvest or slaughter, they may not be able to store the produce or have access to the infrastructure to transport the produce to consumer markets... It has been estimated that in those parts of Southeast Asia where irrigation is available, average maximum climate-adjusted rice yields are 8.5 metric tons per hectare, yet the average actually achieved yields are 60% of this figure… Substantially more food, as well as the income to purchase food, could be produced with current crops and livestock if methods were found to close the yield gaps."

ARI is trying to close the yield gap by teaching farmers about more efficient methods of rice cultivation, more effective means of fertilizer application, more lucrative ways of processing and storing harvested crops. Sustainability must start at the local level of individual farmers and individual farms. As one staff member told me, "It's not about feeding the world, it's about feeding one community at a time." I'm still unsure what I think about food security issues (particularly about the ability of organic farming to feed communities on a large scale), but I feel lucky to live in a community where I have the opportunity to reevaluate my relationship with food.

Winterlude

2010-02-06T15:57:00.000-08:00

It's been a quiet week at ARI. The winter vegetables sit half-frozen in their beds, and the staff and volunteers scurry around campus with their shoulders hunched against the cold. ARI seems to conserving energy for the work that will begin again in April, when the next class of participants arrive.

But farm work continues! Wheat and garlic are quietly growing in the fields, and we continue to harvest carrots and broccoli. Mostly, we're preparing the fields for the next growing season (digging irrigation ditches in the rice paddies, cleaning fields of plant debris, applying compost, making organic fertilizer) and processing the crops from last season (sorting red beans and black beans, drying sweet potatoes and radishes). We've also been helping out the livestock section. Last week, I helped weigh the pigs, pack silage (fermented corn feed for the animals during the winter months), and transfer chicks from the hatching house to the chicken pen. So I'm getting more familiar with the animals - this suburban girl can now catch a chicken like a pro.

Thanks to the slower pace, I've also had more time to just enjoy being in Japan. I've been to a sado (a traditional tea ceremony); I've learned how to make mochi (sticky rice cake) and miso (fermented soy bean paste); and I've been enjoying the wonder that is onsen (natural hot springs). Japan is starting to feel normal. I can now pick up individual soy beans with chopsticks, and I apparently bow to the sales clerk an average of four times when checking out at the grocery store.

Our sado hosts

Our delicious post-tea brunch - sticky rice with red beans, sweet soy beans, and pickled vegetables

And yesterday, we got to play hooky for a community cross-country ski day in neighboring Fukushima prefecture. Most of the group (which included staff from the Philippines and Myanmar) had never been skiing, so we cheerfully bungled our way down the course, poles flailing and ski tips pointing in all the wrong directions. (I turned out to be the best skiier of the bunch, so you know it was a bit of a fiasco!) It was a fun change from farm work, and the landscape was beautiful - mountains of white birch trees and gray ash, valleys of white snow and gray snow sky. A soothing sight for this wanna-be New Hampshirite far from the snowy north country.

Getting ready for skiing in front of the main building...

I hope everyone in the Washington, D.C. area is enjoying "snowmageddon!" Get some sledding in for me.

Change?

2010-01-23T16:02:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, one of the staff members (a fellow American from South Dakota) said the mission of ARI is to see the potential of every community member, whether participant or staff or temporary working visitor, and to support that community member in the struggle to realize his or her "the latent excellence." For many of us, Steven said, that struggle involves change - change that is often painful, that we often resist - because developing our potential means learning to think less of how to serve ourselves and more of how to serve others. As Steven said, "As babies, we are self-centered beings. We rely on others to serve us - there is no other way for us to survive. As we get older, we gradually begin to look outside of ourselves. We begin to serve others... I hope to die without a selfish thought in my head."

I've heard similar speeches many times before, but, surrounded by a community of people who have dedicated months or years to serving others, Steven's words really struck me. I sought this opportunity to challenge myself, to live and work with people from all over the world, to listen to their stories, but am I really open to change? ARI has already changed me, in ways both small and large, but will I work to keep that change alive once I return home? Or will I return to a way of living that is more comfortable, with fewer questions?

Food for thought.

And for some thoughts on food and food production, I read an article this afternoon that examines the threat agricultural pesticides pose to many animal species, species as diverse as seals, frogs, bats, and honeybees. According to the article:

"Today, drips and puffs of pesticides surround us everywhere, contaminating 90 percent of the nation’s major rivers and streams, more than 80 percent of sampled fish, and one-third of the nation’s aquifers. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, fish and birds that unsuspectingly expose themselves to this chemical soup die by the millions every year.

But as regulators grapple with the lethal dangers of pesticides, scientists are discovering that even seemingly benign, low-level exposures to pesticides can affect wild creatures in subtle, unexpected ways — and could even be contributing to a rash of new epidemics pushing species to the brink of extinction."

Does anyone remember the Haagen Dazs "save the honeybee" campaign? Several years ago, Haagen Dazs began soliciting money for research on honeybees (honey is an essential ingredient for much of their ice cream), after 35 percent of the domestic U.S. honeybee population died between 2006 and 2009 due to a mysterious new disease. Many scientists now believe that agricultural pesticides, particularly a new class of pesticides based on nicotine, killed the bees rather than disease. (For more details, please read the article here).

It seems that change is needed.

Haiti

2010-01-13T19:57:00.000-08:00

As I'm sure many of you have heard, Haiti was struck by a magnitude 7 earthquake on Tuesday, January 12. It was the strongest earthquake to hit the island in two hundred years. Thousands are estimated to have been killed, and much of Haiti (particularly the capital, Port-au-Prince) is reported to be in ruins.

