One issue in the United States and worldwide that I would like to see addressed by the next President of the U.S. is the overall wellness of our planet, specifically with an emphasis on pollution. I feel as though pollution was talked about a lot when I was in elementary and middle school; science classes placed an emphasis on respecting your planet by recycling, avoiding littering, and carpooling (among many other things) in order to keep pollution to a minimum. However, I no longer see much emphasis on these practices. For instance, many states do not have laws requiring recycling.
Air pollution is a very large problem across the world. An article from the website epa.gov states that “In 2019, about 70 million tons of pollution were emitted into the atmosphere in the United States… Between 1980 and 2019, gross domestic product increased 182 percent, vehicle miles traveled increased 114 percent, energy consumption increased 28 percent, and U.S. population grew by 44 percent” (“Air Quality- National Summary”). These statistics indicate that people are not as concerned anymore with the health of the planet. This is reflected also by the measures taken by the Trump administration weaken Clean Air Act regulations. Despite the large issue of air pollution, according to an article from the website The Conversation, the Trump administration worked to weaken “enforcement of air quality regulations and remove emission controls on oil and gas drilling sites” (“As air pollution increases in some US cities”).
I believe that the next President of the United States, who at this point is probably Biden, should work to strengthen air quality restrictions and enforce basic procedures for the wellbeing of the earth, such as recycling. Air pollution and pollution in general are significant issues which must be addressed not only by individual people in the U.S and the world, but also the government. Change can be initiated by the people, but the government must pursue and enforce such change to make it effective.
Hey guys! It’s the final passion blog post, and that’s really crazy to me. It’ll mostly be the same as the other posts, but at the end I’ll reflect on my trips as a whole and say what I’ve learned and what it means in the grand scheme of things in my life. So this mission trip was in 2019, and I was 17. Unfortunately, I did not get as many pictures for this one as I wish I did, but I’ll still share the ones I have.
I spent time at 2 different houses for this trip. The first one belonged to a women named Ruth. We were actually applying skirting to the trailer, similar to the houses from last year, but we took a slightly different approach because there was a different problem. For this home, we installed 2×4 pieces of wood to create a stable framework, and then we drilled wooden sheets onto these frames. Here’s one picture of me building the wooden frame:
We did this for 3 days, and then we went to a different site at the end of the week. We actually went back to the couple’s house from the year before (the one with all the wiener dogs!).
It turns out that a few months before we came back, the running water in their house broke, and they couldn’t afford to fix it. Therefore, they had been living without running water for drinking, for the toilet, for the shower, and for other necessities. Therefore, we fixed the running water at their house. We also were tasked with babysitting a little bit, because the older couple was taking care of the neighbor’s children for a couple weeks. They had two little boys. The older of the boys got very comfortable with me and chilled in my arms for a while. I also played hide and seek and tag with him. Here’s some pictures of me with him and my team:
It was really amazing to get back in touch with the people we helped the year prior, and it was a great pleasure of mine to be able to assist them again.
Here’s some other random pictures from the trip:
This is a picture of me and my team from when we went to Rangeley Lake on the 4th of July.This is a picture I took on the way back from Rangeley.This is just a funny picture that my friend Luke took of my brother Jeremy (left) and my friend Craig (right). The coordinator of the mission trip invited us to dinner at her house on the last day in Maine. We played ultimate frisbee at this gathering and it was so much fun, and at the time of this picture, we were playing truth or dare. I don’t remember what made those two react in that way, but I wish I did.Here’s a close-up of Craig that I took haha.
Ultimately, going on these mission trips is always genuinely one of the highlights of my year. I look forward to these trips for months because I always feel so fulfilled and complete from them. Me, my cousin, and my brother created a new terminology, called Post-Mission Trip Depression, because we always are so sad to go home after the mission trips. We always wish that they were longer, and we actually may push to change the Maine mission trips to 2 weeks instead of 1 so that we can get more work done without feeling rushed. I’ve made some amazing friends and gotten close with my family as a result of these trips. I’ve made large impacts in the communities I’ve been to, and I can’t wait to continue doing so by going on more trips. They have shaped me into the person I am today. They have made me humble and able to appreciate the things I have, while using the privileges I have to help those who don’t have such privileges. My religious faith grows every time I go on these trips, along with my self-confidence, construction skills, interpersonal skills, and my appreciation of the little things. I love being a source of hope to the people I interact with. I can’t wait to go on more trips in the future, possibly out of the country and for longer periods of time.
If you ever get an opportunity to go on a mission trip or something similar, I urge you to take that opportunity. It’s more worth it than you could ever imagine.
For this RCL post I will be talking about a specific element of TED talks that can commonly be seen throughout TED talks of various topics. I watched 3 different ones with VERY diverse subject matters, and I found that in all three of them, they propose interesting examples right off the bat. They follow a similar format that entails this: they propose a riveting topic or example, leave it alone for people to think about, and then return to it to provide a new perspective. This allows the speaker to hold the audience’s attention because the audience waits for them to return to the interesting topic proposed in the beginning.
For the first TED talk that I watched, called “What Fear Can Teach Us“, the speaker, Karen Thompson Walker, starts off by giving an example of a whaleship in 1819 sinking. It contained 20 American sailors in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. This whaleship, Essex, sank 3000 miles off the coast of Chile, and the men resorted to using 3 small whaleboats and trying to find their way to the closest shore. However, the speaker describes how these men debated on what shore they should strive for. The three options were going to an island known for cannibalism (about 1200 miles away), to Hawaii (which, the captain feared, could have severe storms), or to a region 1500 meters South (in hopes of finding the coast of South America). The speaker did not tell the audience what decision they made, but continued talking about fear and how sometimes we let fear influence our decisions, even if that doesn’t result in the best decision. Eventually she told the audience that the inhabitants of the boats, fearing cannibalism and storms, decided to aim for the coast of South America. Half of them starved on the way there.
