Wrote about farming earthworms and the relationships between me and other pivotal people in my community.

Within three weeks, AHPND had destroyed our community’s shrimp farms. As a budding environmentalist, I was involved in organic farming, the mangrove club and aquaponics, but this disaster was beyond my scope. For months, I experimented with different ways to save the farms, finally discovering that earthworm castings could neutralize the bacteria. Georgia Tech’s Environmental Engineering major emphasizes such direct community involvement and research as forces of social change. At Georgia Tech, the Water Quality Engineering and Geotechnical...

uddhist meditation is based on letting go of the past but learning from it, planning for the future yet living in the present. To my parents, our religion is like a warm coat, that will keep me protected. But their coat was one size fits all and the coat remained too large for my tiny frame. For years, the struggle between the demands of my education and those of our traditional Buddhist culture had brought distance between me and my...