Author: Jeanne Rose Case

Be a tourist in your own town: Thoughts from Jeanne Case

Jeanne Rose CasePost-Trip Thoughts

Holy Smokes! That was a busy month! It is hard to process all the emotions right now. Even though we talked about it on the last day in Malaysia, how do you answer the question, “how was Malaysia”, it is hard to even for me to answer that question even for myself.

I know that I had an unforgettable, once in a lifetime experience, that probably changed me consciously and subconsciously.

I learned during this trip that I can really push myself.

I can push myself through the heat.

I can push myself through language barriers to form connections.

I can push myself to eat new food — sometimes I would just put things in my mouth and hope for the best.

I can push myself to take advantage of every opportunity, even when we were given downtime.. because “When in Malaysia…”

Sometimes with our normal routines, we become complacent and comfortable. We think we’re living our best life. When in reality we’re constantly spending time with the exact same people that have the same views as us. We’re going to the exact same restaurants and hangout places. We’re reading the same type of books and watching the same type of tv.

Where is the growth with that lifestyle? 

The Malaysian students we were with I think could be guilty of that as well. Their religion sometimes restricts what kind of food they can eat and their country sets the norm for who they can marry (Chinese marry Chinese, Indian marry Indian, Malay marry Malay) but they also have their own routines, their own likes, spending time with people like themselves. Even though we were in their country, we traveled to places that they know of, but don’t really know. I think the trip pushed them to try new things and reach outside of their comfort zone. They were local tourists.

However, 48 hours of traveling to a time zone that is 12 hours different is not something that can happen frequently for your average person.

How can we continue to push ourselves and not fall into the rut of complacency and comfortably?

  • try new food in ethnic restaurants
  • attend a religious service or event different from your own to better understand it
  • volunteer to tutor students with English as a second language
  • attend a cultural festival or show
  • be a tourist in your own town – there could be new opportunities and ways of thinking right under your nose.

While I believe it is hard to measure how much this trip has impacted me right now, when the past two days I was just in travel survival mode, I do know that is has impacted me. I look forward to seeing those impacts crop up with the new people that I meet or the random ones I see on the street and the way that my subconscious brain reacts to those interactions.

I also look forward to experiencing Pennsylvania as an adult rather than only as an adolescence. I plan to be a tourist in my own town, my own state. It will be interesting to see what it has to teach me. Because again.. apparently I’m good at change.

Jeanne Case (@_J_CASE) is a U.S. secondary agriscience teacher. She will be teaching at Cumberland Valley High School in Mechanicsburg, PA in the Fall.

Snacks and Coffee – Day 12

Jeanne Rose CaseAgriculture

Personal Note: Phew if this trip is good for anything, it is good at breaking habits! Infrequent access to WiFi, people think coffee is weird and prefer tea, air conditioning is not found everywhere.. lots of changes we are constantly molding and adapting to, and I will say — this group is pretty dang good at it! I find it amusing, that my blog post on our first day I lamented about the lack of coffee/caffeine in my body and the struggles I was experiencing. For my second post, it was the day that we toured a coffee processing company where we got one small sample.. I have broken this addiction so well that I did not even think of buying myself a whole cup until we got on the bus and had already missed my opportunity. Old me would have asked for an IV or at least five drinks to go.

July 20th – Second Day in the FELDA

MyPlate tells us the recommended serving sizes and food that people should be eating to maintain a healthy diet. On the plate, it includes fruit, grains, vegetables, and protein. (Note to Malaysian students, grains is a broad category — it does not only say specifically rice). Vegetables are the largest piece of the plate, but what do we really define as a vegetable? According to google a vegetable is “a plant or part of a plant used as food, such as a cabbage, potato, turnip, or bean”. So — since vegetable is the largest piece of my plate — and vegetable is just defined as part of a plant used as food — we had quite a healthy Saturday!

Snack Company Tour

Enter a Malaysian home and they all have little containers on their coffee tables with a variety of chips. You will not find Doritos or Lays potato chips, but instead, you will find banana chips and tapioca chips to name a few. We were able to tour a food processing plant where they make chips out of tapioca.

Care to guess what part of the plant is used to make the chips?

The process starts with farmers bringing in truckloads of……tapioca tree… roots! Then they are checked for quality, roots that are too hard cannot be used. The quality roots are then peeled with a large peeler (similar to what you would use to peel potatoes or apples in the states) then it goes into a machine that cuts the root into thin slices, those slices fall into a dye to turn the color orange. Tapioca roots are originally white so they are dyed to match their flavoring. After they are dyed they are placed into a large spinner to remove all the excess water.

