on history

I'm taking a history class this semester and it's called "East Asia in the World: 1500-2000". When I first saw the title, I didn't think too much of it. And then people started to comment on how long the time period is. I had taken a history class sophomore year and that was a really good class. It was about WWII so it was a much shorter period of time. We mostly talked about human emotions and motivations. But in this class, we talk a lot about dates, important events, international relations, politics, and economics. I would much rather focus on human emotions and hear stories about people's daily lives. But running through all the centuries in one course also has its advantages.

You really get the whole picture. This class is mostly about China and Japan and how their relationship with the rest of the world changed as we move into the modern era. When we started in the 1500, Ming dynasty in China, I don't think any of us had much thought about where this class was going. But now that we're talking about the 20th century, I've come to realize how useful it is to be able to see the bigger picture. Ming dynasty, Qing dynasty, Opium War, Taiping Rebellion, Boxer Rebellion, rise of Chinese Nationalist Party, Sino-Japanese Wars, Chinese Communist Party.... it all makes sense. I have a such better knowledge of China (and Japan's) modern history. Back in high school, I kept wishing that we could skip all this old stuff and get into more modern stuff. But the 1970s, 80s, 90s don't make any sense by themselves. History is not about what happened, it's about how and why. The events themselves are just secondary. I've also realize that it's not a simple cause and effect. Everything's much more complex when you start looking at how things happen, the motivations, the context, the emotions. I think I just like complex things.

Ramming Earth

This D-Lab project of bringing stable rammed earth structures made without cement to Sierra Leone is starting to come together. So far, Ben (another person in my group) and I have managed to read through a few books and talked to a couple of professors. And.. the project is taking shape. I really feel like I'm putting my education to use. I guess that's part of D-Lab's purpose. Not only are they aiming to empower poor people in developing countries, but also to show MIT students that the stuff we're learning is actually useful. We're using all the principles of design and construction and it's really cool to actually understand these technical books. I understand what people mean when they talk about clays and sands, types of foundations, and other design elements. It's just all coming together. Next up, Lucy's going to try to produce some actual calculations. haha! We'll see how that works out.

Also, for this trip, we have to learn a new language. It's called Krio. It's a language that evolved from English and other West African languages. And since I'm taking linguistics, I'm slowly able to understand linguistic texts that talk about the language. It's really cool. I can't believe my classes are actually useful. Amazing...

$2 a day: pictures

$2 a day

One of our homework for D-Lab this week is to experience what it is like to live in a developing country and the whole class is living off of $2 a day. Well, not quite. More like $12 for 6 days. This is mainly for food since everything else we use is hard to quantify. Yalu and I decided to ban together so that we can have more money to work off of. So far, it's been quite an adventure.

We decided to start this on Saturday night, starting at dinner. So that afternoon, after disagreeing about how we're going to get to Star Market, we went out on our food shopping expedition. We stopped at the Korean store and got carrots, nappa, and green onions all for $2.57. Then we went to Star Market and got pork, bread, milk, and peanut butter. Our plan is to make rice porridge for lunch and dinner and then have bread and peanut butter for breakfast. Only it hasn't really worked out that way. We've been eating a lot of our bread and peanut butter since the porridge isn't very filling. I kept making this very watery porridge.

On Sunday, we decided that making porridge everyday would take a long time so we made a huge pot of this stuff all at once. We took some pictures, which I will post here soon. The pot was one of those soup kitchen pots and it barely fit on the stove.

I wonder what the rest of our class is doing. I think the only reason why we've managed to have rice, bread, and milk is because Yalu and I pooled our "resources". Otherwise, we'd both be eating the same thing 3 meals a day.

Harvest Fest

On Saturday, I went to Somerville's community garden to volunteer with their Harvest Fest that they have every year. It attracted a lot of toddlers and their parents. We had apple bobbing, cooked veggies that were grown locally, pumpkin carving, and apply cider making. I went and helped with the apple cider making because I was attracted by the cider press. A couple of people were trying to make it work and I was trying to figure out how it worked.

So their way was a pretty long process. Someone would cut up the apples into small pieces, someone else would need to feed it into a grain grinder thing, and we would collect the ground apples (and the juice) to put into the press. The press has sleeves that lets the juice filter out. The result was really good. The only problem was that the cutting and grinding of the apples took a while. The press needed a lot of ground apples to operate. A lot of kids wanted to help grind the apples (turn the handle).

So I let them all help me grind apples. I mainly fed more apples into the grinder and pushed the apples down so that they get grinded. This grinding process can actually go prety fast but not with the kids. They're too energic and jumpy and was just concerned about turning the handle rather than producing any output. I didn't think this was a problem at all but a lot of the adults were complaining that it was taking too long. I'm not sure why they were complaining anyhow. I think we were producing enough cider. We just weren't going very fast. I was just concerned that all the kids who wanted to help, had the chance to help. There was a three year old that was really sweet who didn't do too much, but I didn't mind. If the kids are having fun, who cares if the process is inefficient? Who cares if we aren't really producing a lot of cider? I really hate it when people miss the point because they were concerned about efficiency, production, and doing things fast. Not everything has to be competition. Who cares if one kid can turn the handle faster than the other one?

