The Final Reflection

Aly Higgins

Professor Leake

WRIT 1733

May 29, 2013

The Reflection: Representing People Through Writing and Service

The task of writing about people is daunting and difficult. Throughout my writing career, I have written about myself (many memoirs ranging from a picture story of my first bike ride to a detailed account of my leadership style), about the environment, and once, about a fictional male prostitute. However, I have never had to be sensitive or particular during these writing sessions. Since these topics failed to affect anyone other than my professor at the moment and myself, I had a unique creative liberty- unbounded by the pressures of representation or political correctness. This course demanded a higher standard of writing; I was forced to get out of my own way.

            First, while writing about refugees, I had to continually remind myself of the humanness of the refugee population. While describing the refugee population as a whole, it is easy to group all refugees into an ‘other’ category. Refugees may face unique issues and hardships, but they are still people. They are still human. Thus, when writing about refugees, I found myself stuck in an interesting contradiction. On one hand, I never wanted to write as though I had total expertise on the issues facing refugees, yet I also didn’t want to portray them as a separate population. Through this writing class, I discovered that writing about people is challenging. It requires continuous revision because any word, phrase or connotation could disrupt the balance between maintaining sensitivity about the issues at hand and establishing a clear human element in the writing.

Throughout the quarter, my main focus was portraying the refugees as human. I became fascinated about the idea of the humanization of refugees because I did not like that we called every reading a ‘refugee story’ instead of a story of humanness/love/pain/resilience. While I understand that stories about refugees include unique and challenging elements (including issues of identity, war, and resettlement), I feel that the way to write about any population is to constantly remind oneself and others that in essence, every population is part of the greater human population. During my academic career, I have read stories about the Native Americans of the Great Plains, the Jewish population of Amsterdam, and the Japanese culture of World War II. Each of these populations has a unique quality that should be observed, studied and analyzed. However, these stories and populations should not be dissected, labeled then stored. Continually categorizing stories of foreign people, ideas or cultures develops a ‘God-complex’ in Western writers (a complex by which writers begin to believe they have the power to determine whether the actions of others are wrong or right, civilized or uncivilized) and leads to a dehumanization of peoples who have traditionally not held power on the global stage. The opportunity to write about refugees was my first exposure to the intricacies of expressing the ideas and lives of a diverse population of humans. Overall, the course was a great introduction to this process and established many stepping-stones that will better my future ethnographic endeavors.

The service component of this course at the African Community Center was also challenging. I worked with the Job Club, training refugees to perform well in interviews and complete job applications properly. My volunteer work required immense patience because of the language and cultural divide. I found that the most difficult words to explain were the words I use in everyday conversation- words I truly take for granted such as ‘initials’. Last winter, I traveled to Indonesia for one month on a service trip. While I was there, I barely adapted to the cultural changes and did not learn any of the language. Thus, I cannot imagine only having three months to assimilate into a foreign culture, find a place to live, find a job, learn the language, support a family, and face the emotional demons of my abandoned homeland. That scenario is unfathomable to me. However, during my service, it was that scenario that kept me patient and engaged. It would have been easy to get angry or to give up because working with persons of a different culture and background is strenuous, but maintaining a wider perspective about the difficulties the refugees were facing kept me going. I am thankful for that perspective, and I am grateful for all the lessons about humility, gratitude, and hard work that the refugees taught me over these past few weeks.

In addition, I also observed trends which provide connections to readings in my Global Political Economics course for my International Studies major. During my volunteer time, I discovered that most of the refugees had been nurses, government workers, business owners, or non-profit owners in their home countries. I remember feeling transcended amongst a terrible juxtaposition. In one part, I recognized that helping the refugees apply to positions such as housekeeper or fast food cashier was an extremely rewarding investment of time, but in contrast, I felt deeply irked that these smart, successful people had to resort to a less-skilled life of paycheck-to-paycheck survival and 60 hour work weeks. While reflecting upon this forced reemployment process, I was reminded of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. In his work, Marx describes the divide between the bourgeoisies (the capitalists) and the proletariat (the working class), claiming that the capitalists exist only to exploit the labor of the proletariat. In some ways, a refugee’s struggle to survive in the United States is yet another example of how the greater capitalist system exploits the working, less powerful class. Because the refugee needs money to survive in a competitive capitalist system, they are forced to apply for less-skilled positions that they can adapt to quickly. Just as Marx warned, the American capitalist economy has “converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers”. In essence, the story of the refugees being forcibly removed from their homeland is the story of skilled, passionate, soulful workers becoming deadened, wage-driven hour laborers. This observation truly makes one question: is life really better in the United States?

This class is directly applicable to my future goal of working in education reform. Ideally, I would work with public high schools in low-income areas to develop a core curriculum that requires internship or service hours, global political and economic literacy, and college planning opportunities so that the system of education can move away from intensive testing requirements and benchmarks toward an environment in which students’ passions are embraced and encouraged. I think my work at the African Community Center taught me valuable lessons of patience and perseverance that will be useful when working with policy reform and in the classroom environment. I greatly enjoyed my experience and hope to continue service and writing in the future.