I’m Serag, Egyptian-Dutch and the first in my family to attend university. Over the past year, after careful preparation, I spent twelve months living and working in northeastern Brazil during both El Niño and La Niña. I filmed everything with my camera, aiming to capture real stories from the field.

For six months, I interned at Embrapa, Brazil’s leading agricultural research agency. With the supervision of senior embrapa researcher, dr. Rubens Sonsol Gondim, I worked with local researchers on biochar and cashew experiments. I also visited many smallholder farmers to see how changes in rainfall were affecting their crops and soils. During the rest of my time, I stayed in Ceará, where I explored rural communities, learned from both large industrial farms and small family farms, and traced the fruit supply chain all the way to the Port of Pecém, where most of Brazil's fruit are directly exported to Rotterdam.

My goal is to work directly with communities, share their stories, and translate what I learn into real strategies for climate action and resilient agriculture. As I begin my MSc at Wageningen, I plan to keep sharing these field stories and student experiences on my website. I hope this will help other students see what it is really like to work and learn abroad, and connect what we learn in the classroom with real-world climate challenges.