Two YASCers, Mallory and Jude, are currently serving at an Anglican seminary in Port-au-Prince. Both fortunately survived (please see link for more details) the earthquake, although the seminary and other church buildings were badly damaged. Please pray for them.

Japan, then and now

2010-01-09T00:58:00.000-08:00

Just for fun: I stumbled across this photo from 1934 while doing some research online. It's of the Asakusa Nakamise, the alley of vendors leading up to the famous Buddhist temple Senso-ji in Asakusa, Tokyo. I was there just two weeks ago with Eric - a fun comparison shot.

1934

2009

Now off to a New Year's dinner with the Japanese staff! I've heard there will be lots of traditional Japanese food - nabe (hot-pot stew), kuromame (sweet black beans, a standard New Year's dish), udon noodles... yum.

Food for thought

2010-01-08T22:13:00.000-08:00

My mom (the ever-faithful newspaper clipper) sent me an interesting article this week about a farmer named Joel Salatin in southern Virginia who sees sustainable agriculture and environmental stewardship as an issue of Christian duty. As Salatin states in the article,

"We should at least be asking, Is there a righteous way to farm and an unrighteous way to farm? ... The first goal is to at least get people to appreciate that how we farm is a moral question. Once you get to that point, then you can actually discuss: What is a moral farm?"

For Salatin, "righteous" farming means using agricultural practices that are sustainable ("We believe that the farm should be building ‘forgiveness’ into the ecosystem. What does that mean? That a more forgiving ecosystem is one that can better handle drought, flood, disease, pestilence.") and respectful of the dignity of every living creature ("A culture that views its life [commercial livestock] from such a manipulative, disrespectful stance will soon view its citizens the same way and other cultures the same way. It’s how we respect the least of these that creates a moral-ethical framework."). Its farming that acknowledges the blessings, but also the frailties, of Creation.

Food for thought, certainly, that adds another dimension to the sustainability debate. As the ARI farm manager said this week, "Sustainable farming is farming for the seventh generation... We did not receive the land from our ancestors, we are borrowing it from our children." When you place agriculture and environmental stewardship in that perspective, it does become a moral issue.

おいしい!

2010-01-02T18:33:00.000-08:00

Delicious!

I found a website with some examples of how the Japanese prepare vegetables. These are all very common Japanese dishes, things that I've eaten countless times at ARI. My absolute favorite is komatsuna with sesame sauce (komatsuna no goma-ae). Some of the vegetables listed might be difficult to find in the U.S., but you can easily substitute spinach for komatsuna, butternut squash for kabocha, and radish for daikon (if you try the daikon, I would serve with the spicy miso sauce described in the recipe below to give it more taste).

So if you ever have a hankering for some Japanese food, please try!:

http://www.savoryjapan.com/recipes/vegetables/vegetables.html

Happy New Year!

2010-01-01T17:10:00.000-08:00

January 1st marks three months since I arrived at the Asian Rural Institute. As I look back at 2009 and the events that brought me to Japan, I must give a huge shout of thanks to all my supporters for enabling me to come and work with this incredible community of activists. Thanks to your generosity, I will enter 2010 with over $9,600 raised – only $400 to go! Thank you for your financial support, for your kind emails, for your thoughts and prayers. Your warm and generous partnership in this mission makes living 6,000 miles from my family and friends possible.

By sponsoring this farm volunteer, you are helping ARI provide thirty dedicated activists with the technical training and leadership skills necessary to realize their dreams for their communities. Their dreams are big. One woman wants to start a demonstration poultry farm for her village, so that farmers will have both a secure source of protein and a reliable source of income. Another participant wants to teach farmers in his community to make and use organic fertilizers, which are safer and cheaper than the conventional chemical fertilizers. And another participant wants to establish commercial contacts between churches in his rural diocese and the city, eliminating the need for the middlemen and helping farmers in his community to break the cycle of debt and poverty. This class of participants graduated on December 12th, proud of their achievements at ARI and impatient to return to their countries to start their work. Thank you for supporting them in their training at ARI!

Some pictures from the Commencement ceremony:

Pre-Commencement gathering

Kingsley (Ghana), me (in Sri Lankan sari), and Reverend Edo (Togo)

Josephine (Sierra Leone), Swae (Thailand), Christy (Cameroon), and Edo (Togo)

A proud Kini (Myanmar) with ARI staff member Tomoko-san

Kingsley (Ghana) and Ruth (Myanmar) with their diplomas!

I’m looking forward to the adventures that 2010 holds in store. The spirit of ARI has already challenged and inspired me, and I expect it will continue to do. Best wishes to all for the New Year!

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-27T17:40:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the long absence - I left the farm for a two-week tour of Japan with my boyfriend, Eric. Kyoto, Takayama, and Tokyo! I enjoyed getting a taste of the Japan outside of ARI - Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, big cities and quiet mountains towns, udon and mochi sweets. Japan is a beautiful country, and I'm looking forward to exploring more during my remaining nine months here.

Some things I learned about Japan:

- The Japanese are extremely generous people. When I had trouble using a public pay phone to call home, one Japanese woman spent twenty minutes helping me figure out the right calling codes! Twenty minutes! Once when we were consulting our map in Kyoto, one Japanese man stopped without being asked to see if we needed help... And the examples go on.

