The world is Larger than it Seems

As the last class concluded, and the service was done for the day I reflected on my walk back to my car just how much this opportunity and class had impacted me and my learning here at Fairfield. At the beginning of the class the only thing I known about Africa was that it was a continent. And, since September I had learned: state structures of many countries, engaged in raising awareness on refugee camps, the impact of aid on many countries and created friendships with students that had lived through many of these problems that I read about for assignments in class. This was truly an experience that I am grateful for.

In class, I attempted to engage directly with the materials, which we read on our own. City Of Thorns, offered a narrative on the Refugee Camp Dadabb, in Kenya. At the time we were reading the book the camp was scheduled to close. Thus, our discussions were centered around the impact that the closing would have on Kenya and the surrounding countries. Since then they have extended the closing of Dadabb another year, which is a relief, due to no sufficient plan in place with what to do with the thousands of peoples that call that camp their home. As well, Dead Aid, by Moyo offered a look into the way that aid works in African nations and its negative impact. Although I found her arguments compelling, I could not directly understand what the solution could be. In my eyes the consequences would be so much worse if the aid just stopped. All topics that I found extremely hard to conceptualize.

Working with the youth from IICONN, brought light to these two major dark readings of the class. It made me understand that these children were still just kids. Although they have had a hard life, they are now able to get an education, are well fed and able to become something, free from violence, hunger and instability that was once a harsh reality in Africa.

But, the most important things that I learned were about myself. On the first day of class I was extremely shy when meeting the kids. And, then by the last day was dancing to Shake Body in the LBCC. Thus, enhancing my lesson that people are people, and every single person in this world has something to offer if you let them. Thank you Dr. B for an amazing semester and an incredible experience, I am forever blessed!

The last day of class we played a remarkable game. The game was to stand in a circle and reflect on the semester with the youth from the IICONN center. There was a ball of yarn and it was thrown around the circle and connected every Fairfield Student and every IICONN youth member to each other. When the yarn came to you, the idea was to say something that you enjoyed about the service learning experience.

Many of the answers were: I am glad I made new friends, I loved to play ping-pong, I enjoyed beating Danny at pool, or the dancing was fun. By the time that the last person received the yarn we were all connected. But, the most remarkable thing was the fact that before we even passed the ball of yarn around, we were already connected. Over the 10 weeks of the semester, I was able to create relationships with a community that I had never thought I could. I stepped out of my shell and formed bonds and learned so much from these children, and I was blessed to hear that they had done the same.

Creating solidarity with the refugees from IICONN, was something that I worked on throughout the semester. In Hannah Arendt’s text, Collective Responsibility, she explains the ways that all communities must take responsibility of the actions that people and leaders in their community make. She states, “this kind of responsibility in my opinion is always political, whether it appears in the older form, when a whole community take its upon itself to be responsible for whatever one of it’s members has done or whether a community is being held responsible for what it has done in its name” (Arendt, 149). She believes that if one member of the community does something negative, the whole community is responsible for the actions, because the entire community has agreed to be a part of it. Just as we are responsible for the actions of our president, or congress, because we have agreed as a nation that these people were qualified to be our leaders.

In my personal opinion I believe that working with the IICONN youth is a demonstration of my collective responsibility according to Arendt. My class and myself worked with the IICONN youth to ease their transition into this country. We became friends with the students and treated them as members of our Fairfield Community. I was taken back on the day after the election when I heard one of the Refugees ask my classmate “since trump got elected will I have to go home”? Although none of us in the classroom had the exact answer to that question we can hopefully influence that answer.

After working with the refugees and making them a part of our community we have a responsibility to share with the rest of the world the impact that this had on our lives. As we connected with the refugees we are aware of the problems facing the issue of resettlement. These children now have the chance to create a new life for themselves. They no longer have to face the violence and terror of living in fragile and failed states. It is now our collective responsibility as a class to spread the word on the importance of protecting these children, and hopefully the awareness will aid to them staying in our country.

In Dead Aid, Moyo engages the reader in the different types of aid around the world and the ways that aid can operate. The refugee crisis is explained as winning the lottery, and is only available for a small, small portion of displaced people.

