{"id":1933,"date":"2012-11-29T14:26:22","date_gmt":"2012-11-29T05:26:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kcjs.jp\/blog\/?p=1933"},"modified":"2012-11-29T14:26:22","modified_gmt":"2012-11-29T05:26:22","slug":"alex-breeden-volunteering-with-agricultural-groups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kcjs.jp\/blog\/2012\/11\/29\/alex-breeden-volunteering-with-agricultural-groups","title":{"rendered":"Alex Breeden: Volunteering with Agricultural Groups"},"content":{"rendered":"

I did my CIP through a volunteer agricultural organization called Mori No Megumi, or “Blessing of the Forest”, where I worked both on small vegetable plots in northern Kyoto and larger, more remote rice fields in the mountains east of Kyoto. What kind of activity we did varied every time we went there. The first time we did rice harvesting which was a really great first experience since I hadn’t ever worked with rice before. Moreover, the work required conversations about exactly how the rice should be cut, bundled together, and then put through the machine. On other occasions, we fertilized cabbages, cut weeds, and sorted rice. Even activities which sound like they would be boring, like hand sorting rice, turned out to offer their own unique rewards such as creating more opportunities for conversation. In fact, rice sorting gave me the chance to practice keigo as one of the volunteers spoke to me using honorifics. Thanks to recent class discussions I was able to understand her pretty easily and then follow her shift to less formal speech. It also provided a chance to reflect on what sorts of situations polite speech should be used in since I would have never expected someone to use keigo when speaking to me since the volunteer group was pretty laid back.
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\u00a0I also went to the Kyoto University agricultural circle twice, though we didn’t do much and for whatever reason my friend and I didn’t really connect as well with the people there as we did with the people at Mori No Megumi.<\/div>\n
\u00a0There weren’t any real language problems, or really any major problems for that matter. I was a bit worried about having to get boots and not being able to find them, but I was able to borrow boots from the group representative every time.<\/div>\n
\u00a0One of the parts I enjoyed about my CIP which I don’t think you necessarily get in other groups was the wide range of ages of the people participating. This allowed me to see how age groups interacted with each other and myself get interaction not only with people my own age but also with older people. Also, I got to see some of the cultural differences in more rural settings, like the burning of pretty much anything that’s considered trash which occurs on a much larger scale than in the US.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0My advice to future students is to try and do your CIP with someone else because if a group has two people asking about participating it’s much more likely that at least one of you is going to get a reply. That and when you suddenly blank on vocabulary you know but have momentarily forgotten the other person has your back.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I did my CIP through a volunteer agricultural organization called Mori No Megumi, or “Blessing of the Fo … \u7d9a\u304d\u3092\u8aad\u3080 →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":125,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_locale":"ja","_original_post":"1933"},"categories":[4,51,55,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kcjs.jp\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1933"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kcjs.jp\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kcjs.jp\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kcjs.jp\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/125"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kcjs.jp\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kcjs.jp\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1933\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kcjs.jp\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kcjs.jp\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kcjs.jp\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}