March 2008 Reflection

Posted on March 1, 2008 by abarlow08

Since arriving back in Ireland in January, most of my time has been spent trying to develop my summer research thesis topic. Growing up in Southeastern U.S., I have always been fascinated with hurricanes. My family has experienced the brunt of several hurricanes, including category 5 Hurricane Hugo in 1989. This interest encouraged me to select Oceanography as a major at the U.S. Naval Academy, as well as choosing to do a Master’s degree in Meteorology here in Ireland. Naturally, I hoped to concentrate on tropical cyclone development and forecasting for my research this summer. Fortunately, my research adviser here at UCD is also very interested in tropical cyclones, and we will be working scientists at the Royal Meteorological Society in London on a joint project throughout the summer. The project focuses on understanding how climatological factors, namely the solar activity cycle, may influence hurricane frequency in the Atlantic basin. Research has been done showing that the solar cycle may influence tropical storm frequency on a ten-year timescale, but the research is not conclusive and the possible forcing has not, as yet, been included in hurricane forecasting models. If my results show that the solar cycle is a significant forcing mechanism, then additional model input can be developed.

In addition to developing a project, I’ve been busy keeping up with my courses in Numerical Weather Prediction and Climate Dynamics. I am enjoying the content of these courses immensely, and I am eager to apply what I’ve learned this year in the research thesis. This week, I took part in an intensive forecasting seminar at UCD led by prominent meteorologist and RTE television forecaster Gerry Fleming. Learning how to apply practical techniques to weather forecasting was extremely helpful and I can hardly believe how much I have learned in one short week.

On a lighter note, I am becoming ever more embedded in the Irish culture, thanks to a good friend in my course, Andy Ryan, as well as my lovely Irish housemates. We have a daily ritual which includes drinking tea after class while settling down to an episode (or two) of Father Ted. I’ve also taken up the terms “grand,” “slagging,” and “craic”…much to my housemates’ amusement. The cultural interplay goes both ways, however. I’ve caught my housemates using words like “sweet” and “awesome” although they won’t readily admit to it! The laughs over our English speaking differences have been endless.

Last weekend, our UCD Athletics team headed to Galway for the annual intervarsity cross country race. I was told that conditions at the Galway course could be fairly “mucky” but nothing could have prepared me for what I saw as our bus pulled in. The entire course was churned into a sea of foot-thick mud…more like a bog than a cross country course! After the race, I was literally covered in mud from head to toe! A week later, I am still finding remnants of the Galway bog in my room! The experience was incredibly fun and totally unforgettable. I am continuing to train through the spring in hopes of competing in the Belfast Marathon on May 5.

Finding myself over halfway through my year in Ireland, I can already anticipate how much I am going to miss the wonderful friends I’ve made here. I am looking forward to what the next five months have to bring.

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March 2008 Reflection

Posted on March 1, 2008 by bhayes08

It is very hard to believe that it is already March. I’m sure nearly all of the Mitchell journals have started off with that statement. The days have just peeled off the calendar. I’m sure it’s the combination of a quick year of classes, a new city, new faces, and travel that have really compressed the year. Regardless, it’s been great, and I’ll be very sorry to see it end in a few months.

As I write, we are just a few days away from St. Patrick’s Day. I imagine St. Patty’s Day in Dublin will be quite a sight, but I will only be able to speculate since I’m currently in Vernazza, Italy, on the Ligurian Coast. I had a couple of weeks off of classes, and my fianc» came in for a visit and we took off for our first trip to continental Europe. We spent some time with family in Germany and came down to the Cinque Terre on a 25 Euro RyanAir flight. The weather has been fantastic and there has been some great hiking between the five villages that make up this stretch of the Mediterranean coast. As far as first trips to continental Europe go, we aren’t doing too badly.

In the coming weeks life will be getting real busy. All of my courses will be wrapping up in April, with all my papers due and exam preparation beginning. But I’m most looking forward to the historic 10th year anniversary event in Belfast of the Good Friday Peace Agreement. Not only will this be a great chance to get together with Mitchell Scholars current and past, but to be part of such an interesting historical event is going to be amazing and the kind of opportunity that you can’t place value upon or repeat (unlike, hopefully, a trip to the Italian Riviera).

