02/11/13

Hesitation.

An old high school classmate struck up a chat with me on Facebook last night. He had recently graduated and was looking for work. He shared his worries over having possibly made a bad decision by going to university rather than a professional school to advance his career. He wondered where his life would take him from now on.

So I asked him about his dreams. What he wanted out of life.

What he said was an answer that I often hear from people around me. It was rational. Sensible. Future-oriented and built around security over blind leaps of faith. I couldn’t help but wonder again and again, if that was all that there was to life.

Life is what you make of it. But the pressures of the society in which we live and the relationships we have with the people we love can lead us to put our heart’s desires second to everyone around us.

I feel this way, just like this old classmate of mine does. Just like each and every one of us does. And no one is blatantly pressuring me to live a certain way. They ultimately want me to be happy (whether or not their idea of happiness coincides with mine is another question). Security and consistency is the warm blanket we wrap ourselves in, often disguising as ‘happiness’.

The uncertain future ahead of me is a blank canvas, which both excites and terrifies me. Probably more the latter at the moment. I feel constrained because I know what I want out of life, but have the need to consider the financial and comfort aspects in the choices I make. I’m holding onto the blanket of home life tightly, not completely ready to let go. But I know that this life doesn’t make me happy.

No one is pressuring me yet everyone is. I feel like I have a need to explain what it is I will be doing after graduation when really, I just want to jump into it headfirst and see where it takes me. I don’t want to disappoint my family. But at the same time, I wish I could relinquish all these shackles off of me and just go do as I like without worrying about what everyone else will think of me.

I grew up with ‘horror stories’ of people my age who did nothing with their degrees and ended up going back to school. It was as if they were told to me to say that ‘stumbling through your academic and professional career is failing’. When really, it’s not. I know that.

I want to be alone. I want to run away to some far off land for a while with no expectations but the ones I have set for myself. Not the ones deemed by the environment I was raised in.

But I’m so afraid to be alone. To burn bridges wherever I go. To wander forever solo. I want love and support like any other human being on this planet. But I long to be alone because I’m afraid of being rejected.

I am at war with myself.

01/23/13

Learning through Food.

Today was a super productive day (I’m noticing a trend among my Wednesdays) but not in the academic sense, but the learning sense.

I helped harvest, cook, and enjoy a community meal with the Aboriginal Health program on campus. I rediscovered the wonder of the food system and just how much we as a society are detached from our food. Working together to create a delicious meal was absolutely enlightening.

I sat down in the student cafe in my main faculty building on campus and ran into some of my classmates from my degree program. We talked about dreams, passions, and ideas for what we would like to see happen on campus. And lofty wishing aside, we started to form plans to make those dreams into concrete goals.

We want to create a series of workshops for our program classmates outside of class to help each other realize our potentials, come together as each other’s greatest resources, and share our inspiring passions with the rest of the group. Having a sense of solidarity with others who are in the same graduating boat as I am made me feel like the ocean wasn’t so scary to sail off into anymore.

We want to start a UBC Community Food Initiative – one where all of the food/sustainability clubs and organizations can come together to help improve the health of students on campus and also foster a community in this city we call UBC. This, we think, can be in conjunction with the project I’m working on (Community Student Kitchen in the new SUB).

Just that hour of excited chatter taught me so much than any lecture. I know I repeated this sentiment last Wednesday but it’s so powerful that I need to repeat it again and again.

I managed to squeeze in a quick run at the Bird Coop (hooray!) before heading off to Vancouver City Hall to attend the monthly Vancouver Food Policy Council meeting. I learned about a ton of amazing things happening around the city on the topic of food (and even got in touch with working with the council members in my free time :D).

So I came back home all smiles. I had woken up feeling like today was going to be a fantastic day and oh boy was I right. And somehow, everything I experienced and learned today relates to one another. I’m really liking this idea of fostering community and public health through food and cooking (via kitchens). I think it’ll have a big role in what I choose to do (or what lands in my lap) when May graduation rolls around.

