blog post 2

This past Wednesday I met with Jinmin again.  For about the first few minutes we caught up on the past week’s activities and then we started talking about spring break.  She said that her and her husband were planning on staying in Indiana for spring break and they were going to visit caves or something.  My heart wept because I don’t know why anyone would want to stay in Indiana for spring break.  But putting that aside, I told her I hoped that she had a good time. 

Later that week I went to my other weekly activity which was global café.  This time the Nepali student association of Purdue came to do a presentation on the music and art of their country.  I arrived at 5 o’clock as usual and helped set up as normal expecting it to be a normal global café.  But no.  This particular night things started out slow.  Yet by the end of the presentation, as I turned around, I saw tons of new faces some of which were standing.  I learned more than I could have ever wanted to know about Nepal.  For example I think there are about some 200 languages spoken in their country.  The main one is spoken by about 49% of the population.  Also about 89% of the population practices Hinduism.  What surprised me the most was how much a part of everyday life music is in their country.  Apparently you can’t walk down the street without hearing some type of music.  Moreover there is a certain type of music associated with many things.  Weddings and numerous festivals for example all have certain music associated with them.  And the festivals never seem to end.  Since the country is so diverse in terms of beliefs much of the Buddhist and Hindu culture mix and often you will find Buddhists going to the Hindu temples and vice versa.  Music is even incorporated into their movies.  And by this I mean they film people dancing and singing.  There are no plots like in our movies where we have music but it is in the background.  After the presentation the students feed the congregation with traditional Nepali food they had prepared and they played us a song.  It was an enriching experience.

blog post 1

This past Friday I undertook another activity in order to help speed up the process of obtaining thirty hours of community service.  After a few weeks of calling, waiting, following-up, emailing and then more waiting, I finally got paired up with a conversation partner.  I expected that she would be similar to me in that she was a student at Purdue and she was around my age.  But I was wrong.  Her name was Jinmin Chung.  And Jinmin turned out to be a thirty year old woman, who is seven months pregnant, married, is shorter than me (and I am only 18), but is in fact a student here at Purdue working to get her master’s degree.  Now this is not to say that I couldn’t relate to her, I was just extremely surprised by the person I was paired with.  She was a very nice lady who really seemed interested in getting a more firm grasp of the English language.  We meet in the Union near Starbucks and after introducing ourselves we talked for what seemed like forever.  I then told her about how I grew up in Hawaii until the age of 7 and then about how I moved around a couple more times since living there.  I told her about how ridiculously small my room is on campus.  I told her about how I was majoring in physics.  I told her lots of things.  And then, just as you would expect, she told me about herself.  It was a really great opportunity because I got to learn about someone else’s life and I got to make a new friend.  Then at one point, when we got bored of conversation, we went into the basement to play some pool.  I ended up having such a good time that I lost track of time and was late to global café (my weekly service activity).  I am looking forward to Wednesday which will be the next time we meet.