Along with heading to Belfast and wrapping up my program, I’ve been preparing for my thesis and life next year. I’m headed to Swaziland in June to do some research on HIV prevention programming, and partly funding the trip with the generous travel stipend available through the Mitchell Program. It will be a great opportunity to visit my former friends and coworkers in Swaziland and catch up with my Swazi family from my Peace Corps days. After completing my thesis I’m moving with my fianc», Carrie, to Malawi, where she is posted as a pediatrician with the Baylor University Pediatric AIDS Initiative. Malawi is an interesting and poor country sandwiched between East and Southern Africa that deals with the gamut of public health and development issues. We are excited about our next move, and I am sending out a half dozen resumes a week looking for a job there, in addition to the domestic role I’ll be playing in Carrie’s house.

I can’t express my gratitude to the US-Ireland Alliance and the Mitchell Scholarship Program for the opportunities I’ve been afforded over the last year. I’ll have a busy next few years moving around and finding my way in a career in development, and I can’t imagine a better way to get that started than spending this last year living and learning in Ireland.

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March 2008 Reflection

Posted on March 1, 2008 by sdavid08

There are many ways to see Belfast. The obvious are the open-bus tours, the new “Belfast Eye”, walking through the city center or standing on one of the many surrounding mountains (or hills, for those of you who live near “real” mountains). The past few months I have had the opportunity to see Belfast through some less obvious lenses.

For frequent travelers to Belfast the famous “hen nights” are ubiquitous—seemingly endless arrays of women in pink bunny suits or red devil tails frequent pubs in celebration of their lovely bride-to-be. Of course, they travel in style as well–pink limos and fire engines drive by blasting “It’s Raining Men” or comparable eighties hits. I can now say from experience that this is an amazing way to see Belfast. For a good friend of mine’s birthday we rented a limousine to drive us around Belfast City Centre. The driver was great and assured us he would be waiting (recognizable as “the wee fat man in a suit”) when we brought her out of the club. Not only was she totally surprised, but we were too when we found out the champagne was included! The driver took us all around Belfast, stopping at the site where the Titanic was built and waiting as we stared in awe at the massive hole used to mold the ships built in this city not so long ago. The city was beautiful at night, but what isn’t beautiful with a good eighties soundtrack and a limo?

Another way I have been able to see Belfast is through the eyes of the thirteen year old boys I have been working with through my volunteer work at Public Achievement. Public Achievement is an organization devoted to not only teaching students about civics but allowing them to develop their own passion for it. My group consists of seven thirteen year old boys who have been able to forgive my ignorance of football and help remind me that the city of Belfast I have grown to know is not the same many locals embrace. Many of the boys have never traveled to the city centre, much less Queen’s University, and find the fact that I live in America almost as fascinating as the fact I live in South Belfast. While they have tested my patience, they have also challenged me to see Belfast as small communities and groupings of streets. My greatest challenge, of course, has been getting them excited about Johns Hopkins Lacrosse’s three game winning streak, but they are coming around.

Finally, I have started to see Belfast as home. I have a routine, friends, and memories here, which had not truly formulated last semester. I spend much more time than I used to walking around the city, going to the markets and bonding with the other masochists in my classes at the gym (I will not bore you with the many hours I have seen Belfast from the windows of the library, as I work on my dissertation, but that is another part of my routine this term!). There are places where I am a regular and I recognize people I see on the street. I recently traveled to Barcelona with a group of my friends from Belfast and was relieved to walk into my room and feel like I was at home. Of course, this feeling is coupled with the realization that I am more than halfway finished my program and before I know it, I will be heading back to America again. Until then, I just think of all the things I have to look forward to. My birthday is April 2, and perhaps after that I can report what Belfast looks like from a pink fire engine!

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January 2008 Reflection

Posted on January 1, 2008 by bmcfadden08

Christmas cards and decorations filled shops as early as October, brilliantly twinkling lights were strung above Grafton Street, carols were piped out of every department store, and shoppers carried more bags than I thought possible. The Christmas season in Ireland seemed almost as consumer-driven as cynics claim America’s to be. And I loved it! I returned to Pennsylvania for the holiday (I look forward to family reunions, a giant Christmas tree, and goofy stories retold on a yearly basis, especially when all this is accompanied by freshly baked Christmas cookies), but not before I experienced a bit of Ireland’s Christmas spirit. Everything from chatting with Santa Claus and US Embassy employees at a Christmas Dinner, to which the Mitchell Scholars were graciously invited, to shopping for authentic Irish gifts in quaint Dublin shops and learning my first Irish phrase, the holiday season was a particularly special time to be in Ireland.

