First November Post

Yesterday, I had my third visit to RISSE of the year! I had distributed consent forms to three girls that I know from last year, all of whom were very willing to engage in this project with me. Despite their apparent enthusiasm, however, actually interviewing them proved much more difficult than I had anticipated. Questions like, “Tell me about coming to America” or “How do you feel about your home country?” were met with “Wha…?” I quickly became frustrated and disappointed in the minimal responses I was getting and left RISSE feeling frustrated and thinking, “How am I going to get anything out of these kids?”

Today, though, I can see that my frustration came from having too inflexible a mindset about what my project is. During lunch, I met an alumna of my school named Sierra who is an investigative journalist and essayist. She helped me understand that interviewing people—and perhaps especially kids—about emotional subjects is really difficult; it’s impossible to get a satisfying statement on the first day of talking with a subject, and it’s even hard to get one in the first few months. Of course, that fact was the premise of my two-year-long relationship with RISSE—I wanted to embed myself with the children of whom I would be asking tough questions so that they might be more likely to open up to me.

Meeting Sierra was amazing; she gave me advice about the long game interviewing process, about building a relationship with a subject that I’m ethically comfortable with (part of which is constantly asking myself questions like “Is this the kind of relationship I want to have with this person?” and “What do I ultimately want to do with the information they are giving me?”), and about how I as a journalist need to be aware of my role in the telling of someone else’s story.

Talking to her made me realize that I’m not so sure I want this project to be me using these children’s experiences to try to expose some hidden injustice that America is inflicting on refugees and immigrants. I think my overall goal could and maybe should simply be this: tell the stories of the incredible young people I have come to know at RISSE simply because they are incredible young people. Instead of trying to expose some governmental conspiracy, I could instead be trying to expose some part of the human condition, as Sierra put it, in all of its mundaneness and profundity.