- If you travel with a 6'4" guy, people will come up to you in the supermarket and ask if you're American - just because, as one Japanese gentlemen said, "you're so tall!"

- Offering cheap packaged junk food at temples and shrines seems to be totally acceptable. We saw so many lovely old Buddhist stone deities surrounded by 7-11 sweets!

- Japan is not ARI. I already knew this, but it was reinforced by seeing the incredible amount of packaging that went into everything, the American-like commercial emphasis on newer and better, the constant consumption.

Now I'm back at ARI, although it's very different from the ARI I left two weeks ago. The participants have all returned to their home countries, so we (the staff and volunteers) now face a three month hiatus before the next class arrives in April. I'm hoping the slower winter pace will give me time to learn more about farming and about how ARI operates.

Merry Christmas to all!

A splendid vegetation

2009-12-09T02:49:00.000-08:00

This week, the participants presented their dreams for the future of their communities. The one theme uniting all of the presentations was the need for food security - moving from a reliance on imported food toward true self-sufficiency in food production at the local level. Toward a splendid vegetation.

Ezekiel 34: ²⁶I will make them and the region around my hill a blessing; and I will send down the showers in their season; they shall be showers of blessing. ²⁷The trees of the field shall yield their fruit, and the earth shall yield its increase. They shall be secure on their soil; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I break the bars of their yoke, and save them from the hands of those who enslaved them. ²⁸They shall no more be plunder for the nations, nor shall the animals of the land devour them; they shall live in safety, and no one shall make them afraid. ²⁹I will provide for them splendid vegetation, so that they shall no more be consumed with hunger in the land, and no longer suffer the insults of the nations. ³⁰They shall know that I, the Lord their God, am with them.

Amen.

Organic?

2009-12-03T04:08:00.000-08:00

Today, it seems like the word "organic" is on everyone's lips. It's in the grocery stores, in ads, in the newspapers. Before I came to ARI, I was interested in organic food and organic farming, but I suspected the organic movement might be the child of the non-farming middle-class - certainly a well-meaning, even admirable project, but maybe not economically sound for the majority of farmers in the Philippines or Kenya or China. Organic food in New Hampshire was almost always more expensive than the non-organic option. Organic restaurants (like the delicious Farmer's Dinner in Queeche, for those still in the area) could only be occasional treats for college students like me. How could farmers in poor communities afford to grow such expensive crops?

At ARI, I'm gradually learning what the label "organic" actually means. It means using non-chemical fertilizer - what we call bokashi at ARI, a fertilizer made of chicken manure, soil, rice husk charcoal, microorganisms, and fermented plant juice. It means weeding each bed, rather than just applying pesticides. It means time-intensive work, but delicious vegetables - the carrots here are so sweet, you can smell them as you pull them out of the soil!

But does organic farming actually benefit farmers?

I'm starting to think so. Today, I listened to some of the participants talk about how they will use the training in organic farming and community organizing they received at ARI in their home countries. One woman from Sri Lanka talked about the problems in her community related to the use of agricultural chemicals - about how chemicals had caused strange health conditions (headaches, fatigue, and even paralysis!) and had exhausted the soil. For her community, organic farming is simply safer and smarter than chemical farming. It will protect both the health and the future livelihood of her children. Living in the US, relatively protected from industrial or agricultural chemicals, I often forget about the harmful effects chemicals have on both the human and natural environment. I forget that for many farmers, organic farming is not just about a healthier or tastier product, but about a safe and sustainable lifestyle. Going organic can also reduce farmers' expenses. Chemical fertilizer must be bought, and it is often expensive. Organic fertilizer can be produced by the farmer using local resources (chicken manure if the farmer raises chickens, pig manure if he raises pigs, etc.) at very low cost. Of course producing organic fertilizer takes more time and labor than simply buying chemical fertilizer, but it could ultimately help farmers become more economically self-sufficient.

That being said, I'm also learning at ARI that the spirit behind the organic label matters. One staff member shared parts of the book The Omnivore's Dilemma with us last week. In that book, the author talks about "oil-soaked organic lettuce," lettuce produced by enormous organic farms in the United States that are simply conventional farms without the chemicals. The farms may not use chemical fertilizers or pesticides, but they still use huge quantities of oil to fuel their farm equipment, and they exhaust the soil by monocropping (growing only one type of vegetable instead of rotating crops annually). Environmentally, they don't quite give off the fuzzy green glow that the organic label suggests...

So it's a complicated issue. And right now, I feel very much uniformed. I'm trying to educate myself about farming and about how farming impacts the current discussions about environmental sustainability, energy security, and green living - and most importantly about how farming can become a tool for development, for improving the lives of the participants I am lucky enough to live with.

Wishing everyone a happy weekend!
And: "Slow down. It's Advent."

Meet the participants

2009-11-28T10:01:00.000-08:00

Every morning, ARI comes together after breakfast for morning gathering, which is a chance for one of the community members (participants, staff, volunteers) to share something about his- or herself. It's a time to reflect about our time here at ARI and about what we want to do after ARI. This morning, one of the participants spoke about the political situation in his country. First, he asked everyone to put away their digital cameras (most participants record the morning gatherings), because he was afraid that someone would post the video online and that his government would find it. "If they find it, I go to heaven too soon," he joked. "I don't want to go to heaven, I want to do development." He then talked about growing up in a country without an effective government. He talked about political turmoil, about fleeing his village with his family as a child due to government persecution, about demonstrating as a student, about hiding and fighting in the jungle as a rebel. He said that, after years of armed resistance, he decided to turn to development work. As he described it, both seek to build community in a country without an independent civil society, but development work is more effective because the government doesn't try to kill development workers.