The resettlement process grants the ability for the Refugees to begin a new life in another country with the promise of shelter, food and the dream of upward mobility for their family. But, there is one major failure of this solution. Being picked as a refugee to be resettled is almost as common as winning the lottery. Less than one percent of the world’s refugees have the opportunity of being resettled. Thus, addressing the potential problem that arises with this process, it grants the hope to be resettled, but to many people’s dismay they may never be considered to be resettled at all.

I have directly viewed the way in which the resettlement process can affect these refugees for the better. In class, we engage in service learning with African Refugees. Although, I have not been able to ask or learn their complete backgrounds, we have been told that each one of them comes from an African nation and moved here to Connecticut. Through my own eyes, each Wednesday, I have seen the way that the resettlement process has opened up a world of new doors for them. Just last week I was working with a few of the refugees on their math homework. The section was rational numbers, and as a politics major I haven’t worked with numbers since my first semester here at Fairfield. As we talked out each of the math problems together, I was reminded, these children were forced to flee Africa, and we are both experiencing the same level of difficulty comprehending this bizarre word problem about balloons. Through the public education they are now receiving in part through the resettlement process, opened doors for them they could have never been exposed to in Africa. They are being fed, cared for, educated, and most have the dream to attend college. It is a truly remarkable experience to witness first hand.

Creating this type of solidarity with the IICONN youth was the goal of this service learning class. To understand the political climate that brought the youth to Bridgeport, Ct and the issues that they faced and are facing. When working together and solving hard math problems we create a greater understanding between each other. As well, this specific instance helps me view the way that the Refugee crisis is something that we must engage in as a major problem around the world.

Another major component of our class was the South Sudan Refugee simulation. This took place in late November, in the LBCC on campus. We were asked to simulate a Refugee Camp in South Sudan. First we were asked to create an Identification Card, of someone that could be located in the camp, to engage the students with a real life person. This would create a connect to the students with the entire process of living in a refugee camp and the struggles that these people go through.

This simulation was immensely helpful when connecting to the materials. After reading City Of Thorns, by Ben Rawlence where we read the narratives of nine refugees living in Dadabb refugee camp in Kenya. This particular refugee camp was intended to be a short term solution to the refugee’s seeking shelter, protection from the Somalia war, and famine but, now, this Camp in the inhospitable dessert of Kenya, where only plant life is thorns, has become a long-term home for these refugees. “No one wants to admit that the temporary camp of Dadaab has become permanent,” Rawlence writes. These camps are set in place to solve the situation at hand and hope when things cool down in the country somehow you can just close the camp and everything might just work out. But, now that they are looking to shut Dadaab down, are these people going to be Refugees fleeing from a refugee camp? Illuminating the fact that the ‘solution’ of Refugee camps, provides just a temporary Band-Aid on the problem rather than a long-term solution. The struggles at a refugee camp are clearly horrible humanitarian issues, the problems were further described by Rawlence so deeply through these narratives that I had to put the novel down multiple times, because it was just too much. Thus, during the refugee simulation I wanted to engage the students coming to the event just the way that I was engaged with the material in City of Thorns. That is why I choose to do pictures in a power point to illustrate just how gruesome the registration process is in an attempt to connect students with no background knowledge on the struggles around the continent of Africa.

The next week it was time to meet the youth from the IICONN center. I was extremely nervous, I usually don’t work well in new situations like this one. I am a “chatty” girl when I am in a comfortable setting but outside of that I get very nervous. So, this experience turned my stomach. That day we played a few games with the students, and then ate a meal in Barone, the campus-dining hall. While eating Dr. B asked two of the students that struggled with language communication if they had ever tried ice cream. Ice cream being one of my favorite desserts, I was excited when they had said they never tried it before.

Adrienne and I went and got them a few flavors to try. I could tell that they were puzzled by the consistency of the ice cream as well, that it was so cold. When they tried the ice cream I was over joyed that they liked it, or at least they told me they did.

