Zach O’Brien
2013 - 2014
Kochi, India
My Life as a Volunteer in an Eco-Village
Zach O’Brien (2013-2014: Kochi, India) will work in environmental conservation in the Amritapuri ecovillage, including volunteering on several mini farms and in the ecovillage’s composting and recycling facilities.
Zach is a 2013 graduate of Belmont University, where he earned double major in Mathematics and Economics with a minor in Business. He was inspired travel to Asia after studying abroad at Oxford University and romping around Europe for 10 weeks his junior year.
Zach is deeply passionate about using the scientific method to examine everyday phenomena. Besides practicing meditation, which he sees partly as a tool for removing biases from our perception of physical, emotional, and social experiences, he has spent the last few years at Oxford and Belmont conducting economic research on income inequality.
After India, Zach hopes to attend an economics graduate school program to further his research. He anticipates that India will fuel both his interest in environmental economics and his practice of meditation–both passions he hopes will last a lifetime.
More about me....
Major(s): Economics & Mathematics
Country Highlights
My Stories
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This is it!
Well, this is it! I leave in a few hours from Amritapuri to Cochin Airport to fly back home to California. I’ll admit
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Composting presentation
Amritapuri’s ecovillage offers “Get Growing” classes and workshops which are oriented around teaching visitors (mostly westerners) the fundamentals of organic and sustainable farming. Recently I was
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New projects
New projects have been in the works lately around the ecovillage and it’s been quite exciting. First, I’ve been spending a lot of
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A canine companion comes to the rescue
It’s impossible to travel for a long time in a foreign country without ending up in a few difficult–or sometimes even downright dangerous–situations.
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Economic dynamics in small communities
I’m going to take a break from my series of posts about working on the tea farm to touch on a more or
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Gardening, part 4: soil experiment
As I mentioned in my first post, Black Bug Invasion, the recent destruction of our tea crop has given us the opportunity to
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Gardening, Part 3: DIY organic fertilizer!
Yesterday in the garden we fertilized the tea plants. We have two fertilizer mixtures we use, and we try to set aside one
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Gardening, part 2: dung run
Recently, my supervisor in the garden, Suprya, received word that several local farmers were dumping their cow dung in the village backwaters (which
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Gardening, part 1: black bug invasion
My primary objective in coming to India was to volunteer at the ashram’s ecovillage. I spent my first two months here working in
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The privilege of spending time with the dying
These last few weeks I’ve taken on a job in the ashram’s hospital in addition to the work I’ve been doing at the
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On to Kotagiri and back to the ashram
My last day in Bangalore, I had no idea where I’d visit next and no plans. However, as seems to always happen during
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Trip to Bangalore
A couple weeks ago I decided to pack up my bags and hit the road for a week. First on the itinerary was
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The Hug
The ashram I’m staying at, Amritapuri, is headed up by a famous guru named Amma. About a week ago, Amma arrived at the
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Settling in
Now that I feel fully settled into working in the ecovillage and living at the ashram, I’d like to pick up my story
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And so it begins!
When I sit down to reflect on these past few day, it sends me reeling. Monday I took the biggest, hardest test of