An enormous deep fryer is a next step (I thought I was avoiding deep fried foods by missing the Wisconsin State Fair this year) where the chips are all fried to their crispy goodness. The chips are removed from the fryer to a large table to cool. The second to last step is putting them in a concrete mixer and adding the flavoring. We added a cheese flavoring. The last step is putting them on a large table to cool and to sample. They were delicious :). And plants cannot grow without roots.. roots are a part of a plant.. so I am one step closer today for fulfilling my vegetable quota.

The chip factory has been making tapioca chips since 1992 and became certified for Halal food in 2005. They look forward to releasing their new flavor – salted egg – later this year.

Coffee Tour (Kopi-O)

While I feel I do not have the knowledge yet to call myself a coffee connoisseur, I would call myself a coffee consumer. Our second tour of the day was at Kopi-O Coffee Processing Facility. We learned about different types of coffee, Liberica, which is coffee from Malaysia and usually used in the black coffee. Arabica, which is a bean from Columbia and what is typically used in Starbucks coffee. Robusta, which is from Indonesia and known for its robust flavor, but it typically not consumed on its own.

I learned that roasting coffee is a science — over roast it and it is bitter, under roast it and it is sour. Their typical roasting time is between 10-15 minutes. At this processing plant, they sell the powder, not the actual beans.

For their “black coffee” they roast it with sugar and margins so it has to be in the powdered form and they use a mixture of all three types of coffee beans that they have at their facility. For the “white coffee” they have, nothing extra is added but they still create it in powdered form. The “white coffee” is the type of coffee we would typically see in the states.

The company has a TV as their logo because when the company originally started it was when TVs were first starting to be in peoples homes and if you had a tv in your home you were really popular. The owner wanted his coffee to be as popular as the new TVs and to be in everyone’s homes, so he added the TV to the logo in hopes it would be as popular. By seeing the constant stream of people in and out of the tasting room during our visit, I would say his hopes became true.

For my sample, I chose the white coffee and tried the black and both were delicious. Of course, I bought some more coffee to enjoy at home.

PS. Coffee beans grow on trees, so I think that should also count towards my vegetable quota.

 

Jeanne Case (@_J_CASE) is a U.S. secondary agriscience teacher. She will be teaching at Cumberland Valley High School in Mechanicsburg, PA in the Fall.

A Full First Day – Sunday in Malaysia with Rice, Meetings and Bicycles!

Jeanne Rose CaseIn-Country Sharing

Personal Note:

It is easy to realize how addicted to caffeine you are when you cut yourself cold turkey in order to assimilate better into a new environment. Malaysia is a 12 hour time difference from Pennsylvania so our schedules have completely flopped. My fellow Fulbright Scholars caught a glimpse of that addiction when my eyes got a little watery when I realized we were being served coffee at the University. (It’s not a full addiction – I can stop whenever I want). My luggage also did not reach Malaysia yet, so I was left with the two outfits in my carry-on and the wonderful generosity of my travel companions. However, my Malaysian friend Nisa (who really likes shopping and fashion) took me shopping and made sure I bought “good material”, didn’t “overpay” and that my outfits would be suitable for wearing on campus. Despite the cloudy haze due to lack of caffeine, not having my luggage and traveling for three days… these are my observations.

Things we learned/noticed on day 1:

  • Rice is for breakfast, and lunch, and dinner, and snacks. We were smiled at when we said we only had rice about once a week and the Malay said that they have it at least three times a day.
  • “Free Style” during pictures means funny picture. A common Malay move is to hold their pointer finger and thumb together, which means I love you. They also enjoy the peace sign. (Flashback to elementary school.)
  • Durian fruit flavor lasts a long time in your mouth and comes in the forms of a McFlurry (yes, of course, there is McDonald’s here), popcorn, and the regular fruit. And apparently, there are more ways to enjoy this fruit that we will discover later on this trip.
  • The bathrooms have the showers located directly in the bathroom. No shower stall, no shower curtain. There is a step into the bathroom and a drain to keep the water going into the drain and not into the hall. (There are a lot of steps in the rooms to get from room to room.)
  • There are prayer rooms in the shopping mall since some of the people here pray at least five times a day.
  • All of the classes at UTM are in English.
  • They give you a spoon and a fork for meals rather than a fork and knife.
  • Monkeys go into peoples’ houses in the evenings to steal food – when we saw the monkeys, of course, we wanted to get closer, but our Malaysian friends told us to come back.
  • It is insanely easier when bikes have an “assist” mode on them, especially for going uphill. (Come-on America — where are these bikes for us??)
  • They also have VIP McDonald’s drive-through passes (Maybe we don’t need this trend brought to America…)

Impactful Group Moment – Why are we here?

