Sylvia's Bucket List: 27. Volunteer in a Foreign Country

Completed: 07/30/2014

After harvesting rice

As stated in my previous post of my Hong Kong travels, I was fortunate enough to align yet another bucket list item with one of my work's initiatives. This time, the volunteer experience abroad was to satisfy our college's goal to increase the global perspective and diversity of our students by having them travel to a foreign country and learn about their programs of study from a different point of view.

Camp schedule

After getting the okay from my boss when I proposed my idea of sending students to a volunteer workcamp to Hong Kong, I contacted Volunteers for Peace to begin coordinating our customized experience. We worked with a partner organization in Hong Kong, Voltra, to build our itinerary. Both parties were very good with communication and designing a program that fit our objectives of learning about agriculture and food issues in Hong Kong as well as incorporating local culture. Here is what we did during our stay from 7/20-30/2014:

Monday, July 21, 2014

Arrived in Hong Kong, close to midnight. Traveled to Wing Lung ecological farm via taxi. Met our fellow Hong Kong workcampers, Shirley, Stephanie, Anson, and Bird (he was the main campleader). This work camp is more of an experimental farm, in which whatever is produced goes to the food bank or elsewhere. The land was originally a dumpsite that was bought up by a friend of the homestay host, Simon, who asked that he oversee the farm ventures. Some things they had growing while we visited include Saba snakegrass (which apparently has cancer-healing properties), figs, watermelons, and various herbs. Interestingly, the local volunteers who come work at this site have other full-time jobs, but come to this farm to do something more meaningful with their lives.

Wing Lung Ecological Farm

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Went through an orientation to go over what we expect out of the experience and well as do some intercultural learning. We wrote down our fears and expectations, then did an exercise to measure how "Chinese" we were, by selecting which of two contrasting pictures for each topic better represented our beliefs/culture. The pictures were taken from a Beijing-born designer who lived in Germany. We were also divided into two teams for a food challenge that would happen later that week. I, along with Anson, Ty, and Kelli, made up the grassroots team. Stephanie, Miho, Felicia, and Shirley represented the LOHAS (lifestyle of health and sustainability) group.

Bird explaining the activity to us

We then did a little yard work clearing a terrace lined by citrus trees that was overgrown with weeds. We managed to finish the work in one afternoon. The Hong Kong folks also had their cultural night, where they decided to teach our group a few useful Cantonese phrases, including counting from 1-10, please, thank you, and handsome guy/pretty girl, among other things. We also made some mochi balls, which we filled with peanut butter, spicy chili sauce, and apple Hi-chew. Our group is pretty creative.

Cantonese 101 with Anson and Stephanie

Shirley teaching us how to make mochi balls

Finished product

That evening, we had a welcome party with guests who were previous volunteers or affiliated with Voltra. We were seriously jetlagged, so the party was cut short at around 10pm.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

The next morning, we woke up around 7-8am and ate a small breakfast before doing more yardwork. Our first task was to till a few small plots within a greenhouse and clear out the weeds. There was also weed work to be done in a nearby lotus pond.

Weeding the tall grasses blocking the nice bay view

We then had a simple stir fried udon noodle lunch, prepared by the grassroots team. After lunch, we went to the beach to collect rocks for a cement project the farm was planning to do later on.

Quaint beach nearby

Beach selfie

Some folks continued to do more yard work as the grassroots team headed out to purchase their ingredients for their food challenge. We only had 10 Hong Kong dollars per head to spend (which turned out to a grand total of 90 Hong Kong dollars to feed 9 people). The criteria that we had to follow included price and portion. There were two other criteria, but I don't remember exactly. I think it was taste then health.

The wet market

Anson hard at work bargaining

Since we represented the lower class, we had to walk to the bus stop (half an hour uphill), then ride the bus for half an hour to reach the wet market destination that is supposedly pretty cheap. Anson bargained for our food items at the wet market before we headed back on the bus back home. We left at around 3:00, but didn't return until around 7:00, and dinner wasn't ready until past 8:00. This day was supposedly the hottest day in the lunar calendar. It certainly felt like it when we were in the poorly ventilated kitchen. I never sweated so much in my life (beads of sweat continuously forming, and sweat running down all parts of my body).