“Nollaig shona duit agus SlainteI”, the rhythmic equivalent of “Merry Christmas”, is the only Irish phrase I’ve even come close to correctly pronouncing. My flatmates taught it to me while sitting around our miniature Christmas tree and taking in a few of the great movies that can only be watched between December 1 and 25. Love Actually was one of these, and in this, there is a scene that accurately sums up the Irish (and I suppose British) tendency to pepper conversations with swearwords. Hugh Grant, a youthful Brit who’s new to the job of Prime Minister, greets a young female secretary who proceeds to call him by his first name before uttering three profanities while attempting to apologize. The scene underlines not how crude the female secretary was, but rather, how expletives here are simply viewed differently than in America. During our Mitchell Scholar Orientation in September 2007, Marion McKeone spoke to us about what she termed “Irish speak”. We might all speak English, but we certainly have our differences! My flatmates have also explained to me that when an Irish person says “no” they really might mean “yes”. So when I offer a cup of tea, I know that an answer of “no” does not necessarily mean the tea isn’t desired!

Tea drinking has become a vitally pleasant part of my primary research. Over the past two months I have been conducting in-depth qualitative interviews that will eventually result in a paper about the transition to university life for Irish students. So while sitting in coffee shops and cafes, I click on my digital recorder and listen to stories from young Irish people about their lives, the ups and downs, their families and friends, and, in several cases, about their favorite holiday memories. One man from County Cork told me about a St. Stephen’s Day tradition of his youth. On the day after Christmas, he and his siblings and cousins would dress as scarecrows, beat on their mum’s pots and pans, and call from door to door, collecting gifts of money.

Before I left for Ireland, a friend gave me a journal and told me to write everything down during my relatively short-lived twelve months abroad. I didn’t listen to her at the time, but I have quickly realized that whether learning about seemingly odd traditions or simply finding a favorite time of day in Dublin (on days when it’s not especially grey, at dusk the sky turns various shades of orange and purple and seems like something out of a fairytale), I need to cherish each experience.

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January 2008 Reflection

Posted on January 1, 2008 by estevens08

The weather isn’t growing on me. I have a nice quality raincoat with a zip-out liner and a hood, and my umbrella is practically surgically attached to my body. I am always prepared for the weather—I knew there would be rain. But no one told me that there are only about six hours of daylight in the winter, that the weather could go from perfect to hurricane-force storms in a matter of minutes, and that I would be afraid sometimes that Allison, my housemate and fellow Mitchell, would get carried away by the wind.

But everything else has grown on me. The customary cup of tea in the evenings—and every other time of the day—with the housemates, the pace of life, the atmosphere of UCD, the buzz in city center. My classmates have caught me multiple times referring to Dublin as “home,” and I haven’t bothered correcting myself. The Christmas season was particularly enjoyable.

Well, it was particularly enjoyable if I neglect to mention finals and end of term assignments—I love my program, but school doesn’t get more stressful than the end of term with projects, papers, and exams occupying every moment of the day.

Either way, Allison, in all her perk and spirit, decorated the house and spread the Christmas spirit through Secret Santa with all six housemates and customary American Christmas films. It was such a great night, with all of our housemates together, eating biscuits and drinking tea, laughing at Will Ferrell in Elf. My favorite times in Ireland have been nights like those, drinking tea and talking about everything, from differences between American and Irish cultures to our most embarrassing moments.

As the end of term drew to an end, six of us were treated to a wonderful weekend in Limerick by Michael McNamara, Paul Hayes, and Peter Keogh. Determined to expose us to more Irish culture, most of us saw our very first live Munster rugby match. I can’t begin to describe my gratitude at their generosity. It is perhaps the most fun weekend I have spent in Ireland these past four months. I am constantly amazed at the opportunities the US-Ireland Alliance has afforded me and I truly am thankful for everything that it has provided.

Let’s just say that next term has a lot to live up to.