We had a meeting at the University Teknologi Malaysia that consisted of our group from the States, our Malaysian counterparts, as well as the Dean of the University (that graduated from The Ohio State), and the Vice Chancellor.

The Vice Chancellor was discussing the University and the mobility (foreign exchange programs) and said that he could tell an “increase in student maturity, communication and worldliness when students have mobility”.

It was interesting to me that he noticed that and made a direct correlation of traveling through exchange programs, even if they are only for a week or two, to having better students. However, only about 10% of the students participate in those types of events. It was discussed that it was an issue to get students to do exchange programs in the United State as well. Since people can see a direct positive correlation between world travel and student maturity, how can we increase the number of people participating in exchange programs?

Pictured: Dr. Muhmmad Sukri bin Saud, UTM Dean, School of Education;  Dr. Daniel Foster, Penn State Agricultural Teacher Educator;  Dr. Nur Husna Abd Wahid, UTM Lifeskills Teacher Educator;  Dr. Melanie Miller Foster, Penn State Global Learning Specialist;  Dr. Wahid bin Omar, Vice Chancellor/President UTM

Another question posed to us, “What does it mean to be a Fulbrighter?”

As I am sure that we all have our own internal answer to this, that will probably grow and develop as we go throughout this trip; some thoughts that were shared was that as we are educators, it is our duty to get these experiences so we can share them in our classrooms and communities. It was determined that our job as current agricultural educators and as pre-service educators is to…

“Bring Teach Ag to the World, bring the World to Teach Ag“

Pictured: Most of the Fullbright Scholars and their Malaysian counterparts after a tour of campus via the motorized bikes

 

Jeanne Case

Fulbright – Hays Scholar – Secondary Agriscience Teacher

@_J_Case

Life’s – a – changing: Predeparture thoughts on July 4th

Jeanne Rose CasePreTrip Observations

HOLY SMOKES! In less than 48 hours I get on an airplane to go to Malaysia! (and Amsterdam).

This trip is also happening 4 days after I packed up and moved all my possessions from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania – found an apartment in Harrisburg – and attempted to prepare myself for a new job in August… while packing for this trip to Malaysia.

While I’m excited – there has also been some reservations from my Wisconsin students as to why on earth I would want to go on this trip…

  • You’re going to be eaten by a jaguar
  • Have you even looked up how many shots/medications you have to take to travel there?
  • Air Malaysia — I still don’t think they found that plane, you’re going to be lost forever
  • You can’t even handle Mexican spicy food – how are you going to eat there?
  • Did you see in the Milwaukee paper that the grandma in Indonesia was eaten by a snake?? — Better watch out!

While I have answered the shots/medications reservation — I will think positively about the rest

Reservations I do have for myself is that I do talk a big game about traveling. And while I have traveled more than some, I have definitely traveled a lot less than others. When this opportunity came up, I knew that I had to take it or that I had to stop talking about how I traveled all the time. I am mostly anxious about packing – do I have enough stuff? Is it appropriate? Is it too much stuff? To quell some of these fears, I have been messaging an old student from my first year teaching. She has done about a million mission trips through high school and college and has currently been in Niger in West Africa for the last month and will be there until the end of July as well. She received a lot of pictures of my outfits to determine if they were appropriate enough and helped me feel more at ease with my packing. When I expressed my anxiety of traveling she said “It will be so much fun! You’ve wanted to do something like this for the longest time, I’m proud of you”.

 

I know this trip to Malaysia will be life changing.

I know I just left a ton of people I love back in Wisconsin.

I know that it will be a big change to start at a new school in a new city come August.

 

But in response to my crying Snapchat on Sunday, driving the 12 hours from WI to PA

Apparently I’m good at ‘change’.

 

 

Jeanne Case

5th Year Teacher

Big Foot WI/ Cumberland Valley PA

@_J_Case