Hello
everyone and welcome to my brand new blog, A Summer of Refuge! My last blog was
about my Aventuras during my semester in the Dominican Republic, but this
summer I have moved on from traveling around Latin America (as I often do) and
toward doing work in one of my local communities, Indianapolis.
I
am not a native of Indianapolis; in fact, I am from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Attending DePauw University as a major in Romance Languages and a minor in
Sociology, I have traveled a few times to the city for cultural festivals and
of course to go shopping at the international market, Saraga (highly
recommended). After working at my local coffee shop for the past five summers
and realizing that I’ll be graduating in a year, I decided that this summer I
needed to focus less on making money and more on gaining some useful
experience. Well, useful experience can mean a lot of things. It can mean
having a bad relationship and learning to recognize what we like to call “red
flags”, it can mean going to a third world country and being so humbled that
you are forced to put your own life into perspective, it can mean working in a
boring office from which you come away a resume-building master at Microsoft
Excel, or it can mean interning at a non-profit and recognizing the pockets of
our society which need the most help, which is what I have chosen to do with
the summer before my senior year of college.
This
summer, I am lucky enough to be able to intern at Exodus Refugee Immigration in
Indianapolis. When choosing what to do with my summer, I honestly had no idea
where to start. Do I stay at home in Cedar Rapids and save money? Do I do an
internship abroad? Do I apply for Teach for America? Do I work on campus? I’m
sure that these are all questions that fly around the minds of a lot of college
students who are deciding how to make the best use of their summer. And the
reality is, every person is different and every person is supposed to do
something different. If we all tried to get internships every summer, think of
how mundane the world might be. Some of us need to stay home and work, and some
of us need to travel around. For me, I had never lived on my own before. In all
my travels I had always been with a host family or a group, every summer I had
lived at home with my family, and at school I had always lived in my sorority
house. So even last summer I knew that this time I needed something different
and was actually in the position to do something different. So I decided it was
time for me to live on my own for a summer and try and get an internship.
Now, you ask me, why Exodus? Why Indy? Well,
Indianapolis, for those of you who don’t know, is a pretty cool town. Like any
city, it has its pretty parts and ugly parts, but for the most part it’s got a
lot of culture, it’s not so big that people are impersonal (sorry New Yorkers,
but it’s true), and it’s not too expensive to live in. And it’s the capital and
biggest city in Indiana, where I have lived for the past three years. And I
thought, after traveling around so much, why not work in my own community and
make a difference in my own backyard? So that’s what I determined. An
internship in Indy was my best way to go.
Now
here I am, done with my first week at Exodus Refugee Immigration. I’ll have to
start out by saying that a lot of information in the office is case-sensitive,
so while I would love to share with you all of my experiences with the clients
and the individuals who I encounter and work with in the office, I can only
share certain information and certainly can’t mention any names. So I will do
the best that I can J
I
started the work last Monday, and I gotta tell you…those eight-hour days are
LONG! The first day, I was greeted in the office and immediately began right in
the classroom with the new students. Our clients are refugees from many
different countries, and I really got pushed into client interaction on the
first day, which I loved and was really excited about. We started out by doing
some ice breaker activities (having been a first year mentor and an
international student ambassador at DePauw really helped out with this one). I
immediately felt very comfortable with the students, and of course, when I feel
comfortable with people I start to make jokes. If you have ever taught ESL
before, you know that when you tell jokes and the students get it and laugh,
that’s a really good sign. We learned everyone’s names and got to learn a bit
more about the students and where they are from and what they did in their home
countries. What was most amazing to me is that all of the clients come from
very different backgrounds and had very different lives back home. One client
was a human rights activist, another was a carpenter, another was a teacher,
another said he was a father, and the list goes on and on. And they all start
out here all over again, with a completely new life, new set of clothes, and a
new perspective.
This
first week, I have been mostly learning the ropes and teaching A LOT of English
class. When I lived in the Dominican Republic, I taught (or rather, I tried to teach) students ages 8-16, all
25 of them all together in one room. That, my friends, was what I might call a
useful experience. Getting through a class and being able to actually teach the
students the material was challenging enough, never mind teaching them well.
The English classes at Exodus are very different. LCORE is a program that oversees
English teaching and cultural orientation for the clients. Each student is
assessed and placed in a certain level of English class, and each class has a
different focus, so not only are the clients learning how to speak better
English, but they also learn about American culture and history.
