Jack Foersterling
WRIT 1733
Professor Leake
What, So What, Now What?
Redefining Refugees
Overall, from the time I registered
for this course and the time that I am now writing this paper, I could not have
a more completely different view not only on refugees, but truly the entire
course in general. When I first signed up for the class, to be honest, I didn’t
really know what I was getting myself into. It was an honors writing class, it
fit my schedule, and there was some volunteering involved. It wasn’t really
until now as I am writing this blog post that I really appreciate all that I
have learned not only in class, but out volunteering at the African Community
Center as well. Besides my Pioneer Leadership Program course, through which I
volunteered at the Somali Community Center, I had never really experienced this
kind of class setting before, doing both schoolwork and volunteering in
conjunction. However, this class took what my PLP class did one step further,
it directly incorporated what we were learning in class to what we were doing
volunteer wise. PLP simply required you to volunteer at a variety of different
sites, and in class we really only wrote maybe a paper on our experience. Now
in this class, the two are almost one entity in itself. What I learn in class I
bring to volunteering and what I learn at volunteering I bring back to class,
it is a constant cycle of learning and actually directly using what we learn,
which I think is more important than learning the information in the first place.
While we can all “learn” an infinite number of facts and information, I really
don’t believe that they become truly important until we use them outside of a
school or classroom setting. It is when we realize their real world potential
in use that we gain 100% of the importance of learning them.
In this class, while we did learn a
lot about “refugees” such as their definition, where they come from, why they
left, and what they are doing in America, I believe that the biggest theme we
learned about in class was humanity. When coming into this class I had no real
major background on who or what a refugee was, like I said in my first blog
post. “A ‘refugee’ in my definition is someone who changes location, from their
physical home or homeland, by either force or on his or her own accord. Whether
it is from a country, town, government, etc. The person moves from one specific
“place” (as this can be not a physical move, but maybe a mental one) to another.”
(Foersterling) Basically, I gave the general public’s view on refugees and also
tried to throw in something a little deeper and more meaningful. Now however,
at the end of the class, I try and look at refugees without this shameful and
pitied view. While yes, almost all of us have had better off lives than them,
but the line from Chef Duffy has really brought things home to me, “People are
people, it’s pretty simple.” (Duffy) While yes, some of them drank their own
pee, “there were a handful of boys who drank their own urine, a few more who
ate mud to keep their throats wet,” (Eggers, 21) and some of them were robbed, “I
sit and now he shows me the handle of a gun… I never know the things I am
supposed to know. I do know, now, that I am being robbed…” (Eggers, 4) and some
of them even ate bugs to survive, “…these Sudanese youth ate insects and grass,
risked being eaten by jungle carnivores, and drank their own urine to survive”
(Fadlalla, 102) but at the end of the day, we are all human beings, and should
be treated as such to that extent.
My largest argument throughout this
entire course, and for which I have found both evidence for and against this
idea, has been that refugees themselves should be described and treated as
individuals, and not a group or one being. In too many articles that we read,
even the one at the very beginning by the UNHCR, refugees weren’t really even
described as people, more just like objects, items. “Owing to a well-founded
fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership
of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of
his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail
himself of the protection of that country…” (UNHCR, 3) While incredibly in
depth in its description, we as readers cannot put a face to this suffering; it
is simply a title, a definition. However, when reading the personal accounts of
refugees such as Deng and Mawi, and seeing the long journey that the Lost Boys
went through in God Grew Tired of Us,
I saw that there are very impactful stories out there told by individual
refugees, we just need to find them. We need to break outside the mold of just
seeing refugees as coming from Africa and moving to America, this is where I
think that our final project, “Working with Refugees” really takes the upper
hand. It encompasses all that we have been building upon in the course and
truly provides an accurate and encouraging view of refugees and their lives.
They can come from many diverse places, the Congo, Burma, Bhutan, Iraq, and
they can each have a story more diverse than the places they came from. In this
class we have opened up our own eyes to the real story and meaning of a
refugee, and now it is our turn to share this idea with everyone around us.
Works Cited
Asgedom, M. (2002). Of beetles & angels: a boy's
remarkable journey from a refugee camp to Harvard.
Boston: Little, Brown, and Co..
Eggers, D. (2006). What is the what: the autobiography of
Valentino Achak Deng
: a novel. San
Francisco: McSweeney's.
UNHCR.
(2012, September). Protecting Refugees and the Role of UNHCR. UNHCR, September
2012. Retrieved March 19, 2013, from https://blackboard.du.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id
_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%
Fadlalla,
A. (2009). Contested Borders of (In)humanity: Sudanese Refugees and
the Mediation of Suffering and Subaltern Visibilities. Urban
Anthropology, 38(1),
80-113. Retrieved March 23, 2012, from https://blackboard.du.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=
_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype
%3DCourse%26id%3D_208109_1%26url%3D