Food just has a way of bringing everything together.

01/16/13

This is what learning should be.

On Wednesdays, I only have one class. It’s not even really a class – it’s like a gathering for everyone in my degree program. We meet. We discuss one topic together and we put our ideas to action. These classes always leave me in a state of inspirational euphoria as I imagine the grand possibilities that we as students can make into reality. I think that’s what I loved most when I transferred out of the Faculty of Science. I found a community on campus to which I could belong to. And I’ve learned more here by talking to people than I ever have in any silly 300-student lecture.

I’ve taken this take on learning as a collective – teaching one another – as my favourite way to learn anything. Being abroad for a year, I can safely say that although my lecture classes in Norway were fascinating, they weren’t the most valuable tidbits of knowledge I gained on my journey. 4-hour bus rides talking with a friend about our passions and education, debating the similarities and differences between Norway, India, and Canada in terms of development issues, along with the street smarts I gained whilst travelling solo are what I keep with me. Conversation. Action. The world outside the standard lecture classroom – one with interaction and discussion are my teachers.

So courses I’m taking this term?

1. Urban Studies seminar. Completely interdisciplinary. Free reign of course readings, discussion and research topics. The professor sits among us as we face each other in a circle. And we talk. We learn.

2. Urban Research lab. This is hands on. Interdisciplinary again, which is great. You get to work with numbers and facts although knowledge of such things are not a prerequisite. You learn from each other and work together to work on specific research projects based on issues in the real world. Research that can actually impact reality.

3. Public Policy. This is a lecture style. But it’s interactive. Half the class is brainstorming and talking amongst ourselves. We are expected to think and speak up instead of absorbing everything like silent sponges. How it should be.

4. Directed Studies. This is an amazing opportunity to work on a project outside of the classroom and get credit for it. For this, I chose to research and survey how to deal with the logistics of creating a student Community Kitchen in the new SUB. Hands-on project. Practical experience. Interaction with the outer community and other stakeholders as a team. No silly lectures. And I get credit for it.

I guess if I’ve discovered anything by my last term at UBC, it’s how I learn best. How I think anyone should learn. I know so many students who aren’t aware of how flexible their university education can be. It doesn’t have to be one straight way. Yes, I’m lucky to be in a faculty (and program) that supports such flexibility, but I know of so many people in other faculties who have found a way to make their education their own too.

So in a really rambling way, what I’m trying to say is that we should really think of education as something out of the box called ‘the classroom’. Or at least, reshape what we think of a classroom to be. In the end, students will come out being better thinkers, leaders, and more confident individuals.

12/21/12

Like Alice.

So it has been just over 3 weeks since I have returned back home to Vancouver. I still wake up each morning in a sort of daze, as if I’m still not sure where I am this time around.  It’s as if I got up and was whisked away down the rabbit hole to Wonderland, and in true Alice-fashion, I woke up from dreaming. Except it’s not. The last 10 months really did happen. All I have to do is stare at the tattoo on my left foot and up at all the photos of my adventures abroad pasted on my bedroom wall to confirm it. Wonderland was a real place.

But as all adventures go, coming back home is the most difficult part of the journey. It certainly was for me. It took me a while to stop walking around the streets I knew well in a sort of strange awe; I half-expected someone to greet me in Norwegian or an Indian cow to pass me on the sidewalk. My bed felt like a nostalgic yet foreign marshmallow to sleep compared to the dorm and hostel beds I was now used to. It’s a sort of paradox, really: everything feels familiar but it’s not.

But reverse culture shock aside, it was seeing old faces that caused me the most distress. I didn’t know what to say when they asked me where I had been.

“So where have you been all this time?”

Sixteen countries. “…A lot of places.”

“Oh wow, which was your favourite place?”

In what way? “I don’t really know right now.”

“Are you happy that you’re back?”

Yes and no. “I’m not sure.”

