Reflection
What was something you enjoyed?
- Very new and hands-on experience
- Felt good to actually help and make contributions
- Sourcing and processing products can make a big difference
- New activity introduced: going to people’s apartments to pick up their items
What did you learn from this experience?
- Meat takes up a lot of water (learnt from presentation)
- Global warming, relevant to current affairs about climate change – frequency of natural disasters
- New perspective: learnt about the benefits of plant-based diet, looking at the food chain
- Meat production and industry is massively contributing to greenhouse gases
- Deforestation for grazing land – imbalanced oxygen and carbon dioxide ratio
- 70% of crops end up being fed to animals that we eat, these crops would have helped people in poverty
- Directly eating crops e.g. fruits, vegetables, beans allows more energy to be transferred to us
- Soil degradation – poorer soil fertility
- Fertilisers used in crops can lead to eutrophication
What would you do differently next time?
- Interacting with the local community more
- Getting to know them will help strengthen the bond we have – our goal
- Let them know why we are doing this, about us as a local service
- More structure – get into groups and rotate stations so we have experience with all the materials or specialisation in one material
- Knowing the venue better before starting so we know what goes where
What could have been improved
- At least one Buddha Tzu Chi member at every station to help guide us
- Improve communication on both parts
- Better knowledge of what goes where e.g. different types of plastic