I had read in the papers about the political situation in this participant's country, but hearing about day-to-day life under a violent, despotic government from an actual person was shocking. This man will return to his country in three weeks and continue his work with an NGO - his courage amazes me. He knows that when he enters his country, his USB drives will be wiped, his email will again be subject to surveillance, his organization will be monitored by the government. "Sometimes I still want to fight," he told me. I asked if he thought development work is more effective than fighting. "Yes," he replied, "because then no one dies."

The participants here at ARI are amazing, inspiring people. They left their countries nine months ago to participate in an intensive community development training project in rural Japan. Most of them had never left their countries before - leaving their families and communities required a huge leap of faith. All of them have a deep commitment to service in their communities, whether that service be through agricultural or development work, through teaching, or through religious leadership. The man I wrote about above works for an NGO involved in providing rural communities with access to education. Others work with micro-financing operations, with liaison offices connecting farmers with the government, with public schools, with churches and individual parishes.

Pikolo from Kenya

Shelia from Myanmar

Maiko from Japan and Marie from the Philippines

Kingsley from Ghana and Ruth from Myanmar at the Halloween party

The participants will return to their countries in just two weeks! After two months in ARI, I feel like I'm just starting to know these people - I wish they could stay in Japan a little longer.

Welcome to the farm

2009-11-27T21:01:00.000-08:00

I thought I would take advantage of the gorgeous fall weather to take some pictures of the ARI farm. The ARI campus is not just the farm (the main office, kitchen, chapel, and dorms are also on campus), but the farm is the focus of my life here as a farm volunteer.

Crops and veggies: ARI has fields both on ARI campus and around the town of Nasushiobara. We grow over twenty different types of crops, ranging from rice and wheat to sweet potatoes and broccoli to persimmons and kiwi. Our harvest goes to feed the ARI community (we supplied an estimated $150,000 in food to the ARI kitchen last year!) and to local consumers (so the farm section generates income for ARI). For the participants, the farm functions as their outdoor classroom - they have morning and evening farm work, and they also manage their own plots of land. But since the participants also have classroom work and cannot always be on the farm, volunteers like me provide the extra hands needed to keep the farm running. During my two months at ARI, I've sown Chinese cabbage and spinach, harvested tomatoes and carrots, dug storage trenches for taro, cleared fields, threshed soybeans... it's an ever-changing job!

Soy beans in the greenhouse, post threshing

A participant field, the "Garden of Rejoice"

A row of broccoli in the field

The vegetable harvest arranged for the kitchen

Livestock: ARI also raises chickens, ducks, fish, cows, and pigs. We have 900 chickens, around 50 ducks, two ponds of carp, and around 30 pigs. ARI butchers our own chickens and ducks, but the pigs are sent out to the local slaughter house due to government regulations (which suits me - I'd rather not have to slaughter a 400 pound pig!). Just like with the crops and veggies, participants are responsible for managing portions of the livestock section as part of their training. Volunteers rotate sections every month - this month, I'm in Fish and Duck, which means that I feed the ducks and the fish every morning and evening with one of the participants.

The view down to the duck pen from my bedroom window

One of the pigpens

Piglets! Just over 2 months old.

The entrance to the fish pond area

A ukokkei chicken, a special Japanese breed of chicken

So welcome to the farm!

Playing catch-up

2009-11-27T20:43:00.001-08:00

First, apologies for my long absence! November was a very busy month at ARI - the participants left for a tour of western Japan, leaving the staff and volunteers with a little extra work around campus. So now you get several backlogged blogs at once!

I went to Tokyo last weekend to attend a missionary conference in celebration of 150 years of Protestantism in Japan. My first trip to the big city! We started the weekend with a general meeting of the Protestant Church in Japan (the Anglican Church in Japan is actually not included in this grouping of Protestant denominations, but I got to attend the meeting anyway). The meeting, oddly enough, took place in a church in the middle of Shibuya, the equivalent of Times Square in New York City - across from the Apple store, between the Disney Store and the Gap! Although the entire meeting was in Japanese, I still enjoyed the service and learning a little about the history and the activities of Protestants in Japan. I also got to meet a lovely Japanese organist, who, after I told her that I used to play the organ, played my favorite Bach hymn for me! It made me miss playing for services at St. Mary's, my home parish in Virginia.

I also got to do a little sightseeing while in Tokyo - Shibuya, Ginza, Asakusa. Each section of Tokyo that I visited was dramatically different from the last. I'm looking forward to visiting again soon and exploring more! (Although, after the weekend, I was definitely glad to get out of the noise of the city and back to quieter Tochigi prefecture...)

Asakusa shrine

Me and Heejean, a Korean volunteer, in Asakusa

A standard Tokyo scene - a traditional Kabuki theater next to skyscrapers and construction projects

Otherwise, it's pretty much life as usual at ARI. During the participants' trip to western Japan, I got a little taste of what ARI will be like after this year's participants return to their countries in December - quieter, certainly, but also cozier in some ways, as the smaller numbers encourage people to talk more and to share more. I think that by the time the next class of participants arrive in April 2010, I'll know the Japanese staff and the other volunteers much better than I do now.

I hope everyone had a very happy Thanksgiving!