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January 2008 Reflection

Posted on January 1, 2008 by jsoni08

If I might brand a bit of advice into the brain of every future Mitchell scholar: during your time in Ireland, find your way to an Irish sing-song. Arthur, Nate, Jeff, and I were lucky enough to take one in after a rugby match in Limerick, in the oldest pub in the city, immediately following a Munster win. There is little predictable logic to a sing-song, since you don’t know when it starts and you can’t know when it will end, so finding one will require some measure of patience and resolve. But if you do manage to catch one, then you’re in for an evening straight out of Irish legend. Be forewarned: an American at an Irish singsong lives in something of a social limbo; you won’t know the words or the tunes, and your contribution will be minimal, coming as you do from a culture that has few shared anthems. So just drink it in, and repeat the chorus when you can. And when in doubt, do as Art, Nate, Jeff, and I did, and belt out “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”—it’s reliable and catchy, and you can bet that someone in the audience will help you out when you inevitably botch a line or two. (Kudos to Jeff for adding “Man of Constant Sorrow” to the mix.)

When I haven’t been singing, I’ve been helping to clarify the conundrums of American politics to my Irish friends. (Just how you describe a caucus as anything more than a cross between an English comedy and a rodeo is beyond me.) But with results that seem to defy any conventional wisdom, I’m not sure I can be of much service. My Irish colleagues and I have been sharing the wide-eyed bewilderment at the results from across the ocean, and they, like many of the young people of my generation, are about as excited about Barack Obama as an earlier generation of foreign nationals must have been about Jack Kennedy. Of course, the representative sample of my politics graduate program would be incomplete without its obligatory Ron Paul acolyte. But we’ve got one of those, along with a healthy cross-section of McCain and Clinton supporters, the latter group of which embraces the same nostalgia for the Clinton years that so many of her backers do. At the outset of the year, I had thought that being an ocean away during the electoral horserace would leave me at something of a disadvantage, but it has actually been a nourishing occasion. Being away and having access only to the best guesses of pundits has been a healthy reminder not only of the sheer unpredictability of it all, but also the extent to which, in this election more than others, the world is hungry for real American leadership.

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January 2008 Reflection

Posted on January 1, 2008 by jbenedict08

I suppose it’s worth mentioning at the start that this entry is not an eleventh-hour attempt, as the saying goes, but rather a second-hour one. Second-hour, as in 2:00 a.m. Yes, yes—the rapturous joys of intercontinental jetlag, such as waking up at 1:30 in the morning and trying to find something to do (or write) in these dark, wee hours, aren’t totally bad; I’m catching up on work I left behind when I randomly ended up flying back to America for Christmas and New Year’s. So, with the quiet, nighttime Kildare horse country outside my dorm room window and the ringing sounds of airport luggage conveyor belt alarms still in my head, I write about the last couple of months of my Mitchell Scholarship experience.

Returning back to Ohio and Kentucky for Christmas turned out to be especially relaxing when I realized that I could buy most of my presents for people at the duty-free shops in Dublin Airport. I can’t recommend this enough; gifts from Ireland, at least in my experience, add kind of an exotic element to holidays and birthdays in America, and the one-size-fits-all nature of the gifts effectively eliminates having to worry about people who are difficult to shop for. I even bought an Irish teddy bear for my brand-new nephew, who was sitting in a premature ward in a hospital when I left for Ireland in September. With the gifts came music: I played for my family some of the fiddle tunes that I’ve been working on here with Maynooth’s traditional music group and with my Donegal-style private teacher. Also, the Tex-Mex burritos that comprised 80 percent of my diet in college, southern pulled-pork barbecue and my mom’s chicken and dumplings weren’t bad perks to coming home, either.

There’s really something to be said about how leaving a place—more than anything else—causes a person to realize the ties he’s developed there. I was only gone for a couple of weeks, and it honestly seemed difficult to leave. I have a fantastic group of students in my M.A. program, and all of us have gelled so well that we’re halfway considering going on a group weekend trip to somewhere in the Continent (the party-animals that Musicology students are). I’ve gotten very much involved in the music at the Presbyterian church here in Maynooth, to the extent that I had to make sure that they didn’t schedule me to play on one of the Sundays that I was back in the States. The relationships I’ve developed there, along with the aforementioned students in my program, my instructors, suitemates, friends from karate class, etc. came much more quickly than I anticipated when I arrived in Ireland. The supreme beauty of staying here for an entire year is that these friendships can develop even further over the next seven months.

