I just received my deployment details. I’ll be heading to Vermillion Parish in southwestern Louisiana, a largely rural parish in the heart of Cajun country where a number of small towns (population less than 5000) were devastated. I am very excited! I’ll be staying in Abbeville (or nearby) and filling in a gap with the local team there which needs help writing and editing and synthesizing their planning documents and reports.

There seems to be some confusion as to the correct spelling of the parish. The Vermilion Parish Tourist Commission spells the parish with one L. But historically, it appears to have been spelled with two Ls. Here is a map I found online of the parish from 1895 with the older spelling:

And here is an image of one of the rice fields. Rice farming is an economic base of Vermillion parish. Rice fields double as crayfish ponds. (The crayfish are nourished by the rice roots.)

I hope to have more information to post soon, but I must take care of some chores and get on the road to Abbeville.

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

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“Vermilion Parish” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.