Actually, I don't think cider making was supposed to be a hands on activity but just a "watching how it's done." But the kids just kept coming and wanted to help out. These other volunteers and parents, though, they just kept commenting on how this grinding the apples was a bottleneck of the whole process. I'm just like, "The kids don't mind! They don't even care about the cider. They just want to turn the handle and see mush come out the other end. And if they learn a little something out of this and get to drink cider, that's great. Seriously, as long as they're having fun and get to do what they want to do, that's good enough for me."

On weekly activiites...

Every Wednesday I wake up and spend the whole day thinking that the next day would be Friday. And then at some point, I would realize that this assumption is false and that I have one more day to go before the weekend comes around.

So this semester I'm very busy. I am totally booked 9-5 everyday except Fridays where it's 10-5. Taking 5 classes and working part-time is apparently very time consuming. And at some point, I need to apply to grad schools and maybe look for a job. 2 of my classes are humanities classes which means lots of reading and writing. And D-Lab, which I just wrote about in a previous entry takes a lot of time because we literally don't know anything. I haven't slept a lot the past few days.

But it's okay because I really like what I'm doing this semester. I really enjoy my classes so I'm willing to put time and effort into them. And more importantly, wake up for them.

This morning I met with my partner for the Language Exchange program sponsored by MIT. They're a program mainly to help recent immigrants in the MIT community like students and spouses of graduate students and professors learn English. A side benefit for the native speakers of English who are volunteering their time is that they try to pair up these English speakers with people who speak a language that the English speaking person wants to learn. And in some cases, the exchange can be between other languages entirely. I read about this on the MIT Medical website and thought that it would be nice to help someone out.

So I signed up and they paired me with a wife of a graduate student. She is Japanese, studied Chinese in university, lived in Shanghai for 6 years, married an Asian American from Hawaii. Her husband's father is from Hong Kong and she said that when they visited his side of the family in Hong Kong, many of the relatives didn't speak Mandarin. So she wants to learn Cantonese as well as practice English. She and her husband just moved to Boston and she has no one to speak English with. Also, her husband is a graduate student at the MIT Center for Real Estate, the office where I work! What a coincidence. So I thought this was all very interesting. I don't know how much I can help her with Cantonese or English. Her English is very well and her Mandarin is way better than mine. They had lived in San Jose for 2 years before coming to Boston. But I think it would be a fun experiene. Maybe I can learn some Japanese...

And this winter, I'm going to....

Sierra Leone in Africa! I still can't believe I'm doing this. I'm going to spend my entire IAP in Africa, trying essentially to do some good. I'm taking a class called D-Lab and the D stands for development, design, and dissemination. Basically, they send teams of MIT students to impoverished communities in developing countries in order to bring "appropriate" technology to help these people. These are mostly rural places where what we would consider basic infrastructure doesn't exist. In a reversal of the traditional top-down aid where people pour money to big agencies to fund big projects and hope that this money somehow trickle down to the rural population where it is most needed, we are targeting the people who need the aid the most. Our goal is not to bring technology but the knowledge. We want to show them ways to make small machines that would make their lives easier by decreasing the amount of time they spent on things like shelling peanuts or fetching water.

We met with our community partner yesterday. He is from Idaho and runs an organization called Village Hope in Sierra Leone. They have partnerships with some villages and has been helping them build schools. Schools in the most villages are in really bad shape. They leak during the wet season and are burning hot during the dry season. They have no books, no supplies, so the students learn by repeating after the teacher. The students don't simple supplies like pencils. And for some kids, the schools are very far and their only way of getting there is walking. Kids drop out of school because of this distance. Some families can't even afford to pack a lunch for their kids so the kids go hungry during the day. Village Hope is looking to built schools with cheaper but more durable materials, better ventilation for the summer, and have a community garden so that they can provide food to the children. So far, the six schools that they built are elementary schools. Most villagers have no access to secondary education. Oh, and toilets are non-existent.

So we're hoping we can do a few little projects and a couple of bigger ones. We're not really sure what these projects will be yet but I think it will mostly be with the schools, finding safe water during the dry season (well-drilling), finding a way of making bricks without cement, and irrigation during the dry season. Okay, that's a lot of projects already... My team consists of 6 undergrads and 1 team leader. We're a pretty diverse group in terms in interests and skills. We've been spending a lot of time together working on various things lately. I don't think any of us realized that we would be working on so many projects. Honestly I thought we would have only 1 major project and maybe a side project.

Anyhow, I think this would be one amazing experience. I have never been to such rural communities or Africa. Before this class (September), I never thought I could actually make a difference. Even when I started taking this class, I thought it would be all fluff. But actually, the work that they have been doing are really amazing. I'll write more about examples of these things in later posts.