To this end, this is the last time I’ll have to deal with the dreaded eastward jetlag for a very long time. These sleepless, psychedelic non-nights have one benefit, of course: I’ll be able to start waking up at six a.m. or so regularly—and naturally—in order to start training for the marathon in Belfast that I’ve decided that I’m going to run in May. Two of the other Mitchells from this year are planning to do it, too. The utter irony, of course, is that after four years of waking up at an unholy hour most mornings for Army ROTC physical training, I’m now doing the same thing by my own free will. I ran Nashville’s marathon three years ago back at Vanderbilt (and nearly vowed never to do one again), so I have some idea of what I’m up against. I’m not exactly sure whether vanity, glory, instinct, physical fitness or some twisted combination of the four is what’s motivating me to do this again. But I do enjoy running, even if I’m not varsity material. I suppose that’s good enough reason.

Finally, my last couple of months here have seen quite a bit of career-oriented activity. I received official permission from the Army to go to law school, and am eagerly waiting for admissions decisions to find their way into my mailbox here. Assuming I pass law school and the bar exam in a few years, I’ll be a JAG (Judge Advocates General’s) lawyer for the Army. For some reason, waiting on admissions letters (or, just as likely, the opposite) seems more difficult over here than it did back in the States, and I’m not entirely sure why. Of course, that won’t seem minutely as difficult as finding a place to live, in whichever city I go to law school, while I’m still in Ireland.

But that can wait. Carpe diem can be extreme, even unhealthy, sometimes. So for now, I’m very much looking forward to enjoying my friends, classes, and travels over here and—regarding the integral concept of time-zone adjustment—going to bed after eight p.m. like the big kids do.

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January 2008 Reflection

Posted on January 1, 2008 by nwright08

I steady myself against the wind that nearly takes me over the edge of the cliffs into the icy Atlantic. Standing here on this ancient lookout point I try to imagine what it must have been like for the guardians over the ages. It is a quiet location and I am almost convinced that its walls were built as much to protect from the wind as invaders. Unneeded for generations, the walls are little match for the howling winds on the Aran Islands.

I have spent the past few months taking more time to explore Ireland. From a tranquil peace on the Aran Islands to the majestic heights of the Cliffs of Moher I have stood in awe of Ireland’s beauty. And from the Gaelic speaking Connemara to the green roads of the Burren, I find myself contemplating Ireland’s troubled history.

One does not have to go far to see symbols of Ireland’s history impacting today. Centuries ago the British drove Irish farmers west into Connaught to gain access to the best arable land. This is where Galway, my home for the semester, is located. Further west of Galway is Connemara, one of the largest areas where Gaelic is the first language. I am told that many Irish students will spend time here as they grow up, to help preserve the Irish language.

Evidence of the famine is also all around. My university, NUI Galway, is a product of the famine; the main building was a work project started during the famine. Riding through the countryside on my way to the Cliffs of Moher, south of Galway, I wonder what it must have been like for the Irish farmers who were driven here. Despite having the shared crop of potatoes, the land appears a great deal rockier than the farmlands of Idaho where I grew up. I find it difficult to imagine the hardships that must have come with subsistence farming between the sheets of rock.

Relishing the warmth of a bus, I wonder what it was like to face this frigid cold while starving during the years of the famine. Cutting across the landscape of the rocky hills are several green roads. These roads, another work project, seem to lead nowhere and I have been told that is largely accurate. Incomplete, many now serve as scenic hiking trials.

But there is also evidence of peace in Ireland and with that peace a commitment to try to share it with others. The Irish military is almost exclusively involved in peacekeeping missions. The Foreign Minister has joined with many other world leaders to try to broker an agreement in Darfur that will bring real peace and security to the region.

This commitment extends beyond Irish leadership. When I began recruiting people for STAND’s DarfurFast, an annual event to raise money and awareness for the victims, I was told that the date was no good. December 5th would be in the middle of finals for most universities and the Irish Parliament would be debating the budget. Nevertheless, this was the international day, and we did our best to recruit participants.

The response we saw, I think, was part of that grassroots commitment to peace, and it moved me. Leading into the event, a local secondary school staged a demonstration on the responsibility to protect. Six members of the Irish Parliament chose to participate. And on the evening of the fast, we held a candlelight vigil to show our solidarity with the survivors. Despite the rigors of finals, dozens of students joined us to show their support for peace in Sudan’s future. No longer is a community limited by borders, or its sense of responsibility for its neighbors restricted by boundaries.