Really, I didn’t know what to say. How could I talk about my trip without seeming like I was bragging? How could I talk about the stories I had – of which I could talk about for hours – to people at work where small talk was more appropriate? There was only so much I could say before the polite nodding would make me understand that there was no real way to bridge a gap between someone who just had not been there with me. Who weren’t completely interested because they had their own busy lives to live. There would always be things left unsaid.

For a long time, I struggled with that. I began to jokingly think that maybe I had just dreamed the whole thing. It’s a bit better now – my family and a few friends are quite understanding. But there’s only so much we can talk about my year. More often than not, the conversation always drifts back to the present and future.

The last 3 weeks for me have been a period of transition. I left Canada in January 2012 in order to step outside the small bubble called my life. Now that I’ve returned, I find myself in inside the thin membrane between these two worlds: my old life at home and the world outside.

But if I’ve realized anything this year, it’s that I can’t go back inside the bubble. I have to pop it. Travelling abroad – studying in Norway, backpacking Europe, and working in India – this has been my life for the past year. The extent of impact these experiences have had on me as a person are not crystal clear yet, but I do know that I have been shaped by them. I can’t discount them because I have trouble talking about these experiences with others. 2013 is fast approaching and with it comes my final semester at UBC. It’s the next chapter in this journey I call my life. And that’s what I’m choosing to see it as: a journey. Another destination. Another adventure.

See Vancouver is not in a bubble for me any more. The places I’ve been have shown me how to explore and Vancouver is no different. It is local but ultimately part of the global that I’ve only grazed the surface on. I want to see this city of mine with the eyes of a traveller. To marvel at all of the exquisite qualities it has to offer me. This semester, I’m discovering Vancouver.

Somehow, by still identifying myself as a traveller, my anxieties have been eased. The magic of the Wonderland I’ve discovered are waiting to be found here in this new place.

Down the rabbit hole I go again.

10/7/12

Trials & Revelations in the Field

Field Work is a whole different terrain… even more so in an entirely foreign country where you are considered an alien. It’s been around 3-4 weeks since I have arrived to work at Seva Mandir, a local Indian NGO based in the district of Udaipur. I arrived (as always) bright-eyed, ready to take on whatever challenges would await me during the next 2.5 months. 4 weeks later and I wonder if I’ve even begun.

Here’s the thing about doing field work in an NGO: no one arranges anything for you. You’re on your own. It’s the real deal. Do with it what you will. I thought I had known about this reality long before arriving in my new internship. I really did. It’s only now that I have realized that although I was fully aware of working dynamic at Seva Mandir, I hadn’t really accepted it. I was still stuck in that academic setting where I had so comfortably settled in the last 16 years. In school, you do your homework, study for your tests, get good grades and eventually get praised for all of your hard work. Classes start at 8 and end at 3. There’s a structure to your day. Here in India, I’ve been thrown into the polar opposite. I never have a structured 9 to 5 day – I could be up at 7 in the morning one day and sleep in until 10am another day. There are no set deadlines – except perhaps the looming departure date back home on the other side of the world. No one gives you a set assignment or test. As for praise – you go without. You learn to motivate yourself without reassurance from anyone else.

In short, even 10 years in university could never have prepared me for any of this.

Let me back up and explain just what I’m doing here at Seva Mandir. I’m currently working in the Education Department looking at the NGO’s Youth Resource Center (YRC) program. These YRCs are placed in villages all over the Udaipur district, with the main goal of ‘youth empowerment’ at its core mandate. YRC Facilitators at each YRC organize various activities, discussions, and training programs to teach youth about important government policies, provide a space to talk about social issues, and provide youth with vocational skills in order to better sustain their livelihoods. Such a program aims to shape youth as confident, responsible citizens for future generations. At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. In reality, many YRCs are popularly seen as Youth Recreation Centers – attracting small children rather than the large 14-25 age group.

