Weeds, But The Legal Kind

by Alyssa McDonald – Sophomore Broadcasting Major

Hi! My name is Alyssa McDonald (Slayer). I am a sophomore broadcasting major, though I assume many of you will know me from the softball team at Goshen. I’m not sure what other people have said in these blog posts, but I feel like I am thriving in Japan. Allow me to tell you a little about what I thought was a usual day for us at the Asian Rural Institute.

The morning started at 6:00am. It wasn’t super cold, but it was overcast and lightly raining, which was supposed to continue throughout the day. We got dressed and headed to morning exercise which started at 6:30, this just includes some light stretching to get ready for the work to come. After learning our individual assignments for the day, we headed to our cleaning groups. Today’s cleaning for my group, like every other day of cleaning, has been weeding. However it’s not your traditional weeding, we use hand sickles to cut the weeds, leaving the roots, which we put into baskets that go to the goat pen for them to eat. It’s not the best but it only lasts for 15 minutes. After that we headed to the lower fields to build tomato trellis out of bamboo. We had to measure the bamboo, cut it to size, space them out evenly, and tie them together with rope. By this point the rain was picking up and it was getting very muddy and slippery. I can say that Cormac almost “ate it” a few times, but so did I. Luckily, without falling, we headed back up to the cafeteria after washing up for breakfast at 8:15. 

Now we get into the real reason why we’re in Japan, making a documentary! After breakfast AMPACK set up a location for two interviews, and both went extremely well. After those interviews we ate lunch, which was very good because we had visitors, so it’s just like the Rot back at Goshen. After lunch at about 1:30 we set up another two interviews, one inside the classroom and one inside a herb drying room. The latter was with a female from Indonesia, and her story about leaving home and the challenges that came with that was really inspiring. After that, we had to help clean fresh eggs from the chicken coup. It’s more enjoyable if you don’t focus on the gross eggs and make conversation with those around you, which we mostly just talked about rugby and cameras with a volunteer from Germany to pass the time. 

After dinner Beverly, a board member of AFARI and a close friend of the Asian Rural Institute, gave a presentation of her experience traveling in Tanzania with her organization. My main takeaway from the presentation was this idea that we’re all poor in one way or another, whether that’s having a poor relationship with ourselves, others, or anything else. It made me really rethink how I think about poverty and being “poor”.

Overall the day was very good! We only have 5 days left here at the Asian Rural Institute, and then it’s off to Tokyo, which I think we’re all very excited about.

Thanks for reading!

 

-Slayer