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January 2008 Reflection

Posted on January 1, 2008 by smiller08

I arrived back in the US at the beginning of December to a white-out blizzard: I knew I was back at home. I spent a wonderful few weeks with family and friends, went hiking and cross country skiing, and even had the opportunity to travel to the United Arab Emirates on a cultural exchange. At the end of the month, I sat in the Fargo airport and said goodbye to my dad before I went through security. I felt sad about leaving my family and friends for a place so far away. Twenty-three hours later, as the airplane descended through the clouds, I saw the Howth Peninsula, the Wicklow Mountains, and green expanses of Ireland below me. I stepped off the airport bus in city centre beneath the Dublin Spire, and I walked down O’Connell Street and across the Liffey; I smiled. I felt at home.

One of my best friends from home came to visit this week. I eagerly awaited her arrival at the airport outside of customs. I felt incredibly excited to see my best friend, but I also felt as excited to show her a city that has become my own: the history that I see on every street corner as I walk to class, the multitude of pubs that make the city famous, and the people I have met that have made this experience as amazing as it has been.

As my year in Ireland continues on, my academic program allows me much free time to explore. I am working with another friend to create an environmental student group on campus: I hope to become more involved in the same type of on-campus advocacy that made my time at Harvard so fulfilling. The school vacations during the year have been wonderful, and I have begun making plans with a few other scholars to travel in Eastern Europe during my three week spring break.

A place that once felt so foreign and far away has become a second home for me. I can only look forward with anticipation and optimism for the eight months in Ireland still ahead.

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January 2008 Reflection

Posted on January 1, 2008 by shealy08

The Healy family continues to enjoy the Irish experience. I’m about to finish my first semester of classes (a final essay due in a few days) and look forward towards next semester, which will offer me the opportunity to take several courses of specific interest. My first semester lecturers were incredibly knowledgeable, always prepared and constantly willing to answer any question I had. I’m sure the second semester will not be any different. I couldn’t have asked for a more pleasant experience than the one I’ve received thus far at DCU. The school is great and the friends I’ve made are even better. I’m looking forward to the rest of the year here, but not before I celebrate the end of this semester with friends.

My parents came over the Christmas break and we all enjoyed a great visit. I took the opportunity to show them around Dublin and then we visited the countryside for a few days. We spent two days in County Galway and rented a car to see as much of the “Irish countryside” as possible. We took in the Cliffs of Moher, the Irish coast, Galway City, a number of castles and old monasteries and of course, saw a whole bunch of sheep. Although it was a challenge on narrow roads (driving on the opposite side of the road offers a number of interesting experiences for anyone who’s interested), my dad did a great job and we all enjoyed taking in the breathtaking sites. My parents continued on to Cork (from where the Healy ancestors came from) and couldn’t stop talking about the great time they had. Unfortunately, my wife and I had to return to Dublin to take care of the kids (the puppies and kitty cat) so we were unable to join them. Overall, though, it was a great visit. We’re hoping more friends and family can make the trip in the future to share some time with us.

Aside from studying, Carolyn and I are continuing our goal to do as much traveling as possible. We recently traveled to Stockholm and Copenhagen last month and are trying to plan a trip to visit Rome and Venice this month. We’re certainly not going to miss the opportunity to see as much of Europe as possible. We’re also planning on seeing more of Ireland once the spring rolls around. Weekend trips to Cork and Wicklow are certainly in the planning phases. We’d like to try to go camping in Wicklow so we can bring the pooches, but we’ll see how it plays out. I’ll be sure to keep you updated about it. So far, so good though, and I’m hoping this experience only gets better.

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January 2008 Reflection

Posted on January 1, 2008 by fmcmillan08

After the last night of classes in December, I unsurprisingly found myself in a Belfast pub. Some fellow students and I spent the evening listening to live music, talking about the upcoming holidays, and discussing the ins and outs of our bizarre family traditions. I even learned – for the first time – what a holiday “cracker” was.

That night, I wondered what it would be like to return to the United States for winter break. Would there be culture shock? Would I miss the fresh Guinness? Would I remember that I didn’t need to carry my umbrella everywhere?

But none of these questions really arose.

During my winter break – more than anything else – I was reminded of what a privileged life I’ve led in these short months. My friends from teaching have been busily preparing their students for the New York standardized tests. My girlfriend’s sleep schedule has almost disappeared working on a campaign in New Jersey. My parents have taken on great responsibilities caring for my grandmother and my aunt.