In addition, the second TED talk, titled “Falling in Love is the Easy Part” talked about how the speaker, Mandy Len Catron, took a 36 question quiz which was rumored to make 2 strangers fall in love. As a result of this quiz, she did fall in love, and she became very well-known for it. She remarked that the most common question she got on the internet was asking “Are you two still together?” Then in her talk, she proceeded to dodge that question to talk about how falling in love is the easy part, and the hard part is relying on your partner to choose to keep loving you. She used this tactic to keep the audience engaged until the end, and she eventually told the audience that she was, in fact, still with the man she fell in love with from that quiz.
The final TED talk I watch was titled “How to learn? From mistakes“, by Diana Laufenberg. In this talk, the speaker constantly gave and returned to examples from the various schools in which she taught. She talked about the individual things she learned from her years of teaching young people, and eventually concluded that failure is the most important and effective way of learning.
Overall, I found from these TED talks that an effective tactic for keeping your audience’s attention is to give riveting examples, leave your audience to think about them, and then return to them while also introducing new insight that applies to those examples.
Hey everybody! This post is going to be about my fourth mission trip to Farmington, Maine. This trip was in 2018, so I was 16. Since we’re getting more into the mission trips that were recent (and since I have a lot of pictures), I’m able to remember more details of the remaining two trips. Therefore, again, this will probably be quite long. You can expect that for the next one too since it’s the last (omg!). Enjoy!
Similar to the other trips, this one was during the week of the Fourth of July. However, in this one, our mission team was invited to participate in the parade! I don’t have pictures from the actual parade, but here is a picture of the whole team on the Fourth of July just before we loaded into the trailer for the parade:
During this trip, my work group actually had the privilege of visiting 3 different residences for our work sites (obviously because we’re such wonderful and speedy workers and so we just completely banged out all our jobs like bosses).
The first residence belonged to a man named Don who was a war veteran. He had major back issues that developed as he got older, and they rendered him incapable of being up and about for too long. He told us though that before his back problems emerged, he actually built his trailer home from the ground up. He remarked that it really killed him to not be able to do work on his home anymore. The issue with Don’s house was that there was not proper insulation under the trailer home. As a result, whenever there was severe cold weather (which is very common in Maine), the pipes in his trailer would freeze. He went many winters without running water or heat. Therefore, our job was to install foam boards firmly between the frame of the bottom of the house and the dirt underneath. Then we installed skirting outside of the foam boards. These two layers of skirting prevented snow and wind from getting underneath the house to freeze the pipes. In addition, some other members of my work team replaced the front porch, because it was extremely unstable and broken. Here are some pictures of the process and the final results!
This is just a picture to show what the process looks like. I’m the one in the tan shirt next to the porch.This is a picture of Don next to his new porch. You can see some of the skirting that we installed behind him.
The second work site that we went to was a bit less intense for me, but there were multiple jobs happening on the site that were more involved. A couple people from my team were responsible for repairing the sinking floor in the bathroom of the home, and that was quite a task. However, my task was to paint the walls and floor of the basement. There had been issues with flooding and mold in the basement, but those were resolved before we arrived. At that point, the woman who lived there just wanted a more pleasant area to go do her laundry, so she had us paint the basement so it looked less gross. I didn’t really mind. I love painting, and it was a nice break from the intense labor from the days before. I don’t have any pictures from the actual work at that house, but I do have a picture with my team, the lady, and some of her dogs. She owned 4 or 5 dogs; it was crazy. One of them was a mastiff-chocolate lab mix, and it was an absolute BEAR:
The woman in the white shirt was the one whose house we were working at.
The last house we went to was my favorite out of the whole trip. At this house, we had to install wooden skirting to the bottom of the house and paint it. The people at this house, an older married couple, were the sweetest people I’ve ever met. They stayed outside with us in the heat the whole time while we worked, talking to us and bringing us food and water. They also had four little dachshunds that were very excited to have a lot of people to play with. Here are some pictures from that work site:
This is a picture of me getting ready to install another wooden board, while my friends Aidan and Craig stood and looked pretty. Don’t mind how annoyed I look in that picture. I was just tired. It was over 90 degrees that day.This is a perfectly timed image portraying the wonderful moment when two wiener dogs jumped into my lap during lunch.This picture took place after we finished installing and painting the wood skirting. The woman in the blue and the man in red that are towards the right side were the couple living in the home. Also, one of their dogs is licking my face in this picture, and it made me happy.
Finally, I will just briefly explain one tradition that we do every year for this mission trip. At the end of each trip, we have the prestigious Academy Awards. For this elegant event, we buy costumes or our finest attire from the local thrift store, and then each of us is presented with a made-up, comical award based on our performance throughout the week. Here is a picture of the attire that my friends and I wore for the event this year:
We, naturally, dressed up as elderly people (We think of something different and fun every year, I swear. The year before, 5 of us dressed as frat boys).
[Edit: Upon Kelsey’s request. I added a picture of our frat boy costumes from 2017]
From left to right it goes: my friend Sophia, me, my (favorite) cousin Allie, my friend Carly, and my friend Mary.
Anyway, I always have such a fun and worthwhile time when I go to Maine. Making this post and seeing all of these pictures really made me miss it. I can’t wait to (hopefully) go back again this summer. The trip got cancelled in summer 2020 because of covid, and I’m hoping that won’t be necessary for the next one. Ultimately, I love being able to physically contribute to the community by repairing homes. This gives me so much fulfillment, and making connections with the people we meet makes it even better.