So why isn’t the program working? Many studies and evaluations were conducted, which revealed that there is a clear lack of structure in the YRC program, which makes it difficult to manage and coordinate the countless number of stakeholders involved with YRCs. Hence the main message is often lost and everyone pretty much does whatever they see fit without any effective results. This is when I come in. My goal is to formulate a study to design an effective monitoring and mentoring system between all of the program stakeholders. Basically, create a backbone for the YRCs. It’s a big job, let me tell you.

So I did what I could. I thought long and hard about my research design. I thought about what I would have to do to get the data from the field. I made a plan and countless interview guidelines for all of the stakeholders I would speak with.

Now, I have a Reporting Officer. He’s pretty much my go-to person for this entire project. He’s the current YRC Coordinator and very much dedicated to his work. He even helped all of the interns in getting oriented in Udaipur in his free time. So I go to him and show him everything I have designed and get a thumbs up. Cool. We discuss the arrangements for getting interviews and focus group discussions going in the villages.

And then I wait. And I keep waiting.

Responses from villages are slow. I can’t actually speak with anyone directly because I don’t know Hindi. So I rely on my Reporting Officer and he makes some calls. Any trips I go on are usually arranged by him. But things are still slow and a week or two goes by. The lack of quality translators that can work with me for interviews are frustrating and it takes me a good week to get used to calling potential translators, conducting interviews together as a team, and actually getting some quality data. It’s basically a huge learning process.

Today, I returned from the field with my Reporting Officer, with only one out of three interviews done for the day. Since I hadn’t been feeling well, we had to postpone the discussion to my dismay. So on the way back to Udaipur City, I thought I would have to go back to playing the waiting game when my Reporting Officer asked me what my plans were for tomorrow (Monday). I shrugged and told him I would type up some field notes and wait. Immediately, he made very constructive suggestions for me to take on for the week. Visit the villages you haven’t gone to speak with the YRC Facilitators directly. Go to a village every single day. Get them to understand the importance of your study to the YRC program and have them arrange interview dates for you.

I told him that I couldn’t speak with most of the stakeholders and that I needed help.

He told me get a translator and also added that I should have worked with a translator to make phone calls on my own.

I had to blink. I had not thought to do that. The phone calls, anyway. I never once thought I could take the project into my own hands like that. Faced with the giant language barrier, I had accepted that I had to get a green light from the people around me to get anything done.

Thinking on it now – why? Why didn’t I do exactly as my Reporting Officer said? More importantly, why hadn’t I taken the initiative to think of the solution on my own? I realized on the ride home that I had somehow made myself believe that I couldn’t do anything in such a foreign environment. I had hesitated and resigned to doing really nothing for a good 2 weeks. This wasn’t the ‘me’ that got shit done back home. And by straying from my usual determination, I felt like I had let my Reporting Officer down. See, it’s not his job to tell me exactly what to do. The reason he called me into conducting this study was to get an objective perspective on the YRC Program. This, as the YRC Coordinator, he could not do. In this respect, I was a colleague rather than a subordinate. For me subconsciously, I saw my Reporting Officer as my teacher rather than my mentor. I was writing notes and staring at the blackboard instead of taking the initiative to see him as an advisor to see now and again as I conducted my own study. Instead of asking him to arrange interviews for me, I should have been asking how I could arrange the interviews myself.

So 4 weeks in, and I’ve had a revelation. Enough playing at the drawing board. I want to show my Reporting Officer that he picked the right person for this enormous task. Seven weeks left. Eight villages and numerous stakeholders to speak with. I’ve barely begun. It’s time to hit the ground running.

 

09/5/12

Colour My World.

It hit me just now: the realization that I live in two different worlds.

First is the world I currently live in. Here, my current home is in India. In this country, I wear Ali Baba pants, hop on and off auto rickshaws daily, and brave places that cannot even be called ‘toilets’.  I haggle for everything and bobble my head.  I walk the crowded streets of Jaipur, with a cow passing me every so often so nonchalantly. This is my day-to-day life at present, but in this surreal world, I’m never still. India is only my current stop. This is a world where I’m travelling constantly to new and wondrous places. Meeting new people from all over the world. Experiencing new languages and cultures. This is life I currently live.

