Final Journal Entry: What additional learning have you
gained through the process of finishing your research project? What aspects of
our program are still on your mind two weeks later?
A lot of the completion of my
research project involved doing research regarding policies in Berlin (and in
Germany overall) that are intended to help migrants integrate. This process
meant that I read through the full text of many policies, press reports, and government
documents regarding these policies and their effects on populations. I have
done some work similar to this here and there for a few projects in high school
and earlier in my college career, but I was very unfamiliar with the legalese
and formatting of documents like the EU Directives I have been reading through
in the past two weeks. I learned a lot about the history of citizenship policy,
integration initiatives and procedures of asylum throughout the EU, but
particularly in Germany.
These past few weeks of research
have really allowed me to start connecting the dots between policy changes and
the impact on individuals, which is exactly what I had wanted to do in the
first place! I’m not sure if I discussed this in any previous journals, but I
think my interest in creating those direct connections between policy and
people was inspired by an article I read in a geography class which creatively
traced the journey of a papaya as a commodity. (Here is the link to the
article, I really enjoyed it: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2004.00441.x/epdf
) For my final write and presentation of my research I did not choose to explicitly
connect individual migrants that I met to specific policies and instances of
community action like I had planned to originally, because then I think I would
have either had a too narrow lens, or I would have written a twenty-page paper
(like Ian Cook did in his papaya paper). But, at least in my mind and in this
journal, I’ve been able to connect preliminary readings from spring quarter and
policies that I have recently been reading to a conversation I had with Ali, an
asylum-seeker from Iran who does administrative work at the garden. Ali and
Sophia and I talked for a long time about asylum procedures in the EU compared
to seeking asylum in the US, as well as the history of German and US politics, and
I’m now seeing where all of his arguments were coming from. The research I’ve
been doing since the last week of the four week program in Berlin have helped
fill the gaps I noticed in my conversations with folks at the Coop Campus and
around the city, and I really appreciate being able to see all the information
come together to create this web of cause and effect and feedback in regards to
our program and my project. But I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface,
and I would love to continue doing something with this research in the future,
even if it connects more to the economic side of things (since that is my
major).
Since I’ve been back home in the
States, I’ve really been struggling to describe my time in Berlin to my friends
and family, and I’m getting the sense that a lot of my friend and family don’t
know exactly what to say in response to what I tell them. Just a few days after
I got back to my family’s home, we took a trip to visit my extended family. I
talked about attending lectures at these Humboldt, sightseeing all over Berlin,
Hamburg and Dresden, and excitedly rambled about working at the Coop Campus
with refugees from all over the place. My relatives could easily understand why
I would go study at a German university or do tourist-y things, but many of
them didn’t seem to understand what I was doing working at the Coop Campus, or
had very little understanding of the refugee crisis overall, and how it is not
an isolated issue. Just a day after I had talked all about my experiences in
Berlin, I was watching the news with my uncle when a report about people who
had died while attempting to illegally cross into the US from Mexico came on.
My uncle made a pretty insensitive comment about the people trying to cross the
border, and another relative asked (rhetorically) what it must be like for them
to try to travel in the conditions they did, but the conversation immediately shifted
to something trivial as the television was switched off.
It was really hard for me to remain
calm during conversations like this, because some of my family couldn’t connect
my work helping people who were fleeing the terrible conditions of their home
country to this news report of people who were also fleeing the terrible
conditions of their home country. It felt as if as soon as I stopped talking,
after my allotted two hours of time to talk about the refugee crisis in Europe had
expired, the problem was erased from their minds. I understand that, for many
people, it is emotionally exhausting to always be thinking about large-scale
issues that individual people can do very little to help with, but I absolutely
do not see that as an excuse to not continue a dialogue about them, especially
when there are people who are so willing to discuss them. Of course, the
handful of people I’ve talked to who insensitively dismissed the issue, or
ignorantly missed the connections between illegal immigrants in Europe and the
US, are not 100% of the people that I have talked to, but I was still a little
saddened by the attitudes of a few people I spoke to when I came home.
I’ve been thinking about something
Sharon Otoo told our group when she came and spoke to us at Humboldt. I liked
it so much that I wrote it down in my journal (which actually ended up being
more for notes and drawings than deep reflection, but there’s some moments of
reflection here and there). Sharon said that “racism is a mountain…and I’m
chipping away at it with a toothbrush…but if everyone works with their toothbrush
in the same direction, we can eventually make a dent”. Those words stuck with
me through these past two weeks talking about my time in Berlin, driving through
insanely affluent white neighborhoods in Texas, going to a wedding in rural
Washington, and wandering around Portland, Oregon again. I think a lot of big
problems can be tackled in the way Sharon Otoo envisions our fight against
racism, so I can’t let a few people who don’t or won’t understand what it is I
was doing volunteering in Berlin stop me from doing it.
I feel like I have to keep talking
about it, to everyone I meet, so that people will start picking up their
toothbrushes to make dents in the racism, classism, discrimination against
Muslims, and fear of change that is embedded in this issue of asylum-seekers
and illegal immigrants. I hope that our group’s time in Berlin and our publication
will, if nothing else, start to make a little dent in these mountains.
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