One of my biggest goals while being abroad I want to achieve, is to become more independent. It isn’t that I am not independent at home, or in Seattle, but there aren’t that many instances to be independent as I live in a household with about 70 other girls, and I definitely don’t take the opportunities given to me to try. I want to learn how to be contempt with only my presence, learning to actually digest the world around me in addition to being certain that my decisions are based on what I want, not what others I surround myself want. This week I feel as though I made some steps towards this goal as I spent the weekend without any roommates and decided to go on a day trip to Bracciano on my own! It was a great day, but I still have to work on being truly comfortable on my own. That is something I noticed I struggled with.
Something else I believe helps is our service learning each week. It allows me to be observant of my surroundings and to pay attention to what I’m feeling in the moment. This week for example, there was a little bit of system change. Instead of receiving orders for clothing on slips of paper, those who came in, came into the room directly and told us what they wanted in person. They could also ask for a different item if it wasn’t to their liking. One part of me was grateful for this step towards an increased ability of choice for the refugees, while another part felt frustrated that they were even closer to being able to pick out their own clothes, but they still had to stay on the other side of a table. I understand why it is set up in this way, it was explained to us as mostly an equity issue, I just think that actually being able to see unsatisfied faces made it more difficult. It wasn’t all like this though, several, if not most, people were happy with the clothes they received, smiling when we were finally able to find an article of clothing that suited them. Something else I noticed was how much more frustrating the language barrier became. I was never truly able to help someone who came in by myself and I am almost certain the confusion on my face when someone would try to talk to me showed. It felt like the barrier between me, and the refugees grew. All I wanted was to try to make them feel more comfortable, safe, and as if they had someone they could connect with, but I understand this an incredibly difficult thing for me to achieve in such short periods of interaction. Though I really wish I could speak the same language, that I think would at least bring some level of comfort and connection.
In 233 we spent some time discussing monuments and memorials as well as who decides what must be preserved, forgotten, or erased from history. Mostly drawing from instances of Nazi history in Berlin, Germany in addition to confederate history in the United States. I found this discussion very interesting, and ultimately found these types of decisions much more complex than I thought. Both remembering and forgetting can have significant implications for different populations. It is important to understand the varying perspectives that lie in a particular decision regarding a historic landscape. Though this makes me realize how difficult it must be to make these types of decisions in the first place, but then again public perception is not the only playing factor in historical preservation, where bureaucratic and political factors can carry a heavy weight in this process. Again, I found this subject vastly complex.
Something that really piqued my interest was the discussion and lecture on traumatic brain injury. It made me realize just how delicate the head and brain are and made me wonder about the specific changes that a person might experience after a head injury as well as how long term the consequences may be. Considering how often TBI’s occur not just in regular life, but especially refugee populations as a result of torture, what is the most common level of intensity that an individual’s personality or physical mobility can be impaired and for how long? I know it depends per injury, but it is devastating that this type of injury can not only follow you through physical impairments for the rest of your life but can change your character, something so sacred to who you are as a person.
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