what?

I feel like a lot of important things/thoughts have been happening, and I can't keep up with them, although I suppose I always feel that way.  On the one hand, I do so many things every day that it's hard to remember how everything felt or what happened sometimes.  Like just leaving my house and dodging icy, wet patches on the road--so instead I end up thinking about this time my co-worker Steve showed me to how to run barefoot on the UNC football field last year.  Very random.

But I've also been struggling with a lot of ideas about my entire career path.  Not that I imagine changing it, but, for example--I've just begun an internship with an organization called Project Education Sudan where I will be working with a team to develop a leadership program for girls at an all girls' school in the Jonglei State in South Sudan, which has been experiencing a dramatic upsurge in violence.  I'm working on the "student government/conflict resolution" component of the program, and it just seems so very ridiculous sometimes to plan a program for girls who are very far away from me, not only in terms of distance but probably culturally as well.  I mentioned this to one of my team members, Noelle, today, and she said something to the effect of, "Well, kids are kids everywhere." 

Anyway, I have a problem accepting statements like that and just moving on.  I'm co-facilitating a workshop on Cultural Competency for a conference in a few weeks, and the basic point is, "It's more complicated than that."

Beyond that, I am continuing with my work study job at Manual High School "leading" undergrads as they coach high school students through a service-learning curriculum.  On Friday, we discussed the Martin Luther King "marade," (a march/parade in Denver on MLK day, and the largest in the country) and a lot of students dropped comments like, "People will be racist for another 100 years probably" and "They will always have stereotypes of us."  So what do you do with that?  My team had a naturally academic response, thinking that we could take such comments and help the students to process them and make them more concrete and then realize how they could make change in their communities...somehow.  But thinking critically about it for very long made me feel like having a discussion about racism and stereotypes will just make it more apparent how correct they are.  Yet, at the same time, I know how incorrect they are, and I know, emotionally, to focus on that idealistic incorrectness, but...how do you approach a group of high school students who "get it" with issues such as racism and stereotyping positively?

Then, when my Swahili language partner, who is from Kenya, asked me why I wanted to learn Swahili, I felt so simple when I explained to her that, probably like every other American she had met, I wanted to work with an NGO in eastern/sub-Saharan Africa.  It seemed so unfair to have to give such a brief answer to this woman.  I wanted to talk about how it's weird for Teach for America volunteers to be all over Mississippi, even though it's no where comparable to African countries, but it must feel strange for people, and Americans specifically, to constantly want to help your country and its neighbors.  I know that's not the perspective I bring to the table but it's hard to convey such nuance in an introduction.  Anyway, this morning Isabella, my language partner, posted a link to our Swahili blog to an article about Africa's images, in response to some of our introductions about wanting to work in Africa.  I hope that I can talk to her about the article, at least.  I want to just say, "I get it," but at the same time, I know I don't and can't.

Last night, at a poetry slam event called Cafe Cultura (which aims to promote healing for indigenous peoples through self-expression, etc.), a woman from Indonesia read a poem that she said was inspired by "explaining immigration policy to 300 white people at an Occupy Denver event."  And I just thought...really??  Say it differently. 

On another sort of note, I facilitated a brief training on conflict resolution for my undergraduate peers this week.  It was very well received--I had the students work through a conflict scenario and they had very engaged but different responses.  I wanted to facilitate a discussion about their reactions, but I didn't have time.  Anyway, it was a very good experience.

Ah, I feel so busy--school, Manual, Sudan, Swahili, internships, French, my future, peace--but the thought of writing reminds me of a large empty wooden bowl that I can fill up and then empty.  I will work on expressing that more eloquently.  Eloquent is often all I want to be.