A Year Abroad

So, here is what I’m going to be doing/learning for the next 3 1/2 months:

Post-Conflict Transformation Seminar

Uganda:
The Socio-Political History of Conflicts in Uganda
The Political Dimension of the Conflict in Northern Uganda and the Post-Conflict Politics
Conflict Analysis, Resolution, and Prevention
War, Trauma, and Recovery
The Role of the Military in Conflict and Peace Building in Uganda
Land Related Conflicts, Resettlement and Recovery in Northern Uganda
Government Policy on Decentralization in Uganda
The Economic and Social Impact of the Conflict and Post-Conflict Northern Uganda
International Dimension of the Conflict in Northern Uganda
The Challenges of Nation Building in Uganda
Gender, Conflict, and Peace Building in Uganda
The Role of the Media in Conflict and Peace Building in Northern Uganda
IDPs and Refugees and their Role in Post-Conflict Societies
Constitutionalism and Constitutional Reform in Uganda Since 1962
Forced Migration: It’s Impact on Conflict and Peace in the Region
Post-Conflict Transformation and a Critique of Government Initiatives Towards Peace in Uganda
Challenges to Re-integration after Amnesty

Rwanda:
Political Developments Pre-Genocide
The RPF War and the Arusha Peace Accord
The 1994 Genocide
Post 1994 Politics in Rwanda
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
Transitional Justice Mechanisms
The National Unity and Reconciliation Commission
Truth, Justice, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation
Gender, Conflict, and Peace-Building in Rwanda
Development Efforts and the International Community

National and Ethnic Identity Seminar

Uganda:
Acholi Language
The Acholi of Uganda and their Culture
The Peoples and Cultures of Uganda: History and Evolution of National and Ethnic Identity in Uganda
The Transitional Justice in Northern Uganda and the ICC
The Role of Language in Defining Identity in Uganda
Non-Formal Eduction in Peace-Building
National, Regional, and Group Identity as Causes of Conflicts
History and Culture of the Baganda
Stereotypes and Ethnicity in Uganda

Rwanda:
Kinyarwanda Language
Contemporary Rwanda: Economy, Political, and Social Set-up
Rwandan Culture
Pre-Genocide Identity Politics
Post-Genocide Identity: Identity and Citizenship in Contemporary Rwanda
The Politics of Memory

Field Study Seminar
Experiential Learning and Cultural Adjustment
Interview and Observation in a Cultural Context
Rapid Rural Appraisal, Participatory Rural Appraisal, and Focus Group Discussions
Ethics of Research
Qualitative Data Analysis
How to Write a Research Report
Practical Issues in Doing Research

Independent Study Project
A month long research project culminating in a 30-40 page paper and an oral presentation

Assignments:
A comprehensive essay for each country on post-conflict transformation (10 pages)
Journal 3+ times a week
Language tests
Cultural tests
Drop-off presentations for each country
Description-Interpretation-Evaluation paper (10 pages)
ISP proposal (8 pages)
ISP journal
ISP paper
And lots and lots of reading…

So, this is basically a long post explaining why I’m not going to be as diligent in blogging this semester as I wanted. My first homestay starts in a few days and I’m not going to have much access to internet for the next month. Tomorrow I’m going to Gulu, which up until quite recently was not a post-conflict area, but a conflict area. For many years Gulu was plagued by abductions, as children were taken to fight for the Lord’s Resistance Army. The conflict has left Gulu, but it is necessary to be back at our homestays before dark. With classes going until 4 and sundown happening around 6:30, I’m not going to have much time to go an internet cafe and hop online.

I’m very excited for what the next 3 months will bring and a little nervous about the ISP and how it will work to write papers with such limited access to the resources I’m used to, but mostly I can’t wait for classes to start. I want to do my ISP about transitional justice in Rwanda, although it will take a little effort to find an angle that hasn’t been over researched.

I arrived yesterday afternoon. I’ll be in Uganda for the next month or so before I leave for Rwanda, where I’ll be until the end of the program. My senses all feel overwhelmed, but in a good way. I’ve only been in Uganda for a little over 24 hours, but there is so much to process. On the way to the internet cafe, I got called mazunga or ‘white person’ several times, so I guess I’m officially in Africa now. I’ll do a longer update once more has happened, but for now I wanted to say that I arrived safe and sound.