For
example, the other day in class we learned about American body language. It’s
funny…every culture has their own definition of what’s appropriate and what’s
not when it comes to gestures and personal space. In the US, when you meet
someone you give them a *firm* handshake. In the class I learned some things
that I hadn’t even thought about before, such as when Americans talk to one
another, we tend to stand about 2 ½ feet apart and slightly at an angle. Now
think about it…when two people are casually talking, they typically don’t face
each other directly. They stand slightly at an angle, so they don’t seem to be
in each other’s faces. Probably something you never noticed. Learn something
new every day, right? It was fun to teach this lesson to the students, and we
got to talk about what certain hand gestures mean in their own culture, and how
in many other cultures, when trying to get someone’s attention it is common to
make sounds, such as hissing or smacking your lips. In the US, we tend to use
more hand movements, like waving or raising our hands, instead of making
noises. Learning about other cultures also makes you learn about your own
culture, and I have been so lucky in my life to meet people from all over the
world, but I still get to learn more about my own culture every day, especially
in my internship.
This
week, I have taught a different English class every day. It’s fun to change it
up, and as the students are more advanced, my teaching methods differ depending
on the level they are at. This gives me a constant challenge in the classroom,
and since the classes are small, I am able to be more personal with my students
and assess each one individually, instead of trying to manage a group of
twenty-five kids and angsty preteens who look around the room half the time and
fight the other half.
Along
with teaching classes, I also do a lot of office work at my new job. This I can
completely understand, as in most companies or organizations it is common for
this kind of work to be passed on to the new people or the interns, work study
students, etc. Having had a work study job at DePauw for two years in an
office, I can work a copier and printer pretty well, so this was not a hard
adjustment. I get a good variation of being in the classroom directly with the
students and being in the office where I can do my own work and get things done
in my own time. The LCORE department is in the process of developing an
entirely new curriculum, so it’s really exciting to work in that area this
summer because I can see all the changes happening. Learning English is such an
important part of the orientation and adjustment to the new country, and it
helps that all the students are so eager to learn the language. I think part of
this is because they really have to. If you have room full of high school
students in a Spanish class in the United States, you aren’t going to see the
same levels of motivation as you are in a ENL/ESL class in the United States with
a room full of people who are brand-new to the country and are constantly
trying to figure out their new lifestyle.
I
applaud my students for all the work they do. Exodus does a lot of work in
relation to self-sufficiency of the new refugees, such as employment, housing,
English lessons, paperwork, transportation and medical aid, but at some point
the client has to take it upon his or herself to really become able to live comfortably
in their new society and culture. And the most incredible part of it all is
that each person has a different story. In general, refugees are people who
flee their country or region because of a particularly life-threatening situation.
Many have faced threats of torture, being killed, being raped, having their
families taken away, and many other horrific things. So, in other words, they need to flee. These people are not your
typical immigrant to the United States, although many US immigrants are, in
fact, refugees. The United States takes in about 60% of the world’s resettled
refugees, so in this way I can applaud my country as well. There are a lot of
things I don’t like about the United States, but this is one thing that I know
I can be proud of. And most of these people have been waiting for years for a
chance to come and create a new life outside of refugee camps where many of
them are living in terrible conditions and cramped quarters where disease is
all too prevalent and many do not have access to education, or even a true
breath of fresh air, something that many of us often take for granted here in
the United States. Our clients have been through a lot, and it is our job and
our social responsibility to aid them in whatever way that we can. This is what
Exodus does, and I am grateful to be a part of that for the next three months.
I
am also grateful to be a recipient of the Summer Independent Internship Grant
from DePauw University. While my internship does not pay me, this grant is what
allows me to pay for my rent, my food and my transportation for the summer. I
have been very fortunate to be a part of this opportunity and probably wouldn’t
have been able to do it without the extra help, so I’d like to extend a thanks
to DePauw and to the state of Indiana for really allowing me to have this
experience. I will be writing in this blog every week and will do a
presentation at DePauw next semester about my internship as part of the grant
program, so I hope that this can be a good way for me to extend my gratitude
for all the fortune that I have been given not only this summer, but my whole
entire life.
I
think that’s all I will write for today. Thank you for listening to my
experience and my point of view, and I hope that you will keep reading every
week to see how I progress in my new experience and learn more about refugees
and non-profits in our home community. Thank you-
Anna
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