Service Reflection

Unfortunately, for the first half of the semester, working at Foodchain has been difficult. Not because the work there is hard, but because it was very difficult to find a time where both I am out of class and someone can actually be at Foodchain to give us guidance. Anne Preston, the service coordinator for Foodchain, had said that she would give time slots for us outside of their normal volunteer hours, but the days for those don’t happen until the second half of the semester. That being said, I was able to work there for at least a few hours and from that experience I can tell I will really enjoy the rest of my time there. When I went, we unfortunately didn’t get to do any hands on farm work with either the fish or the plants. Instead, I was needed for cleaning up a renovation project in a more run-down part of the building where their kitchen and store are being built. The paint in that room is currently being stripped and everything needed to be swept up for a dinner that Foodchain was hosting. I also set up tables for the people that would be eating there as well. From both my orientation and the few hours I have done thus far, I can tell that just being in the atmosphere is an excitement. The whole place has a very distinct smell and you can just feel the humidity in the room. But it just looks absolutely amazing. While there I was able to take the picture below. It shows on the right the water tanks holding the fish, the pipes that connect them to the bacteria pool which converts their waste to fertilizer, and then from the middle of the picture to the left are the actual plant gardens. The water that flows from the bacteria pool to the plants is then taken and recycled back into the fish tanks at the end of the cycle. That alone is an amazing process but just being able to be a part of this organization to help give back to the community when Foodchain asks for nothing in return is incredible.

Picture taken by me

TED Talk: "Want to Help Someone? Shut Up and Listen!" Analysis

The video I decided to watch for my TED Talk analysis that applies to my service learning organization the FoodChain is called “Want to help someone? Shut up and Listen!” by Ernesto Sirolli. Ernesto Sirolli is a sustainable development expert that has done work in a number of places around the world. He started off his career by working with a team to provide help and relief to different villages in Africa. Mr. SIrolli spends the majority of the TED Talk telling stories of his experiences while providing aid to different people in Afria and how this “aid” truly did not bring much help or relief at all. He learned that his teams initial approach to assisting the African people was actually quite ineffective, and they needed to adapt and form a new method to bring effective aid.  This TED Talk was done in September of 2012 at the location of the Christ Church in New Zealand.

I believe that the audience knew very little about the exact thing Ernesto Sirolli was going to talk about unless they had done research on him before they listened to him speak. If anyone in the audience had done some research on him before going to the TED Talk they would have found he is sustainable development expert and they could assume or expect he was going to speak on a subject related to that. Just from watching the TED Talk online I knew the title of talk so the extenet of what I expected from Ernesto Sirolli was to speak on effective ways to help people.  From watching the video I believe Ernesto Sirolli was very effective in two aspects of his talk: using humor and using stories to strengthen his point. Honestly the effective humor and story telling was coupled together as the stories he told about his experiences of working with people to support his concepts had humored worked in to them. As for nonverbal ways Ernesto communicated, he would use his hand motions very effectively when he told stories. The content and delivery was appropriate and effective for the specific situation  because of the stories he used of his experiences in Africa portray the concept of how to actually bring true aid  to people. He tells the story of going into a village to try and bring aid to the people by instilling agriculuture for a way to provide food for the people. Sirolli and his team decided to plow a field they they found to be great soil to grow tomatoes in. As soon as the tomatoes had become fully ripe, after one night had gone by, in the morning all the tomatoes were gone because they had been eaten by hippopotami from a river near by. SIrollii and the team were devastated and asked why the people of the village did not tell them about the hippopotami. The people of the village responded by saying the team never asked how they could help the people of the village and said that is exactly why the people of the did not have any agriculture in their region. He used this story to effectively illustrate how if a person truly wants to help someone they should first ask how they can help, not just impose their will on what they believe will help on that person. Overall, I believe that this TED Talk was fantastic overall, but I think an area he could improve was to make sure to fully and clearly pronounce some words that were a little hard to understand because of his natural Italian accent. Once again though, I absolutely love this video.