One would think, since I’ve been packing and unpacking for the better part of a week, that I wouldn’t be up at the wee hours of the morning, just hours away from my flight, packing one more time. But one would be wrong. In just a few hours I leave for Uganda. It’s hard to imagine warm weather when there is still fresh snow on the ground, that soon I’ll have to worry about sunburns and malaria, when just this morning I was throwing snowballs at my dad. It’ll be a change, but I’m really excited. See you on the other side!

I honesty wasn’t expecting to enjoy my semester in China. That’s about the worst attitude you can have going into a four month stay in another country, but as excited as I was to go, I couldn’t seem to shift my negative expectations. On the first epic plane-ride over, Emily and I quickly established each other as mutual crying buddies, both aware that we were going to be in a completely new place with absolutely no one we knew. As it turns out, the only crying that really happened was four months later, when we had to say goodbye to all of the wonderful people we’d met.

I wasn’t expecting to cry. I’ve been known to cry at the drop of a hat, but I wasn’t feeling particularly weepy when Emily and I planned our dramatic entrance to classroom 6 to say goodbye to our classmates and teacher. The BCA students were all leaving early while all of our friends had to stay another month to finish up the term, so we spent the better part of a week saying goodbye to all the people we’d come to know in our four months in China. Almost giddy, we swung open the door as forcefully as we could, as the Russian students did whenever they would lumber into class 20 minutes late, with Emily clutching her coffee and me with my green tea, our morning rituals for almost four months. And as the door opened and as our classmates saw us, that all changed because they were so happy to see us again. We hadn’t realized that they didn’t think we would come to class that day, even for the last 15 minutes, since we had so much to do to prepare for our journey home. The remainder of class was spent with each student saying, in Chinese, how much they were going to miss us. Then Emily said something long and eloquent in Chinese and by the time it was my turn I was too emotional to speak, but still remarkably dry-eyed. Saying goodbye to the teacher, my favorite of my language teachers and my exchange tutoring partner, was the deal breaker. “我会想你. 我不会忘你.” There was no attempt not to cry, no eyes stinging to warn me that tears were pushing forwards, just the sudden realization that I’d started crying without realizing it and that my cheeks were already completely wet and that not wearing mascara had been a very good idea.

None of us slept the night before we left. I seriously underestimated the amount of time it would take to pack up my room. As we all struggled to fit four months into two suitcases, it appeared like I wasn’t the only one who mistakenly thought that four hours would be sufficient to clear out our rooms. We took long breaks, hanging out with our friends and our goodbyes continued throughout the night. I never watched the sun rise from the little mountain by campus. By early morning, everything was packed and we were ready to go but not ready to leave China. Our Japanese friends woke up early to see us off, girls I’d only really met a few weeks prior, but we all held each other and cried some more and thoroughly startled the cabdriver as we sobbed all the way to the airport.

Now, it all feels like a vivid but distant dream. I arrived home on Christmas Eve day after 30 hours of traveling and immediately got swept away in various jet-lagged holiday celebrations. Then it was off to visit family for my grandmother’s 90th birthday party, and then two weeks of never ending vaccinations, plane tickets, and visas as the rush to get ready for next semester pushes my semester in China even further into the back of my mind.

It almost feels like it never happened. Almost. I wish I could say that the life changing experience of being in China for four months is noticeable in profound ways, but it’s really the small things that make it continue to feel real. When Taylor Swift is on the radio I smile instead of shudder because as much as I hate her music, Mollie is obsessed with all things Taylor Swift and I can’t deny that in missing Mollie, Taylor Swift now occupies a slightly thawed out section of my heart. Even as China continues to fade away, Western things still feel off, which reassures me that that last four months really did happen. Knives and forks seemed heavy and unwieldy, Western food to rich and fatty, and the traffic way too orderly. The fact that cars actually stop for pedestrians in a crosswalk still throws me. And I miss speaking Chinese.

If I’m honest, my Chinese never got all that good. I could get around and I could understand a fair bit and my Chinese was certainly good enough to keep me from starving, but even after four months in China I got so nervous whenever anyone spoke Chinese to me that, more often than not, I was reduced to a stuttering fool whenever I tried to respond. But I miss it. Occasionally I’ll hear someone speaking Chinese and I’ll unintentionally continue to follow them around for a little bit just so I can listen to them for a little while longer. I find myself still thinking in Chinese words and phrases, but rarely entire thoughts.