Second is the world I left behind. The world as I knew it back in Vancouver, Canada. Where I grew up. Went to school. Had friends, family, and a job that I loved. Sometimes, I close my eyes and try to remember a regular day for me in that world: I slam the snooze on my alarm and groggily shoo my dog out of my bed as I get ready for school. Here I wear jeans, a nice scarf and pea coat, paired off with a pair of black boots. Standard UBC fashion. I race other transiting students out of the skytrain, down the escalator to get first in line to the direct bus to my school campus every morning and hit a couple z’s on the bus ride there. I hurry to my classes, maybe see a friend during break. On weekends I drive to work. I have a permanent layer of chlorine on my skin. Sometimes I walk. Go for a run in the rain. Tumblr. Cram for midterms.

You know, after reminiscing a normal day for me in my world from a year ago, I’m not so sure which one is more surreal – the one then or this current world of mine. There are a lot of spaces in that old world of mine where I have a ton of time I just spent… procrastinating. Daydreaming about this world now. Even though I have a lot more free time abroad (that’s with my fair share of lazy days too), it feels… fuller. That old world is just a flash of events that don’t seem to interlink – as if I was really dreaming that old life and flashing through the mundane bits. There are definitely parts about it that I miss. But more so than that, there is so much more that I want to bring into that old world of mine from this current one. Every day I spend in India is so full of colour (quite literally – the women here wear the brightest scarves and saris) and when I think back to Canada, everything I remember is in hues of grey and blue. Did I really spend all that time cooped in my room? Why didn’t I go out more? Make use of my time? Get to know my own city?

I often think about the day I return to Canada. November 28th. I wonder how I will feel. How I will see the city. My job. My school. My home. There’s a part of me that’s afraid to go back to that old world – afraid that all of the colour I’ve soaked in this year will fade away with the Vancouver rain. I’m afraid that I will find everything the same as I left it.

I don’t want to see it that way. I feel right now, these are two different worlds that belong to me, but they are very much detached from each other. No one in Canada can really know the people I’ve met or the things I’ve experienced out here just like my friends here haven’t a clue about my life back at home. I’m afraid that when I go back, I’ll feel so detached from that world after experiencing this one.

If that old world is in a protective bubble, I stepped out into this new world eight months ago. I don’t want to just go back inside. I want to pop the bubble. I want the colours of this world to seep into my old one. I want my worlds to merge.

So I hope that when I fly back to Canada, I will see everything with new eyes – as Vancouver is only the latest destination in my travels. A new colour in my life.

09/1/12

First Step.

Today is September 1st, 2012. I am sitting alone in the guest house canteen in Jaipur, India waiting for my breakfast. An omelette, two pieces of toast, and a fresh plate of mangoes and bananas. The weather outside is hot and sunny – a complete 180 degrees from when the monsoons hit the city only a few days ago.

Sometimes, I can’t believe I’m here.

I began my journey abroad on January 26th, 2012 when I drove down to Seattle, USA with my mother to catch a solo flight to Oslo, Norway. I left behind everything I knew – my family, my friends, my job and school – in my home of Vancouver, British Columbia. To this day, the most terrifying and heart-wrenching experience I’ve had has been the moment when I left my mother through the airport security check in Seattle. From that point on, my life changed entirely. In the span of eight months, I have been to sixteen countries on three separate continents – witnessing the wondrous Northern Lights in Tromso, Norway to weaving through the dusty ancient streets of Marrakech, Morocco. Never in my dreams would I have imagined that I have would have done so much this year. And I’m still not done yet!