Sweating in the kitchen

Our menu that night consisted of steamed sweet potato as our starch, boiled lettuce (we got a head for only 3 Hong Kong dollars!), wintermelon with pork, and tomatoes with scrambled egg. I think it wasn't enough food, but luckily we didn't starve.

Grassroots dinner that took like 5 hours total to prepare (shopping and cooking time)

Thursday, July 24, 2014

The next morning, we were divided to complete different tasks, from replacing pheromone sheets to attract pests, to more weeding and tilling of soil, and greenhouse work. We then had a simple American style lunch (sandwiches and salad).

Working them arms. If you like the pants I'm wearing, read this post

In the afternoon, the LOHAS team went out shopping (since they represented the higher class, they were privileged enough to take a taxi and shop at the more expensive supermarket that was closer to our campsite). Our grassroots team stayed back at the campsite to work on the hard task of uprooting two trees that had intertwined. It took us three hours to work on it, but we eventually succeeded! I was quite proud of this accomplishment.

Determined to uproot the thing

Used a variety of tools, including shovels, pickaxes, regular axes, and a mallet

Tired but ecstatic that we finally succeeded!

The dinner that night prepared by the LOHAS team was a single stir fry dish of all kinds of organic foods like tofu, beans, leafy greens, and carrots that were all shipped from as close to Hong Kong as possible to decrease the carbon footprint from travel. We were also served organic brown rice and a dessert of yogurt with granola.

LOHAS team with their dinner

Up close of LOHAS dinner

Friday, July 25, 2014

(Free day - see post on exploring the city)

Saturday, July 26, 2014

Although we had gotten back to the farm past midnight from our adventure in the city, we had to wake up early to head out since we were going to sleep over somewhere else for our series of farm and countryside visits. We had breakfast at a nearby café, where I ate corn congee.

We first headed to the Buddhist-affiliated Sino organic farm in the New Territories. When we arrived though, heavy rains had hit so we had to wait it out for an hour or so. When the skies cleared up, we headed up to the farm, which was surprisingly meticulously organized. The main farmer had family experience and also went to school to train in farming. He carefully marked which crops were planted and how they were doing. His farm included lots of varieties of melons, eggplants, corn, raspberries (the farmer mentioned that he experimented with various crops to see if they can fare in Hong Kong weather, but showed us the raspberries as an example of a crop that wouldn't make it in Hong Kong), bittermelon, pumpkin, peanuts, and other things. We got to harvest some peanuts, knock on watermelon to see which were ripe for picking, and helped to cover up some bittermelon in black trashbag material to speed up their growth.

Corn

Raspberries not doing too well in the humid Hong Kong weather

I, along with another workcamper, were suffering from diarrhea from something we ate the day before (I'm thinking the milk tea from our free day was the culprit, but can't verify for sure). Luckily the bathroom was readily accessible and clean, so it wasn't too bad.

Albino bittermelon

Harvesting peanuts

After we finished the activities at this farm, we headed to Ping Che, the site of another volunteer workcamp that was in session. The rural community of Ping Che is threatened by development, and is therefore trying to promote arts in the area to hopefully build up enough of a cultural value to the place so that the government would deem worth saving when it comes time to demolish the area. They hold group tours and promote the arts through paintings from volunteer workcampers. Hope that their efforts are enough to save them. Anyway, when we arrived, we met workcampers from South Korea, Spain, Thailand, mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. It was tough to share one Western and one squat toilet with about 30 people total, but we managed.

Welcome dinner at Ping Che

Sunday, July 27, 2014

We stayed at Ping Che the next day. First, we had an agricultural workshop presented by Anson, on rural perceptions of our respective groups as well as the agricultural situation in Hong Kong, since he was studying this for his Master's thesis. Hong Kong only produces less than two percent of their food locally.

