Comminity and Home Ecological Garden Project

For my whole life, my main hobby and past time have been sports, whether it is playing lacrosse for my school or soccer with my little sisters, athletics has always had a major role in my life. I love playing both organized sports, either through my town, school, or a club, or just for fun with my friends. I played baseball, soccer, basketball, and football, and lacrosse. In high school, I played lacrosse and wrestled, I also joined the cross-country team in my freshman year. Outside of sports, my interests are more technical, when I was little I loved building things, electronic and otherwise, from building a working cardboard robot in second grade to joining an Arduino class.

Since I can remember I have had a knack for following instructions, as I get older I find that I will think two or three pages ahead and am almost always right when I do. I have always been able to pick up new things quickly, often much faster than the people around me, and in doing so have developed my ability to explain and teach things to others. Knowing that I had this skill I decided to take advantage of the enormous amount of free time that came with Covid, and take a course on how to teach English to people who speak another language. As of May of 2020 I am a certified TEFL teacher (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) and have been teaching classes ever since.

Gardening has been something that I have been a part of since I was little, my dad has always tried to have a veggie garden and most years we have been successful. At my house in Boston, we didn't have much space and had to deal with the harsh winters. Here in Costa Rica, on the other hand, the family I am staying with has much more space and we are even building a closed in greenhouse. Another difference is that here I am working much more independently and have the help of someone much more experienced than I am. One thing that has always been intriguing to me is certain plants grow really well together and produce a higher quantity and quality than they do separately. I want to be able to not just know which plants to grow with which other but actually understand the science behind it and then use that knowledge to further my project. For the community or service piece, I have decided to use the food that is grown in my garden to help the people in my community eat better and healthier without having to sacrifice other things like paying bills.