When I originally set out on my trip, I got a lot of things wrong. I brought mosquito nets, life straws, and other backpacking gear, thinking I wouldn't be able to enjoy many of the same luxuries I had in the US while in SE Asia. Upon my arrival in Bali, I realized this was completely untrue, and even the thirteen dollar per night Airbnb had everything I could need.
That wasn’t the only thing I got wrong. Armed with my camera and mic, I expected that the people hit hardest by Covid and climate change would be the street food vendors, the original focus of my project. I could not have been more wrong. These vendors ended up tending to have a far more local customer base than I expected, and climate change was also not as large an impact as I had anticipated, because they were able to outsource buying ingredients to other countries in Asia. It turns out that the people suffering most from this series of events are the local farmers, and the market stall owners. Because the vendors can just buy from cheaper sources, it’s putting the local owners out of business. On top of that, most governments in SE Asia have banned these markets from even being held at all. Most of them have gone out of business, with new markets now beginning to open back up at half capacity. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to interview as many farmers as I would have liked. The few farmers running stalls that I was able to talk to reflected the woes of closed stalls and bad harvests.
I had to pivot. Many of the deliverables I had planned to create for the Appel Fellowship no longer made sense. I couldn’t do a TED talk about the effects on the street food stalls because there weren’t enough of them. Additionally, I realized I couldn’t do a full interview series because I had to hand translate them, so they would be in a language my viewers couldn’t understand. So I went back to the original goal.
I decided to write.
It seemed to be the best way to convey my thoughts and feelings about this life changing trip. Though maybe there wasn’t as much to write about with my original project idea, in practice, there was so much more to convey. From my packed day-to-day activities, to writing about the food, culture, and bathrooms of the different countries (post incoming about this one), the unexpected gave me so much more to share.
I even decided to keep updating my website and blog after returning to the US. I want to continue to share my unique perspective on life with whoever decides to tune in. It’s fun, and one day, when I look back, I’ll find out that the current future I’m living in wasn’t at all what I expected back then.