Tomb Sweeping Day: Similar to Memorial Day?

While I was reading my autobiographies I was searching for certain items, dates, dynasties to stick out at me so I could be interested in writing this blog post about them. There were a few instances in which I was deciding between dynasties that Johnny wrote to me about and a festival day called "tomb sweeping." As I am not real big into history I decided to skip the dynasties and look into what they call "Tomb Sweeping Day." In my autobiography I received from Alice, I'm assuming that she thought I knew what tomb sweeping day was because she did not explain it at all. In fact all she put was a picture of herself (Selfie) of her standing by a tree with a caption saying "Me on Tomb Sweeping Day." I was immediately intrigued and wondering if this day in China that they celebrate was like our american holiday Memorial Day? I wrote back to Alice asking many questions about this day and why she would put a picture of her on this special day, when I'm connecting it to Memorial Day; yet she seemed very happy in the picture.

When I started looking into Tomb sweeping day it seemed more and more like memorial day. According to this article based on Chinese Festivals, Tomb Sweeping Day is said to be the most important custom during the Qingming Festival. This Chinese festival is always near the beginning of April because this special day is a festival for more then just honoring the dead, but it is closely related to agriculture. This festival marks a point in the year where temperatures begin to rise and rainfall increases; meaning it is a crucial time period for plowing and sowing.

Also I found to be very interesting day because when they honor their lost loved ones they clear the weeds from the tomb and plant fresh soil to show care for their dead ones. On top of that their family takes the favorite food and wine of their loved ones, to sacrifice for them, along with paper to resemble money. These actions of leaving their loved ones their favorite items and burning it on their grave is to show that their loved ones are not lacking food and money.

I now know why Alice took a picture of herself in the graveyard because it is an important tradition during the spring for their agriculture and a day for the gathering of family and honoring of their deceased loved ones.
      

MSU Service Learning Experience

I went to two service learning speeches while I was at MSU for the trip. First was the poverty lecture, the message itself through the lecture was very interesting. The message portrayed was related to my groups project because like their presentation it discussed poverty, starvation, what people do for money to stay alive, health problems of hunger and so on. Hearing about people that have actually done something to help the world puts a different perspective onto my groups project because it incorporates actual cases of people helping the less fortunate in cases of need.
Although the lecture was interesting and portrayed evidence that supports my groups service learning project the documentary with Omer, and the rest of the refugees in it, was fascinating.  Omer and many others were very kind and generous by giving their own time out of their lives to make any number of less fortunate families more accustomed to the new country they are now living in. Overall the documentary was factual and interesting at the same time. The film showed many camps where the families had to flee their past country just to survive and coming to a new country was not easy let alone the amount of stress it had to put on them to survive in the new country. Omer and the rest of the people made this transition much easier in their new world. I think the documentary and the poverty lecture definitely opened my eyes to people in other countries who are struggling to survive while we Americans get angry if we don't get the iPad we wanted, or the apple computer we wanted, etc. Anyway, I loved the trip and I think you should definitely do it next year with your future class and I hope they get as much out of it as I know our class did! 

Global Perspectives - Food Insecurities

Our project consisted of Chris, Colton, Drew and myself but only Chris and I did the powerpoint together. Our project was over food insecurities and how we could help struggling individuals get the proper food they need in order to maintain a healthy life style. Our project presentation summarized how we would get the food to the food banks, food kitchens, etc and all the resources we would need to complete the mission. I have attached a link to the presentation over our Food Insecurities project.



https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3IlyK61g1J8UHZDazEyMkJBMDQ/edit?usp=sharing