Next semester, I think when I get homesick, it’ll just as often be for Dalian as it is for the United States.

I’ll write more when I’m not so completely jet-lagged, but for now, I just wanted to let everyone know that I arrived back home safely.

About a month into my four months in China, Liz asked me if I wanted to blog for Juniata since I was already blogging about my experiences abroad. I thought it would be fun, so I said yes. It was a slow process, which involved getting in touch with the marketing department (or something) but eventually I was sent a user name and password for a blog hosted on the Juniata website. For whatever reason, it didn’t work, and when I didn’t hear back from anyone about why I couldn’t log in, I pretty much forgot about it. At least, I forgot about it until my sister emailed me today and told me that this blog was linked to the PACS site.

I was going to write differently for a Juniata blog, have fewer personal details, mostly because I figured that prospective students don’t really have any interest in hearing about what the Thanksgivings of my childhood were like. And I figured no one besides prospective students would be interested enough to check out a blog written by someone they don’t know at all. I’ve now included a Juniata tag for anyone who just wants to jump right to the Juniata stuff.

And since this is my personal blog and not a Juniata blog, you can see that I genuinely do love Juniata this much and I am in no way being coerced into writing favorably about Juniata. I was worried, when asked to blog for Juniata, that all of my praises would seem fake since Juniata was hosting it, but I can assure you that this really is just me thinking about Juniata and missing Juniata.

And I swear, I’ll do a real update one of these days, but right now I’m working on three papers and trying to figure out how I’m going to be able to pack everything up. I leave China in 5 days and that is SO NOT OK. I have a huge backlog of interesting things to share and eventually I’ll get to writing posts instead of papers.

…You. No, seriously. It does. You guys are awesome. The hardest part about being away is not having you guys here. China is great and I could stay here forever, but if only I could convince you all to join me too. Because without you guys, it just isn’t the same.

There’s that whole ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ saying, but I don’t really think that’s true. I mean, maybe it is, but you guys haven’t felt absent. I’ve gotten to talk to most of you an astonishing amount while I’ve been gone. The only thing really lacking with Skype is the inability to properly give hugs. Cyber-huggy bears just don’t cut it. I think the saying should be amended to ‘awesomeness makes the heart grow fonder’. Because you are awesome. And I’m awfully fond of you.

So, here is a list of all the awesomeness:

Individual Awesomeness:
Marguerita: for sending the first rescue package of junk food
Mom: for sending the most packages (A for effort, B- for the actual junk food. I think the utter fail of the brown rice crispy treats and the total win of the candy corn cancel each other out)
My sister: for sending me a postcard from somewhere in India
My aunt: for freezing an entire cranberry pie from Thanksgiving
Liz: for letting me pester her. All. The. Time.

Joint Awesomeness: Pairs Competition
Anisha: for sending great food and trashy magazines (with an assist from Anisha’s mom: for express delivering the package)
AC and Will: for sending the most psychic junk food rescue package ever (the Reece’s arrived on the same day that I I ran out, and for bonus awesomeness, Nerds! Which I didn’t even realize I wanted)
Dobday and Kat: for always being online (yey for closer timezones!)

Honorable Mention of Awesomeness:
Megan: attempting to bring me real French bread (but not bringing said bread when she realized it’d have to travel in her bag for a week before reaching me)

Not Awesome:
The Chinese postal system. Three weeks? Really? And I have to go downtown to pick it up, why?

Most Awesome: Tie
Barney Stinson
Captain Awesome

But really, you guys are awesome. As much as I love, love, love China, I don’t know how I would’ve made it through the semester without you guys. And not just because you hooked me up with some great junk food, but because you made me feel like I didn’t really go all that far away.

Not on the list of awesome, but want to be? Let me hear from you (send an email or write a comment) and I’ll add you to the updated list of awesomeness (there might be prizes, but probably not). Don’t worry, I won’t think you’re a stalker if you’ve just been silently following me up until now (unless you are a stalker, in which case, not awesome).

Aaaaand I’ll be home in 21 days.