This first class made me understand one of the readings that I did by Crandall entitled, Ubuntu. In his writing he discusses the roles that education plays on these refugees. He writes, “Education plays a critical role in preparing individuals and their communities to recover and rebuild after conflict or disaster. Education is an important tool to promote and ensure greater peace and rehabilitation following an emergency situation. With access to a quality education, individuals can better fulfill their own potential and fully contribute to the growth, strength and stability of their society” (Crandall). Thus, I was excited to engage in the mentoring which would not only help the students, but would change my education, making me engage in real life materials outside the classroom.

 

Our third class we ventured down to the Quick Center to meet Bryan Crandall, an English professor at Fairfield University. He met us in the Museum where we were looking at the works of Rick Shaefer’s The Refugee Trilogy. The pictures sketched from Shaefer depicted parts of many famous paintings but connected to the Refugee Crisis that operates around the world in our modern context. The pictures, I remember, were very surprising to me, the typical refugee wasn’t depicted, and it signified many people, most notably white, on the move.

We were asked directly by Crandall on our way down before viewing the work to consider a time where we were forced to relocate. The only time that I could think of was my freshman year, when I had to move into my freshman year dorm. When Crandall began to talk about the refugee crisis, I was forced to reflect on the privileges that I have in my life. I struggled just moving into my dorm and being away from my family two weeks at a time. I could never imagine having to leave my country with only the things on my back with no opportunity to return back to my home, some of my family members.

Thus, paving the way for the next class when we would meet the Refugees from the IICONN center that we would be working with every week.

After watching the documentary Crisis in the Congo, on the DRC, and then attending “Big Man Rule”, at the Quick Center on campus, I was once again opened up to some of the issues in the Congo, as a snapshot of African Politics. The director of the play took an interesting spin on the traditional Shakespearian play Macbeth, he made the setting the Democratic Republic of Congo to illustrate the issues that were faced by the Congo.

In Macbeth, there was a similar use of the issues of power and wealth that can be seen in “Big Man Rule”. The linkage between wealth and power are undeniable in both of the features. For example, the influence of the corporations, which we saw in the production on the situation in the Congo. The cooperation’s are the “Big Men” in the production. As well, once again we can draw the parallels of the cooperation’s their taking advantage of the country’s raw materials, we see other countries in the real world taking advantage of their materials as well. Rwanda and Uganda, have continued to violently gain access to the materials that the Congo has to offer.

Thus, like the “Big Men” cooperation’s that we viewed in the play, we can see how powerful people and nations can take advantage of struggling nations. And, this exertion of power can cause lives to be lost and create a broad humanitarian crisis, like we see in the DRC today.

 

 

One of the first assignments that we had in this class was to watch a documentary Crisis in the Congo, on the DNC. We were told to consider the ways that the DNC is classified as a fragile state according to our Africa in World politics book and compare it to the documentary. The Democratic Republic of Congo I learned, is classified as a weak state. Although they have been making strides to help their struggling country, “territorial control is limited, private taxation continues, and illegal exploitation and the smuggling of natural resources goes on”(Africa in World Politics 271). The film explained their shifting alliances with Rwanda and Uganda, and that these countries have been invading the DRC for years in order to steal their natural resources and have raped their women, killed their children and burned their villages to the ground in the process. Uganda and Rwanda have been able to do this with United States Aid through troops weapons and influence. The DRC has no ability to stop this because their government has been fluctuating from private rule, colonial rule, and corrupt dictatorship since the 1800s. Resulting in the lack of establishing a strong central state to protect their border and citizens.

This documentary was the first engagement that I had with African Countries, I had no prior academic background in studying these countries and their struggling nations. Thus, my idea of African nations and aid began to take shape. The United States was giving aid to Uganda and Rwanda, and this aid was backfiring and hurting the DRC and the people that were living there. But, the headlines in America never suggested any of the sort, especially that our aid was by default impacting these humanitarian crisis, in the DRC.

Looking back on my notes this what I had listed from my first day of class. We were asked to write down three simple facts that we knew were true about Africa. I am slightly ashamed to realize now that all I could think of was that is was a continent. That is concerning, and shows now how far I have come in this class.

In addition I thought that this would be a good place to start my portfolio, to illistrate just how far I have come and learned. Through the plays, books, work with the IICON students and class discussions, my conception of the world have changed on the basis of world politics.