Thinking back to my college years (oh, I wish they didn't seem so long ago now) about the service learning that I had the good fortune to participate in, several experiences came to mind. The experiences themselves were very powerful and meaningful for me, but upon reflection now I am astounded at the significance they took in directing my path...

• Before I was even a student at Eckerd, Green Rampage's planting of native species around the campus grounds influenced my decision to attend Eckerd. As an environmental studies major and Earth Society leader, we planted and tended to many more.
• As a freshman during Autumn Term, Into the Streets in South St. Pete introduced me to the concept of community gardening. Five years later I was living in community on an organic farm in Santa Cruz, California, learning the principles of organic farming and gardening as an apprentice.
• In my sophomore year, spring break in Immokalee, Florida, invited me into the lives of underpaid migrant farm laborers and the fight for social justice, starting with tomatoes. Five years later I attended an awards ceremony in Oakland, California, that recognized those same farmworkers from Florida for their victory in the Taco Bell campaign!
• Spending the first semester of my junior year in Ghana inspired me to learn about global food insecurity and trade alongside joyful traditional West African dance and artforms. Five years later I returned to Ghana as a volunteer consultant with FarmServe Africa, teaching recordkeeping and business skills to small farmers in rural areas.
• Senior year, in my last semester at Eckerd, an independent study "Eat Your Ethics" enabled me to organize a campus-wide event centered around food and the environment and meet two of my heroes: Frances Moore Lappe & her daughter Anna Lappe. Three years later I had the pleasure of working with Anna Lappe, coordinating her cross-country tour for her second book Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen, and organizing community food-centered events.
• Eight days in a Burmese refugee camp inaugurated my post-college life and whetted my appetite for traditional foods, fair trade and small-scale sustainable agriculture. Three years later I received an email from Wee Eh Htoo, a friend we made in the camp, letting me know that he'd recently been back into the Karen state of Burma and collected traditional herbal medicine information, as well as led an environmental workshop.

Taking part in service learning really is that - taking a part. It would be silly to write about service learning with respect to how it helps the environment or our community because in truth it helps us first. It gives us a sense that what we do and how we live our lives does matter, and that validation of our existence takes the service to another realm. Even service at its most physical grunt-work level, like building a house or digging up non-native species in a restoration area, brings the doer to another place - one where the collective experience and the common good surpass individual desires or needs. Some call service a spiritual practice. I would agree, in that it lifts our spirits and those of others. But I'd also just call it a human practice. Without serving each other, wouldn't we be inhuman? I think it's our natural state of being, what we all really want to do. We just let too many other distractions get in the way sometimes. I have truly been blessed to have so many opportunities to do what I really want to do. I guess it's a combination of will and opportunity.

So where has it all taken me? To Fiji. Actually, it's true. I spent the year after graduation on a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship in Suva, Fiji, doing a postgraduate diploma in Development Studies (plus dancing with the Cook Island Dance Troupe, getting scuba certified, and volunteering at the National Food & Nutrition Centre). While there I was amazed at what was happening to food and agriculture in Fiji: traditional food crops were being replaced in the diet with white flour, high sugar foods, while agricultural land leases were expiring without new farmers taking over stewardship of the farms. Free trade was also hitting Fiji hard; with an end to subsidized pricing for their sugar cane in the next few years, Fiji's small cane farmers would soon no longer have a livelihood. Being well-versed in the organic foods market in the U.S., I started talking to folks about the possibility of transitioning to organic sugar production to keep the farmland in production (which incidentally is linked to people eating more traditional healthy foods, because then they can grow those foods themselves). By the time my year in Fiji was up, I'd decided to start The Fiji Organic Project to assist cane farmers with this transition. Since then, The Fiji Organic Project has become a project of Earth Island Institute, and we've developed a training manual with best practices for sustainable sugar cane production. We've also helped fund the Fiji Organic Association (a trade group for organic producers in Fiji) and hosted the first national stakeholders meeting on the potential of organic sugar production in Fiji.

And finally, I'm back where I started - literally, my hometown and birthtown of St. Louis, Missouri. After several months of getting The Fiji Organic Project off the ground in-country, I decided that I needed to come home. I'm actually working at our family screen printing business now, something I never in a million years would've thought I'd be doing in my career. But in all of my travels and service I've learned that the world runs on commerce, whether the product starts on a farm or in a factory. And to change the world we have to change the way we do business. So I've taken my entrepreneurial spirit to the world of t-shirt printing, what eight other members in my family do. I've seen the need to create a 'green line' of apparel, so we now offer a wide array of organic and recycled apparel options, and soon we'll have a new method of eco-friendly printing under our belt as well! My personal passion for organic farming and environmental education can't be squelched out though.. I'm now working with a local land trust to secure a historic nearby 14 acre farm (that's always been organic by default- it's never had chemicals on it!), to keep it in agricultural production in perpetuity. My ultimate goal is to create an organization that will operate it as a working CSA*/sustainable agriculture training center for youth. The farm will serve as a creative arts center for the community too, our mission being to bring out the culture in agri[culture]! And of course one of the ways we're fundraising is through sales of organic t-shirts! It always comes full circle. Sow your seeds carefully...

www.fijiorganic.org
www.myspace.com/sportsprint

*CSA = Community Supported Agriculture