Chickens

2009-11-05T21:48:00.000-08:00

ARI, as I wrote about in my first post, is a training center for rural leaders, a type of agricultural school for those who work with or who advocate for farmers in their home communities. Most of the participants are not actually farmers, but NGO workers in the field of agriculture or community development. They're interested in learning about different agricultural techniques can that benefit their home communities - better ways of irrigating rice, of raising livestock, of processing crops. So the ARI curriculum involves work with vegetable crops (rice, wheat, tomatoes, soy beans, Japanese pumpkin, komatsuna...) and with livestock (chickens, ducks, fish, cows, and pigs).

After a month of working with the veggies, I got to help with the chickens for the first time this week. ARI has over 900 chickens. Participants help incubate and hatch the eggs, raise the chickens, and then butcher the birds for the ARI kitchen. I started with the end of the cycle, as I was asked to help butcher one pen of chickens with some of the other volunteers. (Vegetarian friends and family, please forgive me!) We butchered 44 chickens within two hours - first cutting their windpipes, then plucking them, then disemboweling them and preparing them for the kitchen. I was exhausted by the end, both physically and mentally, but it was a good learning experience. I now have a greater appreciation for every piece of chicken I eat. And a greater understanding of chicken anatomy!

Later in the week, I spent time with some live chickens, collecting eggs and preparing feed and cleaning out the pens. At first, I didn't really enjoy working in the chicken house. Chickens are not very endearing animals. In fact, they remind me of the velociraptors from Jurassic Park, except without the smarts - just try grabbing an egg from under an angry hen, you'll get quite the glare. Then Jackson, a teaching assistant and ARI graduate from Myanmar, started talking about why ARI raises chickens, and I gained a new appreciation for the little dinosaurs.

First, many of the participants have some experience raising chickens, since the birds are a relatively easy source of revenue. But the participants (or their communities) often rely on imported goods to raise their chickens, which makes them dependent on outside resources - so ARI tries to teach the participants how to utilize local resources to make their communities more self-sufficient when it comes to raising chickens. For example, many participants' home communities rely on concentrated feed, which must be imported and is therefore very expensive. So ARI introduces the participants to fermented feed, which is simply fermented food garbage (i.e. compost) from the ARI kitchen - it works just as well as concentrated feed and costs nothing. In addition to basic feed, chickens also need nutritional supplements to help harden their egg shells. Traditionally, many farmers use crushed oyster shells or some other type of imported shell, but ARI uses our own crushed egg shells, collected from the kitchen, as a cost-free alternative. Many of the participants' home communities also buy their chicks rather than incubating eggs from their existing flocks. ARI teaches the participants how to incubate eggs (using both electric and non-electric heaters) in order to reduce costs and resource self-sufficiency. Jackson told me that before coming to ARI, he had bought all his chicks. After graduating from ARI, he was able to hatch his own chicks, and he wrote an article teaching other farmers within his community how to do the same. So there's a lot to learn from these feisty birds (although I still prefer working with the veggies).

In other and totally unrelated news, I got to go hiking! Last weekend, I went to Shiobara with some of the other volunteers to see the beautiful kouyou (changing leaves). Shiobara offered some interesting insights into Japanese culture. First, the Japanese are huge nature enthusiasts - it seemed like half of Tokyo had joined us on this pilgrimage into the mountains. But in spite of this, or perhaps because of this, the nature was not very far removed from all the trappings of modern life. The highways continue almost to the very peaks of the mountains, and all the hiking trails were only a stone's throw from the traffic and restaurants and souvenir shops. Yet somehow, it was still a beautiful place and a very peaceful experience. As the German volunteer on the trip said, "The Japanese have a wonderful ability to block out the ugly things and only see the beautiful" - I guess I was able to enter into that spirit and just enjoy the beauty of the trail, which wound through autumn kouyou and tall cedars, past waterfalls and forest onsen (natural hot springs). The day ended with some delicious soba and my first onsen experience (so relaxing!). All in all, a wonderful day of natural and cultural adventures.

That's the news from Lake Woebegone! Thanks to everyone for all the recent letters and emails - it's so nice to know that people are reading and to hear what's going on back home. I'm thinking of you all...

Happy Halloween!

2009-10-31T16:45:00.000-07:00

They say that Americans abroad are often the most American - I certainly found myself more excited about Halloween this year than I have been since I was five and I got to dress up as a ballerina bunny. So I decided to introduce ARI to our strange American ways by throwing a Halloween party, complete with candy, costumes, and more candy! With the help of some very enthusiastic Japanese volunteers, I made sugar cookies, pumpkin pie (using fresh Japanese pumpkin (kabocha) and fresh orange pumpkin), roasted pumpkin seeds, and caramel - a recipe for an ARI-wide sugar-high. And then we carved pumpkins! Or, as Marie from the Philippines put it, we made "mottainai (wasteful) pumpkins." (I'm hoping to remedy the mottainai factor by chopping up the pumpkins tomorrow and cooking them.) Here are a few pictures of the prep work:

Collecting pumpkin seeds

Nazi from the Philippines

Swae from Thailand carving his pumpkin

My roommate Ayumi and me

The final products!

And the party, to my relief, was a big success! Everyone loved the jack-o'lanterns and the sweets, and most people even showed up in costume. I unfortunately chose the wrong costume - I was a rainbow (wearing every color, including a wonderfully bright yellow jacket), but the participants thought I hadn't dressed up at all! Which tells you a little about ARI fashion. Finally, I place where I can wear all my favorite, bright clothes without attracting odd stares...

