Though I was always excited to start this blog for my senior project, I did not know I would be doing so while packing for Tennessee. Since the emergence of COVID-19 in mid-March, life plans have been changing with the wind, one of those plans being my senior project.
Originally, this blog was created to follow my month-long volunteering trip to Mudita School, a sustainable orphanage in Nyaungshwe, Myanmar. Instead, this blog will be following my two-week journey WWOOFing at Four O’Clock Farm, a small, family-run organic farm near Knoxville, Tennessee.
I had, and am still having, a very hard time accepting the fact that I was not able to travel to Myanmar this Summer. Not only was I grieving not being able to travel the world and be back in Southeast Asia, which I fell in love with last year, I was also grieving the loss of being able to take part in something “meaningful.” Helping children in a third-world country while also helping to preserve the earth for those children seemed like the most impactful thing I could do with my Summer. When I was no longer able to help at Mudita School and lined up a substitute position in Tennessee, I felt as though my project and my volunteering had lost significant impact. At my core, I believed that working closer to home with a more well-off population would slightly invalidate my work. I didn’t believe that I could create as much of an impact at home as I could abroad in Myanmar.
Though I am still grieving the loss of my trip to Myanmar and grappling with the amount of impact my work in Tennessee will have, I am slowly working to change my view. I would consider myself an environmental advocate, and, as such, I need to advocate for the environment globally, whether it be in Asia or America. In my head, I know that the location of my work does not determine its value, and I hope that, throughout my two weeks on Four O’Clock Farm, this will move from head knowledge to heart knowledge.
As I chronicle my time on the farm, I only hope that I can encourage the readers of this blog to do the same with the environmental degradation our world is facing today. You may acknowledge issues such as climate change, but you must make it heart knowledge; you must believe it to the point where you take action, however that may look for you. I hope this blog will help inspire readers to take action and provide some potential jumping off points.
Here’s to growing heart knowledge together.
LETS DO THIS