The danger of attending a great conference is leaving it at that, attending. Leaving it at feeling good about having thought about difficult issues, maybe even come up with a couple of good ideas, but not actually doing anything of substance about it. That selfish experience, that meaningless self-satisfied feeling, is not want I want to take away from the conference on divided societies. I have a couple of ideas that I’ve been kicking around for a while now, nothing that will save the world, but things that I want to start working on now in order to actually implement them my senior year. Here they are (and I’d love to hear some feedback from you guys).

1. A PAX-O/PACS zine. Sure, we have the Juniata newspaper already, but a zine has a different purpose and often a different audience. I want to create a low budget zine that gives students the venue to write about issues they feel passionately about, things that they don’t feel get proper coverage or representation in more mainstream media. My goal is to have one issue printed every semester, with topics on the local, national, and international level. I want to focus not just on shedding light on the negative, but also highlighting the victories and achievements, the moments of transcendence. The issue published in the spring could also serve a bit as an annual report for PAX-O. Lots of people get ideas and I think it would be fantastic to have a zine for people to use as a jumping off point to both explore those ideas and begin acting. Since zine’s are really low budget anyway, I figure the publication costs will be limited to staples and printer paper.

2. A PAX-O/PACS blog. Similar to the above mentioned zine, but updated more regularly and perhaps somewhat less formal than a printed publication. This blog would have a staff of regular contributors, but be open to the public for comments and dialogue. Again, this would be part informational and part jump-off-point for others to start working on their own ideas. While the zine would be primarily read on campus and maybe distributed to a couple of locations in town, the blog has the potential to reach beyond the Juniata community. It would be nice to have the Juniata website host the blog, showing support for the student activism, but with websites such as wordpress and blogger, a student run blog could be set up with very limited operating costs.

3. A PACS micro-grant program. JCEL (the center for entrepreneurial leadership) has the Student Seed Capital Fund to provide start-up money for student businesses. Aside from the small problem of figuring out where to get similar money, why can’t the PACS department have a similar fund for students seeking to do NGO-style projects? The goal of the Student Seed Capital Fund is to provide ‘experiential learning opportunities’ relating to business and entrepreneurship; I think students could benefit from the responsibility of seeing a small scale project through from concept to completion. This one I need to research a lot more, figure out where that money could come from, but I really, really want to see this idea through.

None of these are huge, change-the-world kind of ideas, but that’s ok. I only have one year left at Juniata and these are all things that can be done in that time (I think). One of the main things I’ve realized is that a lot of what paralyzes me into inaction is that I try to start too big; I get defeated before I even start and then I don’t end up doing anything constructive. But I think I can do these. The hardest part is starting, and I want to create the space for people to start acting on their ideas.

I feel like such a cliche right now, I can’t even tell you.

Until my aunt and grandmother moved to Austin two years ago, the entire family would meet up at my grandmother’s house in New Jersey for Thanksgiving every year. Though I saw my grandmother, aunt, and first cousins a couple of times a year, Thanksgiving was the one day when everyone, down to third cousin’s twice removed, saw each other. Some families do family reunions, we did Thanksgiving. And although my sister swore up and down that as soon as she turned 18 she wasn’t going to Thanksgiving anymore, her 18th birthday came and went and she still made it up to Thanksgiving every year. In 19 years, I think I only missed Thanksgiving in New Jersey twice, each time because of illness. Most of my memories from early childhood are jumbled up and hard to pin down, of the ‘well, I might have been four, but maybe I was six’ or ‘I think I was in Switzerland. Wait, that was California? Really?’ variety, but some of my earliest distinct memories are of Thanksgiving at my grandmother’s house.

I remember sitting at the kid’s table only long enough to finish my food, then crawling under the adult’s table and sitting by Beth’s feet until it was time for dessert. For years I was upset that her name rhymed with death, thinking that she had some unavoidable connection with that fate. She was the first person I worried about dying and for years she was the person I was most excited to see. Then I got older and she had kids and I wasn’t the baby of the family by a long shot. But Beth made sure we’d catch at least a couple minutes just for us each year.

I don’t remember the fist time Jennifer came to Thanksgiving; I must have only been about four. But I remember the fist time I noticed Jennifer, all dark make-up and mystery, walking up the front steps with my cousin. She helped me put together a zebra puzzle. She cried at my grandmother’s 80th birthday party when my grandfather read the poem “A Red, Red Rose”. She was more than ‘like’ a part of the family, she was family. Until she wasn’t. I don’t remember the last time she came to Thanksgiving.