Anson presenting on the rurality of Hong Kong

There was a break for lunch before our group got to go on a tour of Ping Che. The highlight of the tour was stopping by the farmer's market, where we got to try dried fruits/dehydrated foods. There was a flower thing and yellow peel that was really good.

Food is usually the best part of any tour

After our tour, we prepared for our cultural night, to present Hawaii to the other workcampers, Voltra visitors, and local community members. We made musubi as our cultural food item, which was a hit. For our presentation, the students sang Hawaii Ponoi, shared about the islands, and taught everyone how to count in Hawaiian. The audience was then divided into two to race each other to put the Hawaiian phrases in numerical order. Everyone got kukui keychains or macadamia nuts for trying.

Teaching audience how to sing state song

Talking about Hawaiian islands

How to count in Hawaiian

Monday, July 28, 2014

Our group woke up around 7:00am since we were leaving Ping Che. We headed to Long Valley to a rice field, We went to the home base first. The campers here are real troopers, since they do hot work in the sun, yet their facilities is not as comfortable as we had at Wing Lung or even Ping Che. They had no A/C, had to battle mosquitoes at night, and only had a squat toilet. Talk about very basic living conditions.

Sifting rice

Harvesting rice was perhaps the activity that our group enjoyed the most. Harvesting rice entailed using sickles to cut the rice stalks, creating an assembly line to transport the cut rice from the field to the milling machine (the mud is really sticky, so it is not so easy to walk around once you're in the field). We also had a chance to mill the rice to separate the grains from the stalks. After doing that, we sifted the rice to exclude the smaller grasses that get pulled with the grains before bagging the rice.

Milling rice

After a long day (I think this was considered the actual hottest day in Hong Kong), we got a surprise visit from the Ping Che workcamp leader, who bought Pocari sweat and egg tarts for us. We also ate tofu pudding before heading back to Wing Lung. Before we got back to the workcamp, we ate dinner at Tim Ho Wan, a Michelin star restaurant created by a five-star cook who wanted to create affordable dim sum for the masses to enjoy. We also split up so one group headed back to the workcamp while another did some shopping for food ingredients. This was the time we bought our birthday "cake" for Stephanie, since she spent most of her birthday serving as our tour guide during our free day, which you can read about in the Hong Kong post.

Tofu pudding

Cool jello dessert with some kind of flower inside

We were about pooped when we got home, but not enough to prevent Bird from wanting to play drinking games with us (I stuck to water though).

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

We were rewarded with the morning to sleep in, so we didn't wake up and eat until about 11:00am. After lunch, we did Stephanie's short birthday celebration and then we completed evaluation forms for the experience. I then went with Stephanie and one of the students to a nearby clinic since she suffered an allergic reaction to an ant bite the day before, which caused her hand to swell up.

Happy belated birthday, Stephanie!

After an uneventful visit to the clinic (thankfully), we went shopping for additional goodies at the nearby markets. We also stopped by Stephanie's favorite dessert place to buy a durian dessert, as well as one with mango and lychee. I was very much looking forward to that.

Not swollen vs. swollen

We arrived back at the camp in time to help out a bit with transporting some aluminum siding that would be used to construct a future pavilion/gazebo area for workcampers to rest. Another group was preparing hot pot ingredients for our dinner that night. We had a bunch of guests over (not sure who they all were), but it was a pretty chill party. After they left, we opened the dessert. The fresh durian from lunch wasn't as ripe yet so the stench and taste were very mild. Once this dessert was opened, the stench was horrid. But after initial shock subsided, the dessert was the loveliest thing I tasted in my entire life. It was soooo good!

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

We woke up at 5:30 to finish up packing so we could head out at 6:30. Took a van to airport for our flight back home. Such an awesome experience. By the time we finished, we learned so much and the group became a family. Good bye Hong Kong!