Perspective from a Non-Film Major

by Peri Mast-Hochstedler – First Year Psychology Major

Hello! My name is Peri Mast-Hochstedler (aka Shepherd) and I’m a freshman psychology major at Goshen College. If you have been reading the previous blog posts, you should know that we are in Tochigi, Japan at ARI, and I am currently having a great time!

The morning started at 6:00 am as usual and the weather was perfect, no rain, sunny, and a slight breeze. We had our morning exercise and were assigned our cleaning tasks for the day. I headed down to the office to watch over camera equipment and clean until 7. Foodlife work began shortly after where my group (AMPACK) and I went to film the goats. We were told beforehand that they would be milking the goats today, a perfect opportunity to get some b-roll footage. Unfortunately, it was later and not in the morning like we thought (oops!). We then headed to breakfast at 8:15 where we had rice, fried eggs, salad, soup, and of course, coffee. The fried eggs were very good! 

After our very much needed breakfast, we headed back to the seminar house at 10 where Steven, an ARI staff member, presented to us about his work with graduates. It was during this time that Kate, Adrian, and Mike went to film the goat milking. Team AMPACK headed to the office/farm shop to get out footage where we were lucky enough to catch Tomoko San (the director of ARI!) working in her office as well as a couple of others. We quietly got our footage of people working, we didn’t want to disturb them! We then left for Koinonia to rest a bit while we waited for lunch to begin. Cormac, Adrian, Kate, and I went to the ping pong room near the classroom and chatted while we played ping pong. It was a nice time to relax, unwind, and connect more with my teammates before stuffing myself with more delicious ARI rice! 

After our lunch of rice, egg salad, curry, and soup, we prepared to record a second round of presentations from the participants. All of the presentations were very interesting and inspiring to watch but my favorite one by far was Pierre’s presentation, a participant from Haiti. His story really touched my heart, especially because me and him really bonded during the foodlife work we did together throughout the trip. 

Right now, we are getting prepared for a presentation we are giving to ARI members at 8 pm. We will be presenting a preview of our documentary with some footage we have gathered during our time here. I am very excited (and nervous!!) to see their reactions to our preview. I really hope they enjoy it. I’m also excited to see the fruits of our labor for the first time on the “big screen” (in our case a projector). 

I’ve really enjoyed the process of this documentary and I can’t believe our stay at ARI is almost over (only 2 more days left!). I can already feel the ARI homesickness but also the excitement of arriving in Tokyo! 

Thanks for reading!

-Shepherd