I hardly remember Uncle Bobby. I think I remember him making the gravy, but that might just be because I’ve heard my grandmother and aunt talk about it so many times. I remember his presence more than I remember him. He was tall and somber and I felt bad for thinking he was a little bit scary. I was always a little better behaved when he was at the house. I remember making him a ‘get well’ card, not realizing that what was wrong with him wasn’t really of the get well variety.

(And if this post suddenly got really sad, you can blame Andrew Dobday, who sent me a really beautiful, but depressing song while I was in the middle of writing this)

I was expecting missing Thanksgiving to be the hardest part about being in China. It wasn’t. Although I did miss family a little more acutely on Thursday/Friday, I also had a fabulous day. Our resident director ordered Thanksgiving food and we took the food with us to meet up with a group of people all working for a company geared towards physically disabled people. Most people we had dinner with were in wheelchairs, the first people I’d seen in wheelchairs in my three months in China. China is not really disability friendly. The streets don’t have ramps, many places have the odd stair placed here or there, and many low level buildings don’t have elevators. In many ways it is an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality. So we ate turkey, mashed potatoes with gravy, cranberry sauce, and dumplings. That evening couldn’t have been more in the spirit of Thanksgiving if I’d been in a made-for-television movie. I was dubious about how close Chinese Thanksgiving food would taste to American Thanksgiving food, since my three experiences with Caesar salad ended in bitter disappointment, but the food was amazingly good. But I wouldn’t recommend trying to eat creamy mashed potatoes with chopsticks.

And then there was the karaoke. I hadn’t sung karaoke since my birthday, when it was just the five of us from BCA in a private room singing bad boyband music. Most of these songs were, predictably, Chinese songs. Outgoing Emily was quick to jump up and sing her favorite Chinese song, some song with a really long music video about a girl dying from some unknown ailment characterized by dramatic nosebleeds. That left me to sing the ‘Friendship’ song we’d learned for the 60th Anniversary Celebration. I really would have preferred for a black hole to have swallowed me up, or at the very least to have some access to alcohol, but I was unable to get out of singing.

The song I will forever associate with Thanksgiving is ‘This Is a Song for All the Good People’. Aside from Thanksgiving itself, my favorite part about Thanksgiving break was the holiday assembly we had right before dismissal. Once the awkward and seldom funny speeches were out of the way, Mr. Tupper would pick up his guitar. Every year, for nine years, Mr. Tupper played this song. And every year he would change the last verse, making up a new verse for the graduating class. I hardly think it needs mentioning that I got teary every year and absolutely bawled my senior year.

‘So this is a song for all the good people, all the good people who’ve made up my life. This is a song for all the good people, the people I’m thanking the stars for tonight.’

When Megan walked into the youth hostel in Dublin, it suddenly seemed like my three months abroad had only been a dream. The only indication that I’d spent the majority of the semester in China was my nearly constant craving for authentic Chinese food and my absolute surprise at the cleanliness of the bathrooms. Also, people spoke English, which really weirded me out.

In hindsight, Ireland seemed much closer to China when I was looking at a map on my computer screen than when I was 12 hours into a 20 hour trip from my Chinese dorm room to the Dublin youth hostel. But the conference was fabulous and worth ever second of travel time. Except for the moment I thought we might crash before reaching Ireland. That wasn’t too fun.

In addition to how great it was to see Megan and Celia, the conference was so very worthwhile because of the group Dr. Skelly put together. Andras Biro, winner of the Right Livelihood Award for his work with the Roma (among other things) spoke about the Roma as a unique example of a group united within a common identity of victimhood and divided from the larger European identity, but without the aim of gaining territory from the majority. He was the first, but not the last, to stress the importance of empowement as the tool to move beyond victimhood.