Halloween dance party ARI-style! Just imagine a mix of Indian hip-hop, Lady Gaga, and "Country Roads" (for some reason, it's wildly popular in Asia).

Chunxia and Thsushara exchange traditional dresses

I hope everyone back in the States is having a good Halloween weekend!

A good morning

2009-10-27T16:08:00.000-07:00

Today started with one of those mornings that makes you pause and give thanks for the beautiful world around you.

I start every morning in the field, working among the veggies against a backdrop of distant blue mountains. This morning, the peaks of the mountains were covered in storm clouds, while the foothills were glowing in the morning sun. Gorgeous. As I harvested wing beans and red chilies and Chinese cabbage, I felt very close to the mountains. I felt very thankful for my time at ARI.

The pictures don't do justice to the morning light, but here are a few anyway:

Now time for breakfast - itadakimasu!

Almost one month!

2009-10-26T16:43:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I almost forget that I'm in Japan. I'm busy working with people from 20 different countries, learning about how chili sauce is prepared in Myanmar or what plants grow in Nepal or how anti-malaria programs work in Kenya. And tonight we (the Euro-American volunteers) made baguettes with cheese fondue for dinner! True, I hear a lot of Japanese, but I feel very removed from Japanese culture.

And then I go running. Running past fields of rice (harvested earlier this month) and broccoli and cabbage (still un-harvested), past the vending machine pit-stops, past the stunning Nasu mountains. That's when I experience the deepest sense of dislocation - I'm listening to the same running playlist (with M.I.A. and Kayne West, I must admit) but I'm in a totally foreign world. The landscape is different, the buildings are different, even the light is different. That's when I start to think about how I got here. If someone had told me four years ago that I'd spend the year after Dartmouth volunteering as a farm hand in Japan, I don't think I'd have believed them. Me? This Lizzie, the girl from suburban Washington who hates yard work?

So what am I doing here?

Mostly I'm learning. Learning how to distinguish between sweet potato varieties, how to harvest winged bean and egoma, how to make green tomato jam, how to back out of a room so as to properly line up my slippers. Learning how to communicate and share with people from completely different backgrounds and with completely different world views. Learning how to walk rather than dash through life. I'm struggling a little with the last one. I'm a very future-oriented person - always planning for the future, my mind disengaged from the moment (that's why I'm so hopelessly oblivious to my physical surroundings...). At ARI, I sometimes have trouble being truly present. Especially during repetitive farm work, my mind is often off to the next meal or the next day or the next year back in the U.S. - not on the opportunities at hand or the friends present. Not to say that I think I should concentrate on every single edamame that I shuck, but I think my tendency to focus on the next thing prevents me from fully taking advantage of the present. So I need to slow down. I struggled with the same problem during the first few days of Trip to the Sea, a week-long canoe trip that I did last spring down the Connecticut River. We paddled for six to ten hours every day, usually in two- to three-hour stretches. At first, the hours of uninterrupted paddling seemed endless - the same motion repeated again and again, the same scenery sliding by at a walking pace. But then I learned to accept the speed of the canoe and enjoy the slow scenery and the quiet passage of time. I learned to be present on the river. I'm still working on being present in the farm shop...

I'm also here to serve, although most of the time I feel like I'm receiving much more than I'm giving. But the volunteers do help keep the farm running, since the participants divide their time between classroom and field instruction. With the staff, we're often the ones finishing the harvest or processing the crops (today, for example, I threshed egoma, a seed similar to sesame that's used to make cooking oil, and helped husk the rice harvest). And as I learn more about how the farm works, I'm able to be more useful.

Some highlights from the past two weeks:

I turned 23! Thanks to everyone who sent me birthday wishes - it was so wonderful to hear from you all! One of the staff members made me a delicious banana cake, so it was a good day.

Learning how to make jam and yogurt. (Now I can satisfy my yogurt cravings when I get back to the U.S.!)

Celebrating Halloween with some local Japanese children. I was given a Snow White costume (as if I don't already look young enough...), and I handed out chocolates to an adorable parade of pumpkins and black cats.

Looking forward to:

Halloween party! (I'm organizing it with some of the other volunteers, so we'll see what happens. Dancing, sugar cookies, and Japanese sweets will be involved.) Hiking in nearby Nikko. Learning how to drive the farm trucks (although it could be a little hazardous with me behind the wheel of a stick vehicle...).

Right now my stomach is full (onaka ipai!) of delicious cheese fondue, my fingers smell like onion, and my hands are stained from the sweet potato harvest. I'm ready to go to sleep to the sound of the typhoon rain. O yasaumi nasai, friends!

Week two

2009-10-14T02:18:00.000-07:00

Hello again, dear friends!

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.

Welcome to ARI

2009-10-07T03:10:00.000-07:00

Konnichiwa from Japan!

After 29 hours of traveling, I finally arrived at the Asian Rural Institute (ARI) in Nasushiobara, Japan on Friday night. (For a full description of ARI’s mission, please see my first post below) I immediately discovered, just as past volunteers had told me, that ARI is not Japan, but a wonderful and sometimes eccentric mix of cultures. The customs, cuisines, and languages of the participants and the volunteers all blend together to create something uniquely ARI – everyone refers to “ARI English” (a somewhat confusing mix of English and Japanese) or “ARI food” (a fusion that depends on the nationality of that meal’s cook). Since I haven’t yet had a chance to explore what lies beyond the ARI campus, I sometimes find it hard to remember that I’m in Japan!