Watching the people I love strive and succeed in extraordinary circumstances reminds me how lucky I am. I have the rare opportunity to spend the year traveling and reading, reflecting and criticizing. I need to make the most of it.

I know I can do more, but my experiences have already changed me profoundly. In small political philosophy classes, I’ve developed a much better grasp of the literature. Professors have generously opened their doors to me, allowed me to join reading groups, and helped me at each step of the way.

Working with the PPR Project in North Belfast, I’ve seen more clearly what empowering community members and transforming power relationships can do for activism. Public housing residents devise their own human rights standards and hold the government accountable to meeting them. Mental health patients create meaningful and economical pathways for the NHS to decrease suicide. Over and over, I’ve learned democratic strategies I would love to see implemented by groups across the United States.

With each passing day, I wonder where the next months will take me, but above all I hope I can live up to the opportunity I’ve been given.

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January 2008 Reflection

Posted on January 1, 2008 by achan08

If the first journal entry had to do with the novelty of arriving in Ireland, this one is more about settling in. While I love visiting Dublin (and now Limerick, after a fun-filled weekend of Munster rugby, pub sing-songs, and Mitchell bonding), I feel like I can really own Cork. No, I haven’t invested my Mitchell stipend in real estate, but I am gradually getting to feel like a part of the city.

For one, I began interning at Nasc (Irish for “link”), the Irish Immigrant Support Centre, as part of my course in November. The NGO sector is fairly new in Ireland (especially around migration issues) and I’ve noticed many of the same struggles that NGOs in the U.S. face. For example, the staff frequently has to balance long-term vision with the day-to-day grind. Of course, the ideal situation involves the integration of migrants into Ireland culturally, politically, and economically. Yet how does one actually go and achieve this goal?

I’ve had two main projects at Nasc that illustrate this struggle between the short-term and long-term. First, my two classmates and I have worked on Nasc’s Speaker’s Panel, a group that trains members in public speaking. Speaker’s Panel members speak about their experience as migrants in Ireland to the local schools, lead anti-racism workshops, and educate various groups (including Gardai and social service providers) about development issues in their countries of origin. In speaking with the participants, I’ve seen how comfortable and fluent (not just linguistically) they are as a result of their participation in the Panel. In fact, some have even picked up a Cork accent, which I am still trying – in vain – to achieve. It’s easy to get excited about the potential of the Speaker’s Panel. However, in the last few weeks, we’ve struggled with the participation rates in the Speaker’s Panel. Even if we’ve called the twelve members multiple times to remind them of a mutually-agreed upon meeting time, we’ll only have two people show up. This lack of participation not only negatively impacts the migrants, but puts added pressure on Nasc, who has to answer to their funders.

Where we didn’t have a problem with participation was in my second project: planning the Nasc Christmas party. Throw in some presents, food, and presents and people show up in droves. We had African food, a Burmese Santa Clause, and over a hundred asylum seekers, migrants, and “native” Irish crammed into the Nasc office. Planning this party dealt explicitly with the nitty-gritty of the NGO and migrant sectors. It also added to that sense of familiarity with Cork, whether I was running to the Discount World on North Main Street to get one more tablecloth, to Lidl, Aldi, and Tesco looking for the best price on wine or heading out to each of the accommodation centers (where asylum seekers live while they await decisions on their applications) to post flyers for the event.

At the time, I was frustrated by what I thought was the short-sightedness of it all. Why were we putting in all this effort for a Christmas party? To be honest, I still have this thought whenever I flashback to the clean-up. However, I’m also reminded by the importance of interpersonal connections. Even if just for one night, everyone at Nasc – no matter your refugee status or country of origin – could feel like a part of a whole, that has to count for something. And from my experience of working with various groups back in the States, it does.

And so for me, it comes back to the long-term versus short-term. I have a tendency to get caught up in what happens next, next, next. I’m sure many of the Mitchell Scholars are the same way. But many times, those now moments can have just as much impact. Which means for me, “owning” Cork isn’t just about leaving with a degree from its University. And it isn’t so much about knowing the street names and local haunts – though it surely helps. It’s more about knowing the people who live here, whether they were born and raised in Cork, arrived years ago, or are just beginning to grasp that distinctive accent for the first time.

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