To commemorate the memory of surreal life this year, I got a tattoo on my left foot: Wanderlust.  My favourite word. I had wanted to get this done for a long time. The pain I went through to get this inked into my skin is something I hold sacred. The faces of all of the people I had met and the things I had experienced came rushing back to me and all I could do was smile (I’m pretty sure my friend and the tattoo artist thought I was crazy). It was as if at that moment, it was not ink but all of these precious memories that were being etched into my skin. It is a permanent memento of this amazing year and for many more travels to come.

So today is September 1st – at least 12.5 hours ahead of Vancouver that is. People are heading back home from their summer jobs and trips, ready to roll into a new school year. It’s surreal knowing that I won’t be joining them.  A year ago, I was in my old room wondering just what 2012 would hold for me. Now I’m in my room in India pondering the same thing.

So I look at my foot.

03/7/12

Tuum Est.

In Latin, it can be roughly translated into “It is yours.” The University of British Columbia wears this motto with pride, displaying it publicly on signs and crests wherever possible. For a long time, I haven’t really liked this translation.

“It is yours” makes it seem like everything in the world is mine for the taking – as if I’m entitled to the best of opportunities out there. It takes out the element of hard work required in making those doors open for myself. It’s saying I don’t have to lift a finger to get ahead in life. “It is yours” takes my education and all my good fortune in life for granted.

The truth is: it isn’t “mine” – at least not from the get-go. That’s why I like opting for an alternative translation that seems to better encompass my UBC experience and the way in which I try to live: “It is up to you.” No opportunity is a ring presented to me on a velvet pillow – it is a door to be wrenched open, to prop open with the tip of my toe, as I make my way through life.  Studying at UBC – studying abroad – merely being present in these environments won’t accomplish anything. Such settings provide me new avenues to explore and critical examine and re-evaluate constantly what I want to do with my life.

So tuum est! The world is large and full of as many wonders as horrors. It’s up to me to find a way to experience as many of the former, while critical working towards dealing with the latter. No one is going to make that happen for me.

03/5/12

Lost in the clouds.

I remember back when I used to chatter on and on about my passions and dreams to any passing person as I stared up at the night sky full of stars. The words always came so easily as they rolled off my tongue, brimming with confidence and longing. It’s as if saying them out loud would bring me one step closer in reaching for those stars.

I think somewhere along the line I’ve forgotten that part of myself. Or perhaps, now that I have taken off the ground, I am now lost in the midst of misty clouds, unable to see the stars as clearly as I once did. I don’t chatter on and on about my passions any more. I’m not as confident in my words as I once was. It’s as if I left a part of me on the ground that day as I took off into the sky. What happened to that girl?

If I know myself at all, I’m sure she’s still there chattering away where no one can see or hear her, staring up at the endless expanse we call sky.

02/12/12

I wish I was an iPod so I could plug into a computer to recharge my energy battery.

Instead I spend the entire day basically resting up from the long night I had earlier. After a week’s worth of constant socializing, fun, and a night full of sushi, drinks, and good company to top off my week – I started to feel the effects of over-socializing. I’m not naturally a socializer – it takes a lot of effort on my part to talk to people. That doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy being around people – it just means I need my own time to unwind and be off on my own to rest up, reflect, and enjoy my own silent company once in awhile. It’s taken me a lot of hard work to become a better socializer and now it’s much easier for me to do so and recharge afterwards. It’s a fine balance.

A lot of people don’t believe me when I tell them that I used to be very, very shy. I guess it makes me really appreciate the long-term friends I have at home who have seen me grow into the person that I am today. But coming to Norway and meeting new people every day has shown me just how much I have grown. Even I can’t believe that the girl who just three years ago was very much a guarded person could have done a complete 180 into becoming a social butterfly. And it’s not that I’ve changed my personality in a short couple years but the fact that I’ve opened myself up to others – to have accepted and be willing to show others who I am – that has brought me here. This me right now – this me is who I really am. Not that shy girl from all those years ago.

It’s amazing just how much you can soar when you learn to love yourself.