I was a little at loose ends for my first few days, since participants and volunteers have the weekend off. Fortunately, several of the volunteers (from Germany and Korea) took me under their wing and gave me a bike tour of downtown Nasushiobara. Nasushiobara, I was surprised to discover, is actually a fairly big city with some significant urban sprawl. In some ways, Nasushiobara could be mistaken for any American city, with its Burger Kings and 7-11’s and pizza places. But the architectural details are distinctly Japanese, Shinto shrines edge the major roads, and everyone drives on the left side of the road (a fact that this jet-lagged bicyclist kept forgetting…). I got to practice my new knowledge of the katakana alphabet (used for foreign or import words) in the local department store, which was a strange mix of foreign and familiar. I discovered that many commercial items in Japan use the American name – conditioner becomes “kondishyona” and shampoo becomes “shanpu.” More importantly, I was able to buy the all-essential slippers. I knew that the Japanese only wear slippers inside the house, but I didn’t realize that I would need to keep a pair of slippers in every building at ARI!

I finally started work on Monday. Work at ARI is focused around the concept of “foodlife,” a term coined by the institute’s founder to emphasize the connection between the food needed to support life and life needed to produce food. Every member of the ARI community, not just the participants receiving training, helps with the daily work of managing our crops and livestock and of preparing the meals. I was assigned to crops and vegetables for my first month, so I’ll be working in the ARI fields, harvesting and weeding.

A “typical” day at ARI (based on my two days of experience…):

- 6:30 am: Morning exercise – stretching to a Japanese radio program! We all gather in the courtyard to stretch and do jumping jacks in unison. Not quite my usual morning yoga, but still a good (and pretty amusing) way to start the day.

- 6:40 am: Foodlife work. For me, that means field work – harvesting veggies for our meals, weeding, etc.

- 8:15 am: Breakfast. Rice, vegetables, miso soup, and homemade yogurt (my favorite part).

- 9:15 am: Morning gathering. Sometimes worship, sometimes community time.

- 10:00 am – 12:15 pm: Morning activity. This week is an unusual one for ARI because the whole community is preparing for the annual Harvest Thanksgiving Celebration (HTC), so I’ve just been helping out where needed. I think I’ll have more field duties during this time after HTC has finished.

- 12:30 pm: Lunch. Rice, some sort of hot dish (often curry!), soup, etc.

- 1:50 pm – 4:15 pm: Afternoon activity. At the moment, more HTC preparation…

- 4:15 pm – 5:15 pm: Afternoon foodlife work. Back to the fields!

- 6:30 pm: Dinner. More rice!

- And then free time for the rest of the evening. A chance to relax and possibly learn some Japanese or a Thai song or an Indian dance (which is what I'm off to do this evening in preparing for HTC)...

I’m still adjusting to life at ARI, which can be a little overwhelming at times. But after five days, I can distinguish between white rice and sticky rice during the harvest, I find changing my shoes constantly almost normal, and I’m already picking up some of the catch-phrases of ARI English. ARI is a lively, warm community – I’m starting to find my place within it.

A big shout of thanks to everyone supporting me in this adventure in mission, especially my home parish St. Mary’s and my dear friends and family. Arigato gozaimasu (thank you)!

O yasumi nasai (goodnight) for now.

Oriented!

2009-07-28T18:45:00.000-07:00

Hello, friends!

I just completed two weeks of orientation in Chicago with the folks from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the Reformed Church of America, the Capuchin Franciscan Volunteer Corps, and the Presbyterians (I missed my program's orientation in June, so I got to join the greater ecumenical party...). Reflecting on the orientation, I find myself more mentally prepared for my radical relocation than I was two weeks ago. Most importantly, I've fully realized that this is indeed a "radical" step for me - I'm starting to get down to the reality of this next year. I found it difficult to really propel myself forward into my new context while sailing in Maine. I needed to talk with other mission workers, start learning Japanese, take some time to reflect and question... (the fruit of which you can see in my first post here).

And now I'll have many friends in Japan! There are a bunch of mission workers from the other denominations teaching English in Japan next year, so I'll have some support when I arrive in October.

Speaking of October, I've attached a picture of the fall leaves in my town, Nasushiobara in the Nasu District. Looks like they rival New Hampshire's stunning foliage! (Yes, Dartmouth friends, I'm becoming a leaf-peeper...) The more I learn about Japan, the more excited I am to get there!

In closing:
"Let us pursue knowledge and wisdom, for mutual understanding.
Let us pursue respect and compassion, for mutual up-building.
Let us pursue justice and peace, for mutual reconciliation."
(See link for a great video of dancing around the globe and through communities!)

Current happenings

2009-07-23T17:12:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to educate myself about Japan and some of its current public debates - I thought I might share some resources in case others are interested!

Patrick Smith, Japan: A Reinterpretation, (1997). A great book (admittedly, I'm only about half way through... but it's wonderful so far!) from a career journalist who lived in Japan for many years. Smith works through the Western myths and misconceptions about Japan, particularly related to the reconstruction era following the war. He also explores some of the cultural pillars of Japan - the educational system, the status of women, the evolving definition of public versus private space, the "salaryman" culture, the place of history in current political debates... a really interesting cultural and intellectual survey.
Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains (2004). Not about Japan, but a great read about global poverty issues (in the context of Haiti, Russia, and Rwanda) and how poverty is fundamentally linked to basic resource issues.
The New York Times profile on Japan. Includes links to past articles and other online resources.

Cheers for now! If you have any good reads about Japan, please drop me a line!

A journey begins...

2009-07-21T16:43:00.000-07:00

Konnichiwa!

Welcome to the first of many posts about my journey as a volunteer with the Asian Rural Institute (ARI) in Nishinasuno, Japan. I will be working at ARI through the Episcopal Church's partnership with the Anglican Communion in Japan

WHAT?
ARI is an international training institute for grassroots leaders from developing countries. The institute teaches leadership skills and sustainable, small-scale agriculture techniques in the hope of facilitating development in the students' home communities. Affiliated with the United Church of Christ in Japan, ARI welcomes students of any religion (as well as those of no religion) and promotes the spiritual development of its students through its philosophy that spiritual peace begins with the material peace of shared resources.

Okay. Sounds nice, but what exactly does ARI do?

ARI is a farm. A small farm that provides about 80% of the food for a community of about 60 students, teachers, and volunteers that manages the institute. The farm is designed as an experimental school that allows the students (leaders sponsored by their home communities or home parishes) to receive hands-on instruction in organic farming, animal husbandry, fish culture, etc. - and the shared management of the institute enables students to gain experience in running small-scale cooperatives and in community leadership. I think of ARI as a type of farm camp for community leaders. As a UCC affiliate, ARI also brings an interesting theological dimension to its social work. Back in 2007, the institute hosted a symposium called “Peace From the Soil." It looked at the problem of violence and war in our world and concluded: “Peace begins within and peace is possible when there is food on the table. Peace within a human being, peace of mind, and peace within a community, all require that basic needs are met so that there is security of life and livelihood, and the opportunity for physical, mental and spiritual health." We are stewards of creation - yet we have abused our environment and must now work to repair some of the damage. ARI seeks to provide its students with the means of caring for their part of creation.

For some color, ARI stats from the current YASC volunteer there, Mike from Texas:

30 participants from 18 different countries (China, Japan, Indonesia, Philippines, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Kenya, Zambia, Cameroon, Togo, Ghana, Sierra Leone). 8 volunteers (US, Germany, Japan, Korea). 12 staff (Japan, US, Ghana, Philippines, Myanmar).
450 laying hens, 18 roosters, and 100 chicks
5 sows, 30 piglets, and 40 growers (fatteners)
3 cows
2 sheep
Indeterminate duck population ("As," according to Mike, "we butcher the old ones from last year and continue to hatch ducklings for this years rice paddies...")

I'm still a little fuzzy myself on my daily duties, but I suspect I'll basically work as a farmhand, helping out wherever is necessary. And yes, Mom, I'll probably be asked to kill a chicken while I'm there...

WHY?
I'm still struggling to clearly understand and articulate the "why" of my decision to serve as a volunteer with the Episcopal Church's Young Adult Service Corps (YASC). My motivations are mixed. During my orientation in Chicago, the facilitators asked us to identify some of our motivations within a list of options. I selected: "to have an experience, to help the poor, to pay my dues to the world, to find a new direction in my life, to really be engaged in 'mission,' to seek adventure, to teach others, to learn a new culture, to learn the gospel from others, to get away from the affluence of Americans, to enable others, to share life with others." I'd say the spiritual discomfort that nags me when I see inequity met with the intellectual need for an international adventure to compel me to seek out a program like YASC.

Why through the Epsicopal Church? One reason, frankly, is that I did not make the church an important part of my life during college, and I hope to regain the sense of faith and community I had during high school. The principle reason, however, is that I trust the church as an instrument of change and of social justice. Few institutions (of power) promote such a message of inclusion - "we are all one body." I have heard so many stories of ineffective NGOs, thwarted, despite their best intentions, by their lack of resources or organization or ability to see the larger picture. Obviously the church is not a perfect institution, but I do trust the spirit of its mission.

For example, the Episcopal Church recently redefined its mission workers as "mission partners" rather than "missionaries." On one level, this seems a cosmetic change, a bow to the pressures of our PC culture. But I believe that the change reflects an important shift in how the Episcopal Church, USA engages with the greater global church. One church official stated in June 2009 that the term articulates "a more accurate description of the role of mission personnel in the 21st century, with an emphasis on relationship building and the acknowledgement that we all mutually grow in our understanding of one another and of God when we nurture relationships with other parts of the body of Christ. The hope is that the change will help us all think about mission as being mutual and interdependent." "The reality that when we engage in work overseas, we are learning just as much from those we encounter as we are able to teach." We are invited guests and collaborators, not self-appointed fixers. And frankly, I like the change because I'm still personally uncomfortable with labeling myself as a "missionary" - a history major specializing in French colonial history, I find myself bringing too much historical bagage to that term...

Wow, I don't think this Episcopalian has ever talked so much about her faith in such a public setting! (I remember my minister from Virginia once made a crack about how uncomfortable we Episcoplians are about public displays of faith...) Thank you, dear readers, for your patience and understanding.

WHEN?
I leave for Japan on October 1, 2009; I will return almost exactly twelve months later. Until then, I'm working on the coast of Maine as a sailing instructor, spending time with my wonderful family and my boyfriend, Eric, and preparing for my dramatic relocation. Please keep me in your thoughts as I wrestle with the Japanese language, the paperwork of crossing national borders, and the reality that I can't take my kayak with me across the Pacific Ocean...