My mother, inspired by her family’s traditional Chinese siheyuan home, moved her parents in with her when she married. Like the siheyuan's multigenerational courtyard-cuddling wings, our own block nestles my aunt, uncle and cousins.

Yet only as I watched my peers in single family homes traverse a cruel seesaw of virus risk and social isolation did I fully appreciate our alternative way of living.

The farming population in South Korea hit a record-low in 2019, with nearly half the farmers being 65 or older; young rural Africans are leaving their small farms at “alarming rates”; and the rural population in the United States has declined for the first time in history, with over 100,000 small farms disappearing in the past decade.

In a New York Times article, author Ana Swanson details the mounting load of challenges modern farmers plow through each day, ranging from droughts and storms intensified by climate change to supply chain disruptions from the coronavirus pandemic.

Young people view farming as an archaic, unprofitable and unskilled occupation, the International Fund for Agricultural Development explains.

While helping seniors set up grocery deliveries may not sound as exciting as building schools for impoverished children, it demonstrates what colleges really want to see, without the hefty price tag and overtones of imperialism.

A group of peers and I had traveled to Myanmar, ostensibly to create a musical to promote and preserve the Wa people’s artistic culture. The fact that none of us had any background in anthropology, musicology or production was strangely irrelevant.

As Pippa Biddle illustrates in the book “Ours To Explore,” once one group “[finishes] building bathrooms at a local school and [leaves] for home, the structures [will be] demolished to make way for a new project, built by a fresh set of volunteers.” She even documented how children in Uganda learned to “rub dirt on themselves before running toward arriving volunteers.”

Each year in the United States, an estimated 15,780 adolescents are diagnosed with cancer. That’s 15,780 people whose lives, and the lives of the people close to them, have been altered at the drop of a hat.

One study found that only 40 percent of cancer survivors reported that their medical teams discussed the possible mental impact cancer could have on them.

It's a simple, nonchalant response, usually followed by an "Oh my gosh" or an awkward silence, and, for the longest time, that's all I thought that my experience with this disease was going to be.