When Paul Arthur, a leading expert of the Northern Ireland conflict, spoke I was delighted that he mentioned the role of art in post-violence healing, and specifically mentioned ‘Dancing at Lughnasa’. Coincidentally, I’d just been talking to Megan about that very play earlier in the day. When so many equate realism with a fatalistic outlook on war, it was refreshing to see his optimism about the peace process, rooted in pragmatism. Paul Arthur said what may amount to my favorite thought of the conference, that peace is practical. Yes, when there are so many violent conflicts going on in the world, peace requires optimism and hope and a lot of hard work, but it isn’t idealistic. At least, it isn’t idealistic in the negative way people use it to mean unrealistic. I don’t think that idealism and realism are all that far apart and I certainly don’t think that idealism and pragmatism are mutually exclusive. That’s the point I tried to make in my first paper for Nags, after I realized I’d spent nearly three pages defending Machiavelli and might equals right. Conflict is a natural part of the human condition, not violence. Creating categories and divisions are a natural and necessary part of the human thought process; assigning values to those categories is not. Kaplan argued that most human progress is made in the space between savagery and idealism. I agree to a certain extent, but think it is more accurate to say that perhaps real and lasting progress is made in the space between realism and idealism. I think we should hold ourselves to that higher standard.

Up next was the panel discussion with Celia. At this point the sun was shining directly into my eyes, so my notes go a bit wonky here. In fact the ‘peace as practicality’ might actually be Stephen Ryan’s words (also on the panel), but my notes are too muddled for me to tell. Aside from Celia, Stephen Ryan was the speaker who connected most to my Juniata PACS classes. He used familiar terminology and referenced people I actually knew of. It was very exciting. Sometimes, within the secure bubble of Juniata academia, I feel like I might be learning in code, that if I talk about gender and conflict dynamics to people beyond Juniata, they’ll look at me like I’m speaking in another language. In a lot of ways, committing to a major is like deciding to learn another language. You have to immerse yourself in the vocabulary in order to engage in the discourse. It was comforting to know that I was in fact learning the official PACS language and not some obscure dialect.

The next panel discussion, this time on Israel and Palestine, was exciting for me because of the inclusion of a representative of Wahat al-Salem/Neve Shalom Peace Village. As part of a paper I did last year in Conflict Intervention, I looked at Wahat al-Salem/Neve Shalom, a joint Israeli and Palestinian village, and specifically the structure of their schools, as a model for further successful coexistence education projects. Michelle and I worked off the theory that peace can’t be obtained through just one avenue, but that instead multiple parallel peace processes need to occur on every level. From the individual to the top decision makers, each process needs to support the other, rather than undermine it. We left the specifics up to officials to figure out. Kidding. We have lots of ideas that didn’t make it into the paper, but we want to explore when we come back from our time abroad. Because how awesome would it be to be able to say ‘Oh, I figured out a solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict’ when people ask you what you did for your senior thesis?

The highlight of my trip is probably reserved for seeing Megan and Celia, but the academic highlight was seeing Hector Aristizabal’s performance of Nightwind: A Harrowing True Story of Arrest and Torture and then the workshop we did with him after. Even though I’m still doing a secondary emphasis in theatre, somewhere along the way I abandoned my plan to create my own POE (major) mixing Peace and Conflict Studies with other forms of creative expression. However, Hector’s piece reminded me why I was so enthusiastic to mix the two in the first place. I think we overuse the word ‘inspirational’ and I’m loath to use a word that has lost so much of it’s meaning, but it was inspirational in the truest sense of the word. Everyone at the conference responded to his energy and after about nine hours of mostly straightforward academic lectures, that’s saying something. There was a power in his art, and it made the topic alive and relatable. His performance was about his experience having been abducted by a Colombian paramilitary group and tortured for his his alleged connection to communist groups and the murder of his brother at the hands of the same group. The militia was lead by a graduate of the School of Americas (SOA), a training facility run and operated out of the United States. Last year I helped organize for a group of Juniata students to attend the protest against the SOA in Georgia, even though many people questioned why we wanted to protest something that they considered mostly over. When we got to the protest, we saw that it was as much a memorial for those who had died as it was a call to close the last remnants of the now renamed training school. In Georgia, we participated in the street theatre that Hector organizes each year. Small world.

I’m so glad I had the opportunity to attend the conference and I was so happy to see Megan and Celia. But the problem with seeing some familiar faces in the middle of a study abroad experience filled entirely with unfamiliar people is how much harder it is to say goodbye again knowing exactly what it’s like to miss them already. Now, being back in China, my week in Ireland almost seems like it didn’t happen.