Marj to a Different Beat

Hello! My sincerest apologies for the hiatus.

A quick catch-up:

I interned and conducted research for my senior capstone in Lijiang during the summer of 2012. That fall, I returned to Wesleyan University for my senior year. I lived in a fantastic house with four other women, was a member of Wesleyan's College of the Environment Think Tank on environmental justice, completed my senior capstone project on the EJ implications of tourism development in ethnic minority village of China, and generally had a great final year at Wesleyan with great people and truly life-changing classes.

After graduation, I moved to Seattle, Washington, where I interned for the Trade Development Alliance of Greater Seattle and the Washington State China Relations Council (partner organizations, same office). I also served part-time in a Japanese restaurant. After six incredible months in Seattle, I moved to Beijing, which is where I currently reside! I've been here for almost a month now. I moved for a communications position with Natural Resource Defense Council's China Program.

Tomorrow, I leave for a week-long trip to Cambodia during the Chinese New Year holiday break. Upon my return, I promise to post more about my experience here thus far, including: pollution, expat culture, and food!

Here's a "draft" post I just found that I feel is worth posting. This was a research trip that I did to Lugu Lake (Lugu Hu), which borders Sichuan in the northwestern corner of Yunnan.

Lugu is home to the Mosuo people, somewhat sloppily labeled by the Chinese government as a people of the Naxi ethnicity. During my long weekend visiting Lugu Lake, I met a number of interesting people, including one woman who works for the county government's tourism agency and a local elementary school teacher. The teacher, Mr. Chen, took me on a ride around the lake (including into Sichuan!) and then treated me to dinner with a group of his friends.

While we were driving around, an earthquake hit the area. We didn't notice the quake from our car, but it did a lot of damage to a village near the restaurant we had dinner at. We saw a number of emergency vehicles drive by during dinner and then went to investigate it ourselves. The photos of the houses with missing walls are from this village. Mr. Chen's lady-friend lived in another more rural village that was hit hard by the earthquake, so we drove to check on her. Her and her family had moved their mattresses outside into a makeshift tent and were sitting around a bonfire. They were all Mosuo and had Mosuo-style headdresses on. Although I couldn't understand their dialect, it was powerful being apart of this moment of post-disaster togetherness.

Food!

Some pictures of Lashi Lake, the lake I live on.

There pictures are from our environmental education presentations at local elementary schools. It is difficult to get farmers to come to these types of presentations without providing compensation, so GEC solves this problem by creating hype before their presentations and then asking students to bring their parents and grandparents, who actually come! The presentations are interspersed with student performances -- short skits, singing, or dancing -- and all end with a speech by one of the students about the importance of environment protection.

Here's a quick tour of where I'm living this summer. It's called the Green Education Center, or GEC (Chinese: 绿色家园). GEC is a branch of the NGO Yunnan EcoNetwork. The center is located on Lashi Lake, about 20 minutes from Lijiang Old Town. There is an exhibition hall in the center so visitors often come by to learn about what we do, the diversity in the area, biogas digesters, being environmentally friendly, etc. We also go to local schools and do presentations about being environmentally friendly (more on those presentations in a later post).

The center is a converted farm house. I was told the farmer moved to the city and now rents the house to us. It's a neat place made of wood and packed earth.

This is GEC from the outside. Note the solar water heater.

This is the main office building. I live upstairs in the middle.

This building has bedrooms on the bottom floor and the exhibition hall upstairs.

We leave our fruit and veggie peels out to dry, so that they don't rot, and then put them in the digester or feed them to the pigs.

Our apricot tree!

This is the back of GEC. The building is our bathroom, to the right in the pig house. In the foreground is the garden.

Our peach tree!

Yummy ripe peaches mmmm

Sinan, a staff member, making dinner. Featured: mint and egg soup.

Abigail Washburn is a really cool bilingual folk musician that my good friend from Wes introduced me to a couple years ago. Listen to this short yet powerful TED Talk and check out the music video below, which has over 4,000 views on the Chinese version of YouTube (actual YouTube is blocked in China).

I'm currently at my internship in Lijiang, China at an organization called the Green Education Center (GEC), a branch of an NGO called Yunnan EcoNetwork. I arrived on Sunday June 10 and then found out that my good friends from Kunming Tammy and Lea were visiting Lijiang Old Town for a couple days!

I decided to take the 20 minute minibus ride to the Old Town and spend Monday night with them in their hostel. They were both very curious about what exactly I was up to in this part of China and so came and visited GEC on Tuesday. We try to feature all of our guests on the GEC blog, so here is their post: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_a44340b6010136oj.html.

10 days late, check out this incredible photo retrospective of the Tiananmen Square protests of June 4th 1989.

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/06/tiananmen-square-then-and-now/100311/

Some shots from my trip to Chengdu -- covering both Daoism and Buddhism.

The first few photos are from Mount Qingcheng, one of the most important centers of Daoism in China. It was about an hour out of Chengdu via bullet train and absolutely spectacular. The hike lead us through many different Daoist temples and through some beautiful forests.

PANDAS!

Arrived in Chengdu on Tuesday. Wednesday morning we woke up bright in early to make the 7:30 bus to see the pandas. It's important to go early in the morning while these lazy creatures are still active--and active they were! We even got to see a mother and baby playing which was fantastic.

At the end of the tour, we watched an educational video about the mating issues with pandas. Pandas seem to be just about the least practical creatures evolutionally. Their babies are classified by scientists as "premature" -- all of them -- because they come out 1/1000 of the adult's weight (100 grams) and often the mothers accidentally kill the babies by stepping or sitting on them.

Pandas also sleep a ton, eat a ton, and don't do much else -- including mate. The video  discussed the artificial insemination process panda keepers must do to keep the panda species in existence. They knock the pandas out and then use a modified electric shock and massage stimulation technique to collect the sperm (this part of the video was just a scientist explaining it -- no footage of the real thing, kids) and then inject it into the